Designer Rodrigo Esper

Publisher Esper.Games

Players 1-4

Play Time 60-150

Played prototype provided by designer 

On Kickstarter now: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/esper-games/the-queens-new-capital-0

Queen’s New Capital is a deck/tableau builder with some new twists. The goal of the game is to be the first to acquire a certain number of recognition seals. The game also offers a campaign version and various upgraded complexity decks.

Let’s start with the theme:  the Queen organizes an uprising against a brutal tyrant, brings four factions into her alliance, and succeeds in her rebellion. She envisions a new ‘capital’ to give her kingdom a fresh start. You are tasked with winning the allegiance of the factions and building a new ‘capital’ with leaders to aid you.

Setup is simple. You lay out a common board that has four tracks that each player participates in. Each player gets a tableau to track their individual progress on tracks and a bonus spot tracking their “Free Board actions.” Each player begins with two randomly determined leaders and one randomly determined structure.  Players start with the same 10 card deck.

A turn is drawing six cards, playing at least four, and then discarding the unplayed cards. The basic cards are one of ten basic actions, but advanced cards can combine or increase their effectiveness. Here are the ten base actions:

• Research lets you take an advanced card;
• Recruit lets you take a leader;
• Build lets you build a tier 1 structure;
• Administrate lets you either remove a rebellion token or reset your “free board action”;
• Elite Deploy, Mobilize Army, Intimidate, Raise Moral, and Send Envoy are cards that are played face down towards a crisis that is faced at the end of the turn;
• Bribe allows the player to ignore the effects of failing to resolve a crisis.

Players are allowed to perform one Free Board action a turn.  These actions are:

• Scout lets you discard some cards from a stack and refresh to try to find the card you are looking for.
• Resupply lets you draw two more cards.
• ‘Faction Action’ lets you trigger a special action of a faction you are favored with (at the last space of their track).
• Support Action is a work in progress based on the game’s development.

A picture of all the actions and some icons.

Player tableaus can hold 4 structures/buildings (think columns to the right of your tableau) and each structure may hold 2 leaders.

It is possible for players to take additional turns. Players may then choose to “burn” or remove from the game one of the remaining cards in hand.

This is a picture of the buildings you can build (displaying tier 1 at the top and tiers 2 and 3 below it.

After players are done playing cards, then players will evaluate the Warfare card and must individually have enough warfare icons to match or defeat the card. If players have won the conflict, those with the highest number of conflict icons will earn a reward token that the player can use in the future for an extra turn. In addition, some warfare and political cards will provide tokens with these icons that can be played in future crisis phases.

Next the political crisis card will be evaluated, and players must cooperatively have enough political icons to meet or defeat the political crisis with the same rewards possible.

If there is a failure of either of these crises, players take a rebellion token. These are placed on a structure and will stop the structure from scoring during the scoring phase. If two or more tokens are placed on a structure, it can cause your leader to desert. 

Finally, during the scoring phase, players will evaluate attribute icons in their tableau and advance on the tracks. When a player reaches the fifth space of a track, they get a recognition seal to be used towards the winning goal. 

Let’s talk about the tracks. There are 4 shared tracks on the main board. Building structures and recruiting leaders can move you up here during the scoring phase. Each player also has 2 tracks on their board that represent the factions of structures and leaders they play, pulling one in two different directions. Getting to the last space on these faction tracks allows you to be honored and unlocks an extra action you may take with your once per round, bonus action.

My thoughts on the game:

Queen’s New Capital provides some interesting new aspects to deck building. The different factions influence abilities, and their attributes add to the theme. The semi-cooperative element adds interaction, as cooperating may help other players more than yourself, so there is a bit of a traitor mechanism. The game doesn’t outstay it’s welcome as rounds move quickly.

The game offers different modes of play through a goal card that challenges players to place different seals or offers different miniature goals to help place seals throughout the game or provides additional rewards for meeting extra goals.

The game acknowledges from the onset that the art is AI-generated and both me and my friends found it beautiful. The designer is active on Discord and on BGG and is available for answering questions about the game.

Let’s talk about the good first. This game does have something to offer. It’s less of a deck builder and it’s more of a tableau track racer. The art is a bonus. We all liked the art and AI does offer something that was described as “it’s as if they molded and painted the miniatures and took a picture.” The tokens give you some agency to play in a way you want to. Some of the cards appeared more powerful than others and thus, there was competition to get them, but it just comes down to the turn order which rotates each turn regardless of your individual actions. I liked that the scenarios were varied, allowing for some changes game to game.

These are the available development cards (top) and leader cards (for selection at one point during the game).

This is how my tableau looked at the end of one of the games.

There are some issues with the game that I caught late and may already be resolved by the constantly evolving development while in Kickstarter.  The rulebook was confusing for us. It referred to seals but then used the image of seals to indicate attributes. There are rules for placing structures and leaders but not a lot of clarity on replacing leaders or placement of leaders in relation to each other, as some leaders had actions that depended on leaders above it. The bribe card in the prototype was hard to decipher but it’s already been addressed in a newer version of the game. I disliked that the same crisis cards appeared in the same order every game.

Overall, I enjoyed this game, but I am eager to see it designed and playtested a bit more. I like the direction and some of the ideas integrated into the design but the game did not feel to have very tight gameplay and the crisis cards felt like a forced way of having euro-style interactions. This could be based on its prototype status, but I would like to see the cards a bit more balanced and an easier way of upgrading, which felt more difficult to do than advance on the tracks.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Lorna: Queen’s New Capital provides some interesting aspects to deck building. The presence of a tableau and board albeit small provide a nice balance to the game. The different factions influence abilities and attributes add to the theme. The semi-cooperative element adds interaction, as cooperating may help other players more than yourself so there is a bit of a traitor mechanism. The game doesn’t out stay it’s welcome as rounds move quickly.