After the positive review I gave for Architects of the West Kingdom two years ago, I had always intended to eventually review the next game in the trilogy. It is called Paladins of the West Kingdom, a tabletop eurogame designed by Shem Phillips and S.J. MacDonald, published by Garphill Games, and originally released in 2019. The premise involves the players as loyal West Francian nobility being charged with tackling various important tasks with the help of the King’s knight-peers. Players interact with the game by gathering workers and resources, and exchanging them to take various actions that increase their victory score. This was actually the first West Kingdom game I ever played, so I’m very excited to tell you all whether it holds up. Take up your blade and honor your oath, because we have a kingdom to protect! Please note that I am still not really a board game expansion buyer, so City of Crowns will not be considered in this review.

The goal of Paladins of the West Kingdom is to collect the most Victory Points over the course of seven rounds. There are many elements of the game that contribute to your final total, but the main six actions are found on the right-side of the player board. These include Commissioning monks and Garrisoning outposts on the main board, obtaining walls to Fortify your lands, working to Absolve your sins, and setting out to confront and either Attack or Convert invading outsiders. Said actions constitute the bulk of your win condition thanks to the King’s Orders. These are a set of cards chosen at random and revealed over the course of the first three rounds, and each one revealed designates one of the six major actions as being worth extra points if you perform it five or more times. Orders revealed later are also worth more points, to incentivise pivoting your strategy towards them if you started the game focusing on other things. This system is quite welcome as it manages to shift the dynamic of different playthroughs without needing to overcomplicate the game, which will become more apparent as we break down the game’s other components. I’ll talk about these components in rough order of when they appear in the round.

The first step in a round is to select a Paladin from the Paladin Deck: draw three, pick one, put one on top of the deck, and one on the bottom of the deck. Each paladin comes with three perks for that round. First they provide two workers, second provide a special ability which amplifies the effects or cheapens the cost of one of the twelve main actions, and lastly provide a temporary stat boost to the game’s core Attributes of Strength, Faith, and Influence. The special ability and Attribute boosts in particular can have a dramatic effect on the pace of your round, but Paladins cannot be reused after the end of the round you put them into play. This brings the game’s strategic side straight to the forefront, immediately demanding careful consideration from the player. There are a few obvious plays like playing Otton and Girard early if you get them in the first couple rounds, or playing Samson in the early-mid game to Develop on the cheap and get your core engine ready, but this mentality ignores the element of chance. Most of the time you’re asking all kinds of nuanced questions. Do I play Oliver on a turn where I can maximize the combo potential of the Pray action, or should I use him when I need his hefty +4 Faith bonus the most? How long can I hold off on playing Ivon in order to maximize the value of his provisionless Commissions without accidentally stalling out my win condition? Easily one of the most impactful decisions you make each turn, and rightfully so given the name of the game!

Once each player has chosen their Paladin for the round, they’ll take turns selecting from the randomly drawn Taverns to gain four more workers and round out their starting worker pool of six. The workers come in six varieties: white Laborers,  red Fighters, green Scouts, black Clerics, blue Merchants, and purple Criminals. Each of the action spaces on the board have different worker requirements and each Tavern is claimed by only one player, so competition over different worker types can get fierce if player strategies hone in on the same objectives at the same time. Laborers can only go onto clear action spaces, the four main colored pieces have matching spaces which require them to use, and Criminals serve as powerful wild cards that can be used for every type of space but have a special drawback. 

Once everyone has their workers, the players take turns placing them down on their boards to take their actions. You might think it’s a mad rush to use your high reward right-side actions early and often, but these require three workers to use, as well as requiring an Attribute check and either silver or provisions. As such you’ll often find yourself focused on the left hand side of the board first to set up whatever play you’re going for. Silver and provisions can be gained at a flat rate through the Trade and Hunt actions, but by far the most important action on this side is Develop. It costs two workers and a hefty four silver, but in exchange you get to place a Workshop down on the leftmost worker space of one of the right-side actions, permanently reducing the number of workers needed to take that action (up to a minimum of one). Plus you get a bonus worker each time you Develop and taking the action lots of times eventually counts towards your Victory Points, so it truly is the most valuable action in the game. 

