Debrief: The Old King's Crown by Eerie Idol Games

A fading crown. A table full of secrets. We’re diving into The Old King’s Crown—a heavy, heady blend of bluffing, bidding, and brutal clashes—where every season reshapes the map and every decision echoes across years. We unpack how the game’s sketchbook-fantasy art direction and sharper final production help a complex ruleset breathe, why the seasonal flow is the quiet teacher that keeps turns focused, and how a single overbid in spring can save (or sink) your endgame in year five.

We map the core loop: spring’s covert bids for locations and bold heralds that call your shot; summer’s simultaneous reveals and clash resolution where the trailing player chooses the order, turning tempo into a weapon; autumn’s governance where gavels and scrolls translate into votes and lore, letting you buy faction-specific upgrades that redefine your hand; and winter’s cleanup where even draw rules carry teeth as hand size shrinks with careless churn. Along the way, we compare the table feel to Root’s trust-based tension: you can’t track everything, so you learn to read signals, spot feints, and time your power spikes. Factions like the Gathering, Uprising, Clans, and Nobility share a common spine but express sharp identities through asymmetric powers and one-shot banners that demand well-timed plays.

Then there’s the solo mode: a modular Simulacrum AI that sometimes lies on purpose. Personalities swap in, difficulty scales cleanly, and the “liar card” twist creates real uncertainty without heavy upkeep. It’s a surprisingly elegant way to learn timing windows and iconography while still offering a worthy opponent. If you crave a strategy game where art, theme, and mechanisms interlock—and where stolen locations and dwindling hand size become stories you retell—this one belongs on your radar.

If this breakdown helps, follow the show, share with a friend, and leave a quick review. Tell us your take: which faction are you drafting first and why?

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting the Stage: Why This Game
• 1:05 Art, Production, and Iterations
• 3:28 Core Pitch: Theme and Weight
• 5:00 Yearly Flow: Seasons Overview
• 7:30 Spring Bidding and Heralds
• 10:48 Summer Clashes and Resolution Order
• 13:10 Autumn Governance and Lore Economy
• 16:05 Factions, Powers, and Root Vibes
• 20:40 Decks, Hand Management, and Teachability
• 24:05 Solo Mode: Simulacrum AI and Mind Games
• 28:30 Strategy Depth, Staying Power, and Who It’s For

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:15

Welcome to the Operation Game Night Podcast. I'm your host, Travis Smith. Joining me as always is Clayton D. Gable himself. Hi, Clay. Hi, Travis. How are you? I'm good. How are you? Doing great. I am excited to talk to you about our feature game today. Old King's Crown. More specifically, the old King's Crown. What is this? From 3D Idol Games.

SPEAKER_00: 0:42

You tell me you want to debrief this, and I I follow board games pretty closely, but this one slipped through the cracks in my you know stratosphere here. So you're gonna have to really do some legwork to catch me up on what this is all about.

SPEAKER_01: 0:59

Well, this is gonna take some serious work to catch you up because this game is pretty beefy. Uh, but yes, this game is currently going out to backers. It was on Kickstarter or GameFound for a little while, uh, but it is published by Eerie Idol Games, and it is currently riding at number one on the BGG Hotness as of the day of recording this. Uh, and it's getting some good reviews. Early contender for game of the year from some people. So, the old king's crown. What is it? It is a game where you're trying to outmaneuver your rivals as you vie control for an ancient crumbling kingdom. Uh, it's a pretty heavy game. I'm gonna do my best to get through this. I have read through this rule book and the solo rulebook probably 10 times each. And these are not small rule books. I mean, this this one's writing at 50 pages for the just the main game. The solo rules are probably 50 more pages. There's a lot going on in this game, and I'm gonna try and do my best to walk through it as slowly as I can. Uh, the designer is Pablo Clark, artist is Pablo Clark. This guy is freaking talented, man. His art is amazing and stunning and fun to look at throughout the game. Uh, it kind of looks like a fantasy sketchbook looking thing. Um, there's like crumbling ruins, and there's cool characters, and there's like just really striking portraits and imaginative creatures. This game, the the art and the and the design, so good. And I found it interesting because I was trying to really wrap my head around these rules, and I thought, let me go to YouTube, let me go see what else was out there. I'm sure some people got review copies of this game, and you can watch 10 different review copies of this game being played and see like 10 different versions of the art and the production, and it's really interesting to see how it's evolved over time. Like this one right here, this like deep maroon color is not really. I guess it's close to the color that they ended up with, but it's far more subdued. Like the red really pops in the game. Uh, you'll see like the Wayfarer type characters, they uh ended the production pre-production copies, kind of this dull bluish, and then it like really came to life. They ended up with this like really cool aquamarine. So all that to say is this game has gone through a lot of iterations, and I think what they ended up with is really sharp. So uh mechanisms betting and bluffing. I mean, just tell me if this uh strikes your fancy. Betting and bluffing, yes, card play conflict resolutions, potentially, variable player powers.

