Ever thought that Everdell could be improved by a little bit of royal backstabbing? Or played Citadels and bemoaned the tragic lack of raccoons? Maybe you’ve finished a game of Splendor and felt that, after all those jewels you earned, the least you deserved was a kingdom? Or sat down to play Dominion and thought, “damn, I have way too much control over my own cards”? Then allow me to present For A Crown: a game that I never expected to love, but love all the same.
For A Crown is a 3-5 player shared deck-construction game with take-that elements, hidden victory points and some reeeeaaallly pretty player boxes. It was created by Maxime Rambourg, the designer of Dracula vs Van Helsing, with art by Paul Mafayon. It takes around 30 minutes to play, and is now one of my go-to family-friendly gateway games with a bite.
The premise of the game is simple. The kingdom’s nobles have decided to unite and install a new ruler onto the throne… and they will stop at nothing to make sure it’s them.
Each player starts with a small chest containing some hidden rubies and a family heirloom that they can publicly sell for rubies if they ever run out. Nothing says “grand noble lineage” like having to flog your ancestral treasures due to poor money management!
The game is played across four rounds. In each round, players recruit mercenaries from the Royal Square, place them in their family’s sleeve, and shuffle them into one shared deck. That shared deck is then revealed one card at a time, with players resolving the effects of their own mercenaries as they appear. This deck grows in size each round, growing from a small selection of weak but carefully selected cards, to a massive melee of part-synergised, part-chaotic chaos.
Throughout the game, mercenaries can help you gain coins or rubies, improve your influence, push other families down the social ladder, and hand out masked bandits that can deal their own devastating consequences. Meanwhile, event cards can also disrupt the game and push players towards a particular goal.
Once all four rounds have been completed (or at the end of the first round a player gets knocked out), players reveal the contents of their chests, count their rubies, add the value of any unsold heirlooms, and then the richest family claims the crown.
Strategy, Suspicion and Tactical Treason
A lot of the strategy in For A Crown comes from working out the relative power of each card based on what you currently know is in the deck. A card that looks boring early on may become far more powerful once the deck is full of mercenaries, bandits and events. Similarly, a particularly flashy, powerful card can harm you more than you might expect if it paints a target on your back.
There is also a nice resource-focused tension between short-term survival and long-term advantage. Spending all of your coins on a useful mercenary could help you for the rest of the game, but overpaying could force you to dip into your rubies for your next purchase, threatening your total pool of victory points. The game is filled with decisions like this. Do you attack other players or do you help yourself? Do you improve your influence this turn or could somebody else still play a card that will reverse the move straight away? But with a shared deck, this is never a game of perfect control - it is simply a game of suspiciously timed opportunities, haphazardly orchestrated in advance. The game gives you just enough structure for your decisions to matter, but never becomes bogged down in the potential dry sterility of optimisation.
With any take-that game, king-making can become a concern. However, in this game, I've not really had much experience with any overt king-making. The closest version of this has been that when two players solely target each other, each believing the other is in the lead, the other players are likely to place higher by quietly falling under the radar. Effectively, you can hurt another person’s ability to win, but you can’t really help any one person without everyone else noticing and attempting to even the playing field.
Of course, the act of targeting or being targeted may not be everyone’s cup of tea. In For A Crown, you could become a target at any moment. Sometimes you will be targeted because you are winning. Sometimes you will be targeted because you might be winning. Sometimes you will be targeted because you are definitely not winning. Sometimes you will be targeted because you smiled suspiciously or because you had the sheer audacity to momentarily look inside your family’s chest.
This may be a flaw to you or it may be a perk, but the amazing thing about this game is that being a target never feels personal - because every single card does some damage in one way or another. Everyone is meddling and everyone is doing something indefensible. It really does feel like a chaotic family squabble more than a personal attack.
Your best bet is to convince everyone you’re not a threat yet not at risk of being knocked out of the game - all whilst following the deck’s meta closely enough to pre-empt any dangers, and then quietly come out on top (aka with a crown on top of your head).
Thematic Whimsy and Missed Melodrama
The theme is honestly a little pantomime-like (in a good way). It’s colourful, it’s silly, it’s cute and it’s bright. It’s full of cute little animals and mischievous moustache-twirling mercenaries. And honestly, this works because it makes a mean game approachable. You might be scheming and sabotaging, but you’re really just sending some cute little guys into a court full of overdressed animals. The art softens the betrayal and brings out the game’s lightheartedness.