Another important left-side mechanic is the Recruit action, which allows players to peruse a rotating selection of Townsfolk and either discard them from the line for an immediate effect, or (if you used two workers) put them into play by your board and gain a persistent passive effect. These effects usually grant a bonus reward for taking certain actions and can enable you to create very profitable setups, but they have to be obtained swiftly and carefully since other players might get to them first. Each Townsfolk costs an amount of silver (or requires you to take on Debt) relative to their place in the line, which means the player who Recruits first has the potential advantage of picking the Townsfolk with no additional costs and later players might have to settle for paying high prices for their hired help. Alternatively, you might Recruit a Townsfolk while they’re still expensive simply to make sure you’re the one who gets them. Finally the last of the left-side actions is Pray, which costs a little bit of silver but allows you to clear placed workers off of any space on your board and thus makes the space re-useable. The usefulness of this action is largely dependent on your available worker pool, silver and provision reserves, and what Paladin effects you have to take advantage of, but when everything lines up the ability to re-use a space twice in one turn is potentially game-winning. In practice it’s generally better to get Pray’s clearing effect of a bonus effect like the ones in Commission, Garrison, and Absolve, but if you’re willing to go all in then making time to Pray can push your board state well beyond what is usually possible.

Once you’ve set yourself up for success, it’s time to actually start using your right-side actions and going for the win. Each time you perform one of these six actions, you’ll gain at least one Attribute point, and at least one other benefit like bonus resources. The key here is that every one of the right-side actions requires one type of Attribute while rewarding another, such as Commissioning requiring Faith and rewarding Influence, and as the Attribute requirements rise you’ll need to invest in other action types to keep up. This leads into the core engine goal of the game, where you want to be able to loop right-side actions (usually ones that are part of the King’s Orders) into one another and maximize your ability to perform them five or more times within the turn limit. For instance, building a Commision and Absolve engine which has the two actions work in tandem to make the other easier to perform by consistently raising both Faith and Influence. This isn’t the only strategy of course, in particular timing your Paladin cards to use an action with temporarily boosted stats can be just as effective when played right, but the consistency provided by doubling down on two of the game’s core scoring actions with the help of Workshops is really competitive all the same.

That covers all of the individual-focused mechanics in the game, and as you can tell a lot of this game’s play patterns are pretty independent of the actions taken by your opponents. This is a hallmark of the Eurogame genre to be sure, but there are some inputs from your opponents that do matter. The competition for Townsfolk was explained earlier, and another similar mechanic is the Outsider cards. You can claim one of these rotating Outsider cards through the Attack or Convert actions, which similarly rewards doing it early in a round since in theory you could clear the related King’s Order with minimal attribute investment (though in practice the other players will force you to invest more to keep up). The Commission and Garrison actions are similarly competing for limited space on the main board, with the more spacious areas requiring higher attributes. Next, from round three all the way to round seven a King’s Favor action is revealed which are once per round (can’t be cleared with Pray effects) bonus spaces which provide a large boost in resources to the player that sends a worker to it. And lastly there is The Inquisition, which is the most multiplayer element of the whole game. As players recruit Criminals into their service from Taverns and Conspiring, they draw a Suspicion card and take some silver (0-2) from the limited tax pool on the main board. When the last of the tax is taken, an Inquisition occurs and the player or players with the most Suspicion discard half their Suspicion rounded down in exchange for a Debt card. This makes spaces like Absolve and other means of clearing Suspicion very valuable, especially because opponents might try to intentionally trigger an Inquisition in order to stick you with a points penalty you have to deal with!

So with this game’s many, many moving parts finally established how does it all come together? Well once you understand it all your general play patterns will start to get pretty similar from game to game, as the basic strategy is pretty plain to see. What manages to save the game entirely though is the King’s Orders, as this single mechanic ensures that most games will have greater emphasis placed on various facets of the overall experience. Whether ultimately presented with the challenge of gunning for one particular engine or adapting to a more scattershot set of Orders, the system works as intended and teaches me a little more about Paladins of the West Kingdom’s overall design each time I play. The only real downside is if a player decides to guess the third Order and manages to do so correctly, the early engine they’ll have built around it kinda decides the entire game on turn 3. It doesn’t happen often, but I have robbed games this way and it kinda guts the game of all that great strategic maneuvering. Beyond this I do wish there was at least a mechanic that let you mess with your opponents more directly so as to make their presence felt more, but overall I understand the goals of both the game’s genre and the thematic direction born of preventing direct infighting.