SPEAKER_00: 3:47

I'm intrigued.

SPEAKER_01: 3:48

Okay, and a little bit of deck building.

SPEAKER_00: 3:51

That's always good.

SPEAKER_01: 3:52

Yeah, okay. They put down the mechanisms like this as like something simple. It's not all that simple. Uh, the card itself has an anatomy that you need to know. Uh, the board itself, the the rules of the game all have their like this interwoven type of narrative that they're trying to accomplish. I think it does it relatively successfully. But let's get down to what this game actually is. This is a game where you and your fellow players are trying to compete for influence in this fantasy world that has lost its previous ruler. The game is played over a series of years, and the years are broken down into like these the years are the rounds that you're playing, and those years you go through these different seasons of the year that are kind of the sub-rounds. So you have the start of the year, which is like kind of setting up for the order of play for this round. Then you've got spring, which is you are bidding on cards with the cards in your hand, you're placing out your heralds, which are like these big icons, into the one of six areas that are on the board, the regions. Uh, I'm sorry, locations, not regions. Yes. Some in this game are tough to get a hold of. Then you are taking any card, any actions on cards that have like a little spring icon, which is like a little tulip, a little flower. Then you go into summer, and that's where you have the majority of your conflicts. And summer has a day and night phase. Uh, you are placing out clash markers, you are resolving the clashes in these different regions, um, and then you're trying to do a cleanup. That's like the conflict phase is summer. Then you've got autumn. In autumn, you are governing, you're journeying, you're taking autumn actions. Okay, we'll get into that a little bit. And then winter is kind of a cleanup phase. You're getting ready for the next round, and then you move the the round marker over, you're on to the next one, you start again with the start of the year. Okay, what does all of this mean? So you tell me, man. Yeah, I'm still trying to figure it out a little bit. Uh, you play as a unique faction that has a faction leader and a unique uh location of power that kind of gives your faction its unique abilities. Okay, so like the the factions are good at different things based on their different abilities. I wish I could list off the names of the different factions. Uh, you have the gathering, the uprising, the clans, and the nobility.

SPEAKER_00: 6:36

Travis. Yes. I know you're just getting started here, but you've said a lot of things that make this sound a lot like a particular leader game. Uh when you're talking about the semantics of words and how everything has a particular meaning and the phases and nights and yes, springs. Am I sniffing up the right tree?

SPEAKER_01: 6:59

This game gives me serious root vibes. Wow. Okay. Uh, not so much like moving characters around a board or fighting for area control, but the mechanics and the way that the cards all play off one another. It kind of reminds me of like Jared's big thing about trust when playing root. Like, I don't know what you have going on over there, but I'm trusting that you're doing the right things.