This being said, the game's theme falls just short of its potential. The art’s air of lighthearted marketplace whimsy removes much of the melodrama of its cutthroat royal sabotage. When I think of what this game could be, I think of shady backrooms, mysterious villains, centuries of royal luxury and players begging on their knees as they try to convince the most influential among them that the best strategy this round would not be to backstab. The potential for roleplay is there. The potential for drama is there. The potential for worldbuilding seeps across every card. And yet, the game falls short of this, likely due to a few small issues that break immersion.
First, the event cards don't contain any text reminding you of their context. They only have illustrations and icons on them, which is useful for simplicity, but makes it much easier for a card to become "lose rubies based on your place on the initiative track" instead of "a scandal has filled the court, causing nobles to lose standing and wealth - only those with the highest social standing are able to come out unscathed". Of course, you can find the context for each event card in the rulebook, but that's a surefire way to break the tension in the middle of a royal conflict.
Similarly, the mercenary cards themselves easily become "raccoon, raccoon, frame, frame" instead of "the vicious secret faction agent with influence amongst rich and poor alike, who turned to crime when slighted by one of the other royal houses" or something like that. Without this, it honestly just feels like I'm in the marketplace for the marketplace's sake, playing the mechanics rather than the theme. Some might prefer this; I'd prefer both.
This also applies to the houses. Whilst the game's noble families have some unique symbolism, they've not been built in a way that makes players truly attached to them. The characters and houses have little flavour beyond their animal, colour and illustration. Meanwhile, the heirlooms, though mechanically useful within the game, have no emotional attachment to the characters or their house.
Ultimately, it becomes hard to fully invest in the game's theme when you've not been invited to explore your own story.
Noble Assets and Courtly Components
That being said, I can't help but praise some of this game's production choices.
The player chests are so incredibly fun, but also mechanically very handy. They're not going to knock over or fold poorly like a screen, and they even hide their contents from people taller than you who would otherwise be able to look over a screen. The chests also make hidden scoring feel tactile rather than fiddly, allowing players to physically embody the role of very-suspicious-accountant. Meanwhile, the sleeves, though slightly flimsy, add just enough theatricality to fill the shared deck with suspense, and the general token box even comes with a little separator, proving that every single component was given the depth of thought it deserves! On top of all this, the art inside of each box is honestly phenomenal - I really wish more games took every effort to make sure that every piece of packaging contributes to the gaming experience.
Even better, all of the player chests and component chests fit perfectly into the game box. This should not be as satisfying as it is, but it is indeed truly satisfying. I am extremely vulnerable to a well-organised box insert (Sniper Elite, I’m looking at you), especially one that makes set-up and tear-down so much more efficient.
The only slight downside here is that the sleeves do not feel as robust as I’d like, given how central they are to the game. They are both charming and functional, but I can see them showing a lot of wear if you play the game a lot.
Where Does This Game Fit in the Kingdom?
In terms of where For A Crown fits into my collection, I think I'll be more likely to use it as a take-that gateway game for new gamers than I am Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest but far less than I am for Colt Express. It gives us more chaos and simplicity than the former, but it does this in a slightly less refined way than the latter.
There's a world where I use this game to scratch an itch when some players yearn for deception-based games but others find being the impostor excruciating. For A Crown provides suspicion and betrayal without anybody being forced to lie about who they fundamentally are as a person.
Game nights aside, I might even be able to picture myself playing this on a train, with the nicely compact player boxes and recessed central board surely aiding in the truly noble cause of not-losing-pieces.
The game is also refreshingly low-effort to get to the table. It does not require a 15-minute rules explanation and it does not require anyone to understand the full economy of an entire fictional empire. You can sit down, explain the basics, and within a few minutes someone is already accusing someone else of secretly being rich.
For some players, that will feel too light. For me, it’s a great start to an evening with friends, family and strangers alike.
Final Thoughts from the Throne
This game is not the deepest deckbuilder or the sharpest take-that game. It’s certainly not the richest thematic experience I’ve ever played. But it’s tactile, funny, accessible and quite possibly the game that has defied my expectations more than any other.
For A Crown may not quite claim the throne, but it absolutely deserves a place at court.
Overall score: 72 / 100
Artwork: 3 / 5
Complexity: 2 / 5
Replayability: 3.5 / 5
Player interaction: 4 / 5
Component quality: 4 / 5
Likes:
Takes minimal energy to sit down and play.
Refreshing and tactile components.
Easy to teach without feeling overly simple.
Great for players who want betrayal without social deduction.
Dislikes:
Less satisfying for players who want full deckbuilding control.
Not for players who hate cutthroat gaming.
Enjoyability depends somewhat on player dynamics.
Difficult to fully invest in a theme that falls just short of its potential.