Presentation-wise, my commentary from the previous West Kingdom review remains largely unchanged. It is an inherited style which rides a thin line between flattery and mean-spiritedness regarding the game’s subject matter, but overall leans more towards the former. I think this can be felt the most in the designs of the brand-new Paladin characters themselves, as there is a good mix of knightly idealization, cartoony ruggedness, and stark reminders of the reality of war amongst all twelve of them. Each of these elements may or may not have worked out on their own, but the blend between them is ultimately the most compelling direction it could have gone. And while the game boards themselves feature less to look at overall thanks to their smaller size, they still have charm to spare. In terms of functionality, word minimalism is once again appreciated from a design standpoint and forgetting rules is overall less common in Paladin’s design.

Finally we come to our spiritual reflection for this review, which takes an interesting turn this time around. Despite the noticeable theme of morality in the previous game, the Suspicion mechanic ultimately doesn’t expand upon the ideas put forward by Virtue very well. This is because the Tavern cards will inevitably leave you in positions where gaining Suspicion is forced, so we don’t get those incredible stories of winning the game while consciously picking the longer but more holy road. Instead I wanted to bring attention back to those core actions you take to win the game: Commission, Absolve, Fortify, Attack, Garrison, and Convert. Naturally the Commission, Absolve, and Convert actions draw heavily from western Europe’s Catholic history, and it’s cool to have a game that lets you engage with that particular facet of medieval life. From here one might be tempted to make a point that these actions are symbolically greater than their counterparts in Garrison, Fortify, and Attack respectively, but I don’t think that’s true. Rather it is in the harmony between these two thematic archetypes where the full reality of Christian life comes truly alive. 

This balance between spiritual and political matters brought to my mind G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and specifically the chapter titled The Paradoxes of Christianity. The book is something of a paradox in and of itself; described in the first chapter by the author as mostly a “slovenly autobiography” about how he came to view Christianity as the soundest base of ethics, yet well regarded today as one of the great modern works of Christian apologetic writing. In any case, this chapter begins with a recount of the strange quality of Christian skeptics to come to wildly opposed criticisms of the same faith. Some condemned them for their intense meekness and gentleness like with the monks or the peacemaking saints, and yet others condemned them for their involvement in history’s violent episodes like the crusaders and the saint kings. But Chesterton ultimately follows this line of contradiction into the heart of Christianity and comes to find that her doctrines, her orthodoxy, exist precisely so that figures and virtues of such radical contradiction can coexist. As he so beautifully put it:

It is constantly assured, especially in our Tolstoyan tendencies, that when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. But that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. That is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb. The real problem is—Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? That is the problem the Church attempted; that is the miracle she achieved. – Orthodoxy, p. 125

Make no mistake that for the majority of us God’s call for our lives will be to meekness, a gentle love which can rise above the temptation to resolve friction with a reprisal of obstinance. Even so, righteous indignation has its place, and there is a need for those who answer the call to war so that the people behind them can live. Both kinds of people have to be a part of the story of salvation, else we lose the right to call ourselves the “universal” church. The shy parishioner who prays quietly doesn’t need to become a master apologist owning people on the debate floor, he just needs a friend in Christ who can learn from his silent devotion. The driven parishioner who wants to take the fight to evildoers doesn’t need a reprimand to suppress his confrontational personality, he just needs to be shown where, when, and how to fight evil properly. Both are beloved by God. Both are good Christians. In that light every King’s Order could be said to be a fundamentally Catholic order, and as such this game provides a moment of reflection on the balance of priorities and virtues we all must grapple with to follow after Christ.

In summation, Paladins of the West Kingdom is an entertaining strategic board game with good replay value and an undeniably unique charm that comes from embracing the time period it depicts for what it was. Its somewhat solitary gameplay loop and potential for luck-based exploits do leave me less fond of it than Architects, but this is still a quality board game that deserves a similar place of honor on your shelf. If building up this kingdom brought you joy, then defending it is certainly worth your time. Hopefully one day someone will make my dream chanson de geste video game, but for now I’ll happily stick to this board game alternative.

About PeaceRibbon

A graduate in philosophy from a campus with Benedictine monks, "PeaceRibbon" is just an ordinary introvert looking to put his hours of playing games to good use. He's played games on every Nintendo console since the family Wii and later took up PC games once aware of Steam. He's explored a lot of genres, but his favorites have been story driven RPGs and fighting games. Often finds himself going deep into gaming culture and