Kinfire Council is a competitive/semi-collaborative worker placement game for 2-6 players. As leaders of the Council, players work together to protect the city of Din’Lux from dangers outside the city and Cultists within. That said, everyone wants to be the one seen as THE saviour of Din’Lux, so rivalry is inevitable.
On Another Level
There’s a lot of personality in the art style of the game. Unlike most worker placement games, these are not just coloured pieces filling the city. Every worker is a unique counter with their own name and portrait, and they can each be upgraded to give special abilities. Each player also gets a special Seeker worker that is a beautiful acrylic standee.
A Quick Tour Of The City
This game has a lot going on (which the manual does an excellent job of explaining), so rather than go through the entire gameplay structure, this will be a quite high-level overview of the game.
Kinfire Council is played over just five rounds, tracked using the different Lighthouse that you work on each round.
At the start of each round, two Decrees are dealt out and three Cultists are drawn from a bag to block locations and escalate Threats outside. This can cause a Threat to trigger and impact the players and/or the city.
At this point, each player takes turns placing a worker on a district and choosing one of the listed locations at that district. This generally means gaining or trading resources, but there are also options to gain Influence tokens or Sentries (which give you extra points when resolving particular city dangers), vote on the Decrees, upgrade the districts (which flips the district tile to its more powerful side), or train your worker to give a permanent boost. You can’t visit a location that a Cultist is in, but you can use an adjacent location and skip your normal action to arrest the Cultist instead.
There are also some hexagonal locations outside the city, which can usually only be accessed by your Seeker (the acrylic standee). This is how you visit the Lighthouse for a powerful bonus or thwart the Threats outside.
Any time you place a worker, you also get to run an Errand. This generally requires an Influence token and some combination of resources, and the core ones are meeting a city need or building the Lighthouse. Both of these help keep the Cultists slightly more under control.
Once everyone has placed all the workers they want/can, we check the status of the city. For each City Need not met, an additional Cultist is added on the next round. We then check which Decree won the vote and resolve it. This could be averting a crisis, triggering an immediate effect, giving a bonus to the player that wins the election, or adding a law that slightly changes how the game is played.
If there are still Cultists in the city, they again escalate and potentially trigger Threats. These Threats often damage the Lighthouse, reducing the score you get for having built it, and adding to the Cultists’ score.
Now, tidy up the workers and Cultists, switch to the next Lighthouse and move on to the next round. After 5 rounds, the game ends and we compare scores.
Each player can see the current scores, but the Cultists have an extra surprise. At the start of the game, 3 Threat cards are set aside face down. If a lighthouse is ever destroyed, another card is added. At the end, all of these cards are revealed, and the rewards for each are added to the Cultist score. Now you get to see who won. Be prepared for this being the Cultists.
Damn You And Your Inevitable Betrayal
There can be a hazard with longer competitive games where a player starts to fall behind early on and then spends an hour watching themself lose. This can be a little dispiriting, but Kinfire Council has an interesting fix to this.
In any player count over 2 players, you can choose at any time to become a Cult Conspirator. This has no mechanical difference to gameplay; instead, it makes use of some existing features on the board to allow you to boost the Cult and potentially flip the win condition on its head.
First, let’s discuss how you can help the Cult. Some districts have unsavoury locations (for example, Burl’s Alehouse) that add to the Cult’s score. In doing so, this allows you to add Influence to the Cult Influence space on the scoring board. This is no hidden traitor system; every move you make to help the Cult is on full display. Other people can get in your way by visiting that district and using the location there that doesn’t help the Cult.
If doing this just meant that you win if the Cult wins, what’s stopping everyone that’s not winning from just sabotaging the city and winning that way? Well, just as when you’re saving the city, this is still a popularity contest. If the Cult ends up with the highest score, only the player with the most Cult Influence joins them in victory; everyone else was just a pawn to them.
This system gives players the ability to stay relevant in a game where they may otherwise be spectating another player’s win. If things are going particularly badly, you might end up with a sudden capitulation, as players abandon the sinking ship and jockey for position to welcome our new overlords.
The Water Is Deep, Dive In
There has been a lot said about how much Kinfire Council feels like a spiritual successor to Lords Of Waterdeep. While I love Lord Of Waterdeep and can see the many similarities, they are far outweighed by the differences and improvements.
Each player is a different Councillor with a different mildly game-altering ability, so you will each likely play in a slightly different way. One may concentrate on city improvements, one will send extra workers outside the city, and another may focus on research; each Councillor will reward certain action choices, and this creates a useful asymmetry that will reduce how much you will be stepping on each other’s toes.
The explicitly collaborative nature of the game makes the theme really stand out. You need to work together by arresting Cultists, thwarting threats, improving buildings, and passing decrees. That said, there is always a reward for doing these, so this game really is more of a popularity contest than a full civil conflict.
In Kinfire Council, you are all not only sharing the city but sharing the tasks. No hidden or personal objectives in this game. All tasks are open to everyone, so nobody is working in isolation. As an example, you can work with multiple players to build the Lighthouse. Everyone scores based on the height of the lighthouse but multiplied by how many levels they individually built. Voting is also a joint decision, but there’s often a reward for whoever voted the most for the successful Decree.
As well as explicitly joint efforts, there are other jobs to keep the city working for everyone, but always for a reward. Meeting the City’s Needs keeps the Cultists under control but also scores you points. Arresting a Cultist frees up a space that everyone else gets a chance to use before you, but those arrested Cultists are a valuable resource you can trade in at some locations. Thwarting Threats requires resources and your Seeker worker, but can give lots of points, and these cards are another valuable resource to trade. The scoring and rewards in this game are built around the concept of selfish philanthropy.
Kinfire Council is definitely more complicated than Lords of Waterdeep, but also far more deep in the options, upgrades, and actions available. The 20-page rulebook is excellent, making all of the rules easy to understand, and it’s full of useful illustrations and examples. Once you quickly get used to the iconography, the complexity is in what to do rather than how to do it.
It feels like a betrayal, but I do suspect Kinfire Council has usurped what is still a treasured game for me. I won’t be getting rid of it, but if I want to run a city like this, I honestly don’t know how often I’ll choose Waterdeep over Din’Lux as my destination.
