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[Polk5440]

Discuss and vote for your favorite kingdoms here.

View the spreadsheet with a list of all the entries, the candidates, the finalists, playtesting comments, card statistics, and expansion statistics here.

Juding Round 1: Initial Evaluation.
(123 Kingdoms)

Shark_bait and I each independently scored every entry as a 1 ("no"), 2 ("maybe"), or 3 ("yes") over the course of a week and a half. We did not look at submitters' names.

For me, at this stage, if there were a lot of a certain type of kingdom (e.g. Menagerie engines, Procession chains, "make Scout useful", "make Rebuild bad") I tried to compare these kingdoms directly to each other.

The kingdoms that scored at least 4 points became "candidates" and moved on to the playtesting round. The only kingdoms which were not playtested were the kingdoms receiving two "no"s or one "no" and one "maybe".

Judging Round 2: Playtesting.
(54 Candidate Kingdoms)

Over the course of many weeks we playtested all of the candidates. Playtesters were me, greatexpectations, Mic Qsenoch, and Shark_Bait. Greatexpectations and I playtested the most. After each game, we made some comments.

During this phase we were concerned with questions like "Is it interesting and fun?" "Does it require a lot of skill to play?" "Are there multiple paths to victory?"

Actually, that last one was the hardest. Many, many kingdoms claimed they had a money vs. engine or engine vs. alt vp, or two competing strategies. Most of these kingdoms didn't in fact play as described. Very often there was one dominant strategy. 

Read more about that discussion here.

During this phase we rated each kingdom as a "yes" or a "no" for consideration in the final eight. There were definitely moments where we thought, "man, if we could just swap out a couple of cards, this kingdom could be really great!" We resisted the temptation to tinker.

Judging Phase 3: The Final Deliberations
(22 "yes" Kingdoms)

During Phase 3, for the final 8, a kingdom was disqualified if:

-- a judge submitted it
-- a GokoDom medal contender submitted it
-- A GokoDom medal contender played it before (e.g. was on the other side of a video or log submitted in the description)

We wrote down our favorites and then talked about how to create a great set of 8 kingdoms from those 21 kingdoms. We wanted to build as diverse, interesting, and exciting set of final kingdoms as possible. If a kingdom is interesting, but the other 7 kingdoms are very similar, it's not as interesting a match as it could be. Our criteria were:

-- "Interesting-ness"
-- Strategic diversity within and across the kingdoms
-- Expansion diversity across the kingdoms
-- Card diversity across the kingdoms
-- Submitter diversity across the kingdoms

Not all 21 kingdoms were created equally. We definitely had favorites, and we pretty much agreed on those favorites, so the final deliberations went pretty quickly. We also selected the play order for the kingdoms to make the match as exciting as possible and to showcase each selected kingdom in the best way possible. For example, three kingdoms used Throne Room, so we tried to separate them. Kingdom 2 was a "slower" kingdom, so it was sandwiched between two faster kingdoms. Stuff like that.

Honorable mentions were picked in case GokoDom finals went long. They would be eligible for voting if they got played.

If the final had gone really long, any of the candidates could have been played, but would not have been eligible for voting.

Judging Phase 4: Voting

And now you vote on the overall KDC winner!

Discuss and vote for your favorite kingdoms here.

To all the contenders, gl, hf.

[greatexpectations]

well said, and you covered just about everything i wanted to mention. for now the only thing i would add is that while playtesting we would often purposefully choose divergent strategies to get a feel for the competitiveness and/or challenge of playing different strategies. this was done even if we both felt a certain strategy might be stronger coming in.

[Polk5440]

well said, and you covered just about everything i wanted to mention. for now the only thing i would add is that while playtesting we would often purposefully choose divergent strategies to get a feel for the competitiveness and/or challenge of playing different strategies. this was done even if we both felt a certain strategy might be stronger coming in.

Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention that. That was an important part of the testing, especially if the descriptions mentioned they were pitting two strategies against each other.

[shark_bait]

-- a judge submitted it

Heh, heh.... I couldn't resist.  Designing Kingdoms is too much fun.