Getting Started with Good Kings Bad Kings
Good Kings Bad Kings is a two-player strategy card game published by Renegade Game Studios, designed by Greg Paprocki. The premise is straightforward enough: each player controls a king, a court, and a set of noble pieces, and you're trying to get your king to safety while undermining the other player's. The game uses a deck-building mechanic where cards enter play from your hand and you acquire new cards over time. It plays in about 30 to 45 minutes for a first game, though experienced players tend to finish faster since the turns are relatively quick once you know the flow. Each turn follows the same basic sequence: draw a card, then play actions from your hand until you choose to end your turn or run out of legal moves. The actions involve moving your noble pieces around the board, playing event cards that affect the opponent's court or your own, and managing your king's position. The board has a series of rooms connected by corridors, and your king starts in one corner while the opponent's starts in the opposite corner. Movement is constrained by the layout, which means positioning matters more than raw card advantage in most situations. One thing people don't always realize going in is that the deck you build during the game essentially becomes your engine. The cards you play are permanent additions to your court, so choosing which ones to acquire early on has long-term consequences. I've seen multiple players grab what looked like the strongest offensive card in round one, only to find themselves locked out of defensive options later when the opponent's strategy shifted. The game doesn't punish bad decisions harshly, but it does make them slow and painful rather than immediately game over.
How the mechanics actually work in practice
The noble pieces — the castellan, the spymaster, the knight, and the treasurer — each have different movement patterns and abilities. The castellan moves one space in any direction. The spymaster moves one space diagonally. The knight moves in an L-shape like a chess knight. The treasurer moves any number of spaces along a straight line. These movement rules sound simple but they interact in ways that take a few games to internalize. A knight can jump over pieces, for example, which opens up routing possibilities that the other nobles don't have. Cards are divided into three categories: event cards, which are one-time effects played from your hand, royal cards, which stay in play and provide ongoing abilities, and quest cards, which represent objectives you complete to score points. The quest system is where the game diverges from most deck-builders. Instead of just accumulating victory points through card effects, you need to physically move pieces to specific board locations or meet certain conditions. This means card advantage alone won't win you the game if you're not also managing the board state.
Setting up correctly the first time
There's a specific setup procedure that matters more than most players realize. You shuffle each player's deck separately, place the quest cards face-up in the center, and set aside the extra cards not used in a two-player game. The board layout is fixed, but the placement of certain starting cards can vary depending on which expansion or scenario you're running. Make sure both players agree on which rulebook version you're using before you start, because Renegade has released several updates and errata over the years. I ran into a problem with my third game where we discovered halfway through that we'd shuffled a scenario-specific card into the main deck that wasn't part of the selected quest. The card in question was from the "Siege" scenario and granted an ability that completely changed the endgame scoring. Since neither of us had caught it during setup, we just kept playing and I ended up winning with an unconventional strategy. After that, I started double-checking the deck composition after shuffling, which takes about 20 seconds and prevents any confusion. It's a small habit but it saves you from arguments that are hard to resolve mid-game.
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Common mistakes and how to avoid them
The most frequent error I see is over-investing in offense early and neglecting board control. Players will buy aggressive event cards thinking they can pressure the opponent into a mistake, but the board in Good Kings Bad Kings is quite wide and controlling key intersections gives you leverage that raw damage doesn't. The knight and castellan combo in particular is underappreciated because it lets you contest multiple board areas simultaneously. Another mistake is treating all quest cards as equal priority. Some quests are much easier to complete than others depending on your opening moves, and the game rewards players who adapt their card acquisition to the quest they're pursuing rather than grabbing the mechanically interesting cards. If you're going for a quest that requires controlling the center chamber, a treasurer on a long hallway can be more valuable than a spymaster with a strong event ability. The card economy in this game is tight enough that every acquisition decision has a real opportunity cost.
What the game does poorly
Good Kings Bad Kings has a known issue with first-player advantage in certain matchups. If Player One secures an early board position that restricts Player Two's king movement options, the second player can find themselves reacting for the entire game rather than executing their own plan. This isn't a fatal flaw, but it does make the opening turns more important than in many comparable games. There have been unofficial homebrew rules that address this by giving the second player an extra card at the start, though the official rules don't include any such compensation. The game also struggles with player count. It's strictly two-player, and while the components can support more people watching, there's no mechanism for adding a third participant. If you're looking for a deck-builder that works with three or four players, this isn't the right tool. Games like Dominion or Star Realms handle multiplayer better, though they sacrifice the tight one-on-one pressure that Good Kings Bad Kings creates. The cards themselves are decent quality but not exceptional. The artwork is consistent and functional, and the card stock is adequate for regular play, but if you're prone to bending cards during shuffling you'll want to get sleeves. I use standard-sized cards with a matte finish and have had no issues after about 40 games. Glossy sleeves tend to stick together and make drawing from the deck slower, which is a minor but real nuisance during longer sessions.
Where to get it
You can find Good Kings Bad Kings through the Renegade Game Studios website directly, as well as through major retailers like Amazon, Target, and various hobby game shops. The suggested retail price is around $39.99, though it frequently goes on sale for somewhere between $25 and $30 at online retailers. Third-party marketplaces like BoardGameGeek's market or local game store forums sometimes have used copies in better condition than what you'd find at big-box stores, since those retailers tend to expose games to more handling during display. If you're unsure whether you'll enjoy the game before committing to a full purchase, several YouTube channels have full playthroughs and rule explanations. The "Shut Up & Sit Down" review and the "Dice Tower" coverage both give reasonable overviews of the mechanics without spoiling too much. Reading through the rulebook yourself before watching any videos is still worth doing, because the video explanations sometimes gloss over edge cases that matter in actual play.