SPEAKER_00: 7:24

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 7:25

Like, it's hard to keep track of what everybody has going on through this game because every time you pick up cards, your hand is changing, your abilities change, the actions that you have available to you change. And so this game is constantly evolving, and the places that you take risks in this game change things like so fast. The board state changes, the the overall game state changes. So I want to get into like just a couple of these things, uh, because I do think that the individual portions of each round are actually really interesting. So, start of the game, you're figuring out who goes first, right? Like the player order, you're starting the year with figuring out player order, and player order goes in order of the amount of influence that you currently have. The person that is last actually has an advantage in this round, and that they get to determine what order the clashes will be resolved in during the summer phase. That's big. We're gonna get to that. The spring, when you're bidding, you have these location cards that kind of come out of this uh this giant deck, and you everybody plays cards face down to bid on these locations that have abilities later on. When you all flip your cards, the person that ended up with the highest value in these cards gets to pick first, they take that card, they put it on their player board, and then that card that they bid stays underneath face up. That's important because in later iterations of this, I can bid something higher. And instead of taking from that row, if that value is higher than something like a than a number that a player had bid previous rounds for a location, I can go steal that location from them, steal that ability from them. So you need to bid like not only high enough to win this round, take the location, get the special ability, but bid high enough to play a little bit of defense for later years so that somebody doesn't come take my location later on. So my god, it's pretty interesting, it's pretty cool. Uh okay, spring, the bidding, you place a herald. Your herald is like calling your shot, like, I am going to win this location's battle. So you'll see the board is broken up into these three sectors: the plateau, the highlands, and then the lowlands or something. And you are placing your herald, your kind of big meeple into one of these six quadrants, and that's saying, I am going to win this battle this time. And if I am correct, if I win that battle on that location, I get an extra favor. If somebody else calls that exact same sector or that location, and I beat them, I not only get one favor, which is like your in-game scoring, but I get to steal favor from one other person or from the person that also like kind of bet against me. Then you're playing cards face down to these different clashes, these different regions in the summer areas. You all flip them up at the same time. The higher the amount of points that you have uh between your card value and the other meeples that you're kind of doling out between these three regions, that you'll win those clashes, you'll get favor, plus additional bonus actions per location, depending on where you won. All that cleans up. It takes a little while. You have to resolve each location on its own. Autumn is super interesting because at the top of the board, there's like these governance boards that you can commit cards to. This is a lot. I'm saying a lot of words here, but the actual actions themselves and the phases are not that complicated. It's just these like the the words that go along with the cards are hard to understand. Uh, each card has like an attribute versus a trait versus like a character versus like uh there's a lot going on here. Uh, but at the top of the board, you have these different like panels that you can commit characters to, and those care and then each card has like these gavels on it, which are your votes on these councils, or it has these little scrolls, which is lore, and that lore, like you can use a card to get more lore. Uh and that lore is used to purchase specialty cards from your faction deck and add them to your hand. Uh, and then the other governance ones can do different things. Like, I'm not gonna get too deep into the rules, I want to talk about like how these things interact a little bit, but lore, you're gonna have to use cards to get lore. The lore is used to purchase cards later on to upgrade your deck. Uh, the governance allows you to move cards around and do different things. Winter's a cleanup. Uh, you're kind of just re reconsolidating everything and getting ready for the next round. That's a lot of words. Yeah. What I know you have you probably have a thousand questions. Uh go ahead. Uh, have you played this? I have, but I have only played it solo, and I want to get into the cool ways that the solo rules work.

SPEAKER_00: 13:00

Wow. I am, you know, you have said a lot, and there's a lot of things that are like, you know, ringing in my head. It's like, oh, that could be interesting. That could be fun. But I can tell already this is a game I would love somebody to teach me, but I don't know if I could bring myself at this phase. I'm playing magical athlete, folks. I like yeah, this that's the level of games I've been into, and hearing all the semantics of the words and the different phases and rounds and resources and governing areas, it's it's making my head spin. Again, sounds like I would love it if somebody else did the work, yeah. Which you have. So I would love for you to hustle your butt up from Alabama and you know, maybe you could just teach me how to play quick.

SPEAKER_01: 13:50

Yeah, so this game has a lot of extra stuff going on. So every phase of the year, every season of the year, you have to kind of check all of your cards and all of your traits and all of your like check everything to see if you have any additional actions. Then you get to the summer phase with the clashes. Yeah, I'm kind of checking all the cards to see how they play off of one another. Like, that's the part that takes the most amount of work is figuring out how everything interacts with one another. Each faction has like these individual skills that are kind of these banners that go beneath your player board. And when you use them, they flip over. They're like one use per game, but those are super powerful powers that you can use. Um, there's another one like if I win a clash that has the favor of the king or whatever, which is like this little disc that has a one, two, three on the outside, it's got a little flag on it. If I win that clash, that token comes to me, and it's almost like in route how you have the hirelings for a very specific amount of rounds. Yeah, this one has one, two, three on it because every time you use the special ability that you gained by getting the favor of the king, you're decreasing that counter, and then once you lose it, it goes back to the main board for somebody else to win. Um, your hand size, you most factions start out at six hand six cards for hand size. Every time you need to draw from your deck and you cannot do so, you shuffle all your cards together, you put it back, and you lose a hand size count for the rest of the game. So, like, there's all these little things that go on across this board, it's a lot to keep track of, and that's why I said it's it's gonna be one of those trust games, Clayton.

SPEAKER_00: 15:37

How many decks of cards are there? So, one of the nice things about Root is that there is one deck of cards and they are used in interesting ways by the different factions. Yeah, are there several decks that you have to deal with and draw from and shuffle with, or is it similar to Root in that you can they're like multi-use across all the factions?

