• Game: Barons
• Publisher: Cambridge Games Factory
• Designer: Thomas Colthurst
• Genre: Kingdom building card game
• Players: 2-6
• Playtime: 20-60 minutes



• What's Hot: Lots of game for under $20; plenty of cards that offer lots of strategic and tactical opportunities; direct “take that” style conflict; CCG/Settlers influences clearly felt; very reasonable playtime even for six



• What's Not: Horrifyingly bad artwork and graphic design; endgame conditions are unsatisfying and anti-climatic; players that don’t embrace the nastier elements could turn it into a snoozer

by: Michael Barnes

To date, Cambridge Game Factory’s biggest hit has been Carl Chudyk’s notoriously ugly but really quite great Glory to Rome, an evolution of the San Juan-style card game that pretty much blows all other contenders in that field out of the water. Its horrendous graphics are getting a huge upgrade thanks to a Kickstarter project and the hiring of an actual graphic designer, but their recent title Barons is still stuck in a woeful artistic miasma of gradient primary colors, crude line drawings, and ‘what-were-they-thinking’ font choices. I’m putting this right up front because it’s simply unavoidable—Barons, like the original Glory to Rome, is eye-searingly offensive to all modern design sensibilities. With that said, there are rumors that Barons will be getting a Kickstarter remake in the near future, so it may behoove interested parties to sit tight until it’s time to pledge.

But Barons as it exists today is an $18 card game packed in a clamshell box. It’s definitely low budget and won’t impress anyone with its production quality, but it’s another great small press title that offers a surprising amount of bang for the buck. Players represent barons attempting to increase land holdings to generate resources and complete a two-stage victory condition. There are four decks of cards representing four different land types that each produces a different commodity. Each deck features a number of buildings, action cards, and Knights on their faces, but each can also be played in a grid around the baron’s central castle to increase taxable lands. Up to four, like-colored and connected lands can be taxed, each providing a card draw from the deck of that color.

Cards are also discarded from hand to construct buildings, pay for event cards, and hire Knights. Every card, therefore, is useful and there tends to be a number of decision points in each hand that give the game a surprising amount of crunch and depth given its rules simplicity. You might tax your green lands intending to get green cards to build a particular structure for its special ability, but the cards you draw might turn out to be more interesting or strategically significant. There’s always a lot to weigh in terms of what to tax, what to play, and what to spend.

Knights radically change the game’s dynamic, and in some ways save it from being a dry exercise in isolationist expansion. Knights have two costs- one that will buy their services to attack or defend or a higher one that will allow them to attack and then defend. Attacking Knights lay waste to opponents’ baronies, sacking resource lands and destroying buildings. It’s a very, very satisfying take-that element that provides some much-needed friction that so many games like this are missing. Defending Knights take position in a barony’s grid, protecting adjacent buildings and lands. Knights typically have special add-on functions of their own as well.

There are a lot of different cards, and it isn’t hard to see the influence of Magic: The Gathering in some of its core gameplay concepts including a higher-than-usual degree of possible combinations and cards that impact resource production or game flow. There are even dual lands like in Magic. Settlers of Catan is also a key touch point with a similar resource mechanic. And comparisons to San Juan (or more appropriately Glory to Rome) are unavoidable, but they’re favorable ones. I also find that the game has some resemblance to Small Box Games’ Irondale, particularly in the spatial, grid-based abstraction of geography and position.

The primary complaint I have against Barons, aside from the gut-wrenching artwork and graphic design, is that the victory conditions are oddly unsatisfying. It’s one of those games where victory is heralded by someone saying “that’s it, I win…I think” followed by some card-counting to make sure the player has the right resources. Players must first build a church using a complete set of the game’s four resources and they also have to have a church card in hand. This increases the taxation ability to five lands, and it can not be attacked by Knights- a very, very smart design choice. With a church in the barony, building a Cathedral wins the game. It’s constructed with a double set of resources. It can feel extremely anti-climatic in an aggressively played game with lots of pillaging and mayhem when a player just pipes in at the end of their turn “Cathedral, I win”.

Barons can also be a very dry, boring exercise in bean-counting if the game is not played with more aggressive types focused on simply working out the best and most advantageous taxation avenues to hit the church and cathedral first. To get the most out of the game, players simply must embrace the take-that opportunities the Knight cards afford, putting off buildings and land expansion to stick it to their buddies whenever possible, Attacks that divide up taxable lands can be devastating, as can knocking out key buildings providing bonus cards or abilities. But players have to make use of them for the game to avoid feeling like another resource management game.

At its price point, Barons offers a lot of game and it can field up to six players in a reasonable amount of time—about 10 to 15 minutes per player seems about right. It’s hard to overlook how freakishly ugly the game is and the victory goals are ho-hum, but there’s plenty of strategy and tactics on offer and it’s a fairly easy game to get into. Just make sure you’re playing it with people that embrace its more CCG-like aspects including the direct conflict that is offered. Do that, and what could have been another boring “build a kingdom” exercise becomes a fairly interesting little resource management game with some teeth.