SPEAKER_01: 16:02

Yeah, so each faction has its own small deck of cards. You have some that you start with and then some that you can buy with lore later on. Those the little like scrolls on the cards. So that's a resource that I'm trying to get so that I can buy these powerful cards for later on that are associated with my specific faction. The only common deck to everybody is the location deck, and that guy sits on the board, and you are just flipping it out as like uh like a market that you can bid on these different locations to get you powers, and once you buy them or earn them or whatever, they sit on your player board so you can like reference their powers at all times. Though those are the only decks.

SPEAKER_00: 16:48

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_01: 16:49

When I get when I get into the solo mode, that's got a fair amount of other decks that you're kind of managing. Uh, but for the base game, it's just your player deck, the hand that you start with, the additional player deck that you're kind of buying from to like add into your deck as you go along, and then the location deck.

SPEAKER_00: 17:10

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 17:11

So it's not so bad. It's it's really not that bad as long as you are kind of keeping track of all your different cards and what they do. Like it that's the hardest part for me, man, is keeping track of the different cards when they're used for different things. It means that your card has an archetype and different traits associated with each card. And like, keep that's not really listed cleanly anywhere on the board. The board does a really good job of kind of walking through the flow of the game. You kind of work your way from the top to the bottom, left to right. So it's it's really clean like to just say, right now we're focused on this. Let's determine player order. Then you move next. Next, we're doing spring bid for these location cards, and it's right underneath. Then summer is right below spring, and then fall is right below that, and like it kind of works its way through it, it lists it out on the board exactly what you need to do. But man, there's a lot going on between these different cards and powers and traits and all this stuff. It's kind of a lot to keep track of. I think that is where the weight comes from, is just knowing how everything fits together. Uh, but the actions themselves that you're taking are not all that difficult. So, said a lot of words. I hope I've done this game justice. The videos on YouTube for this game are like anywhere between 18 minutes and like two hours. This game has a lot in it. There's 50 pages just in the core rule book. I'm not gonna get through all of it. I'm not gonna like get down to the nitty-gritty. I think there are some very interesting decisions that go along with each of the phases. I think the player powers are cool. I think the ability to upgrade and steal bids later on in different rounds. Like you're playing an individual game every single year, but the actions that you take kind of echo across the different years that you're playing, which are the the complete rounds, the years. Um, you can play a shorter game at four years, or you can play a longer game to six years, but usually you play it five years. Um, what I do want to touch on very briefly is the solo mode. I could do a whole second episode just on the solo mode of this game. Couple of things. Solo mode looks when you first pull it out, it looks super boring. You have all these beautiful cards for all the player factions. The solo mode is like black cards and like a little deck of fog, and everything is black versus all these like bright, vibrant colors. There's a reason for that. I don't really love it. I wish they would have picked a different color, but the solo mode is meant to be these like autonomous creatures that are coming out of the earth to like take over this kingdom, right? They are like the clockworks, the you know, just like root, like they have like the clockwork factions, these are the simulcraft or simulcrons or something, some other proper noun.

SPEAKER_00: 20:17

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 20:18

Sim Simulacrum. Terrible, terrible name, anyways. Yeah, the cards are pretty boring, but what you're doing is you're kind of flipping cards that will determine what these simulacrums are wanting to do each round and each phase of each round. The really cool thing about the solo mode is that they have different like decks that you can build for this simulation, the solo version, to compete against. So there's like different archetypes that you can build out to play as like somebody that's super aggressive, or somebody that like really wants to go all in on favor and upgrading their hand, or somebody that wants to like target you specifically, or somebody that so that like they do this really cool way of introducing a unique flavor every time you play. There's ways to scale the difficulty against the solo mode, which is cool. Uh, when you go into the clashes and the bidding and stuff, uh, the back of the card for the um the solo character or the uh simulacrum, it will tell you like how like a gauge on how strong the card is if they are bidding for something, and it will tell you like the priority will be this location that it's trying to compete for this time. But the really cool thing is it tells you in the rule book like some of those cards intentionally lie, so like you're trying to plan ahead, and you're like, I want I know that they want to go for this location, they're trying to bid for these cards, they have a really hard, like difficult, high value card on top, but that might be a lie. I think like 25% of their decks are like liar cards, so you can plan ahead, but then they might pull the rug out from underneath you with like a feint. It's it's really cool how they do it. And I'm probably not doing it justice with just words, you kind of have to see it in action, uh, which of course makes for good podcasting. But uh the way that they introduce a solo mode is really cool. Uh, it it's not that much upkeep, it's really not, and it it helps me it helped me understand the rules of the core game better playing against this solo mode. So uh yeah, I just have to say, like, really cool implementation, really cool decisions for a game that is rated at 3.5 weight on BGA or BGG, like it I really think it's much cleaner and much smoother than that. The hardest part is just learning what all of these different aspects mean and how they play off of one another, all the archetypes and the traits and the all that stuff is it's hard to wrap your mind around the first couple times. I watched a lot of videos, I read through the rule book probably 10 times. It took it took me a while, but I think the payoff was really good. And I understand why people are loving this game right now.

SPEAKER_00: 23:20

Dang. So you think the mechanisms do you think the mechanisms are what are gonna shine through, or is it like I keep going back to root because that's like what popped into my head so many times while you were saying things, but like in root, the mechanisms are great, but you really feel like you are in this political upheaval and you have your role to play, and it really feels like that, and you know, so the mechanisms kind of fall to the background, or is this more you think a mechanism forward game where it's like a really interesting puzzle that you're trying to solve with your you know, hand management and card play?

SPEAKER_01: 24:04

See, that's a tough one because each of the factions play very differently, um way different, like root different, or like just I wouldn't I wouldn't say that different. Like the actions that you're taking each turn are the same, right? Like you're playing cards and doing this stuff, but the specialty powers make them very good at different things, so that everyone kind of has their own unique flavor that they bring to the table. I say that having only played solo mode, but I've played two different factions and they all they both played differently and they felt different to play, different emphasis. They have two different descriptions in the rule books that say things that they're good and bad at. I think the way that this game sings or this game will have any lasting saying power is that the factions feel good to play, each on their own, and they they play with different styles enough to where people that have played the game before can jump in without having to do a ton of homework. People that are brand new, it will be a difficult teach, just like Root. Like the onboarding to this is difficult, but if you have a crew to play with periodically, regularly, you play this game once a month, like we played Root, like this game will have some staying power because there are some like deep tactical and tactical and strategic decisions to be made every single phase of every single year, of every single round of every like the weight of every single decision, you feel it. You get to like round number four, and you're like, Man, if I would have stolen that card round one or round two, like I wouldn't be in the place I am now, or vice versa. Like the fact that you're balancing being in the lead and jumping ahead to an early lead versus the person in back deciding the order that the clashes are resolved in, like, all this stuff just ties together so nicely. I did this game's gonna get a lot of traction. I think a lot of people are gonna love this game. It's not gonna be for the common everyday, like, what is board gaming today? And they just pick up this game, like that will never happen. This is gonna be a niche thing, but it's gonna have some staying power, and people are gonna fall in love with this game, much like they did root, much like they did. I I don't even know of a good comparison to this. Like, it is it is really unique and it's really special, and I think it's it's gonna have a life of its own past this. They I they have a expansion, it's still in the shrink wrap. I'd love to get it out and see what's going on in there, but uh for right now, I it just took me four days to figure out what was going on with this one. So one step at a time.

SPEAKER_00: 26:55

Well, hey, lap it up for you. That's impressive. We don't often wade into the the threes anymore in Operation Game Night. So I'm proud of you for digging into that rule book and bringing our listeners the best content you can about games that might be of interest to them.

SPEAKER_01: 27:17

Yeah, I and I would encourage you if you're listening to this, you are interested in this game. I don't know why. I probably did a terrible job explaining it, but uh this is this is a heavy game that requires a lot of like investment to learn. Um if you are interested in this game, there's tons of YouTube videos out there. Just know that any YouTube video that you watch is probably a pre-production copy, unless they say like it's finally here. This copy showed up and I backed it on Kickstarter, whatever, uh, because that the rules vary just a little bit uh from video to video, the production varies video to video. And so go out, see what it's about, see it played in person, see it played on YouTube, uh, and really get a feel for this because it I think it is great, and I I hope that this game has legs in the future because I I really love what Eerie Idol Games and and Pablo Clark has has done with this one.

SPEAKER_02: 28:14

Yeah, I'm I'm intrigued. I'm intimidated, but I'm intrigued. So and I am exhausted. That was a lot of talking.

SPEAKER_01: 28:21

So yeah, good job. Let's wrap this one up. This has been The Old King's Crown by Eerie Idol Games. I have been Travis, he has been Clay. This has been Operation Game Night. Thank you for listening, and we're out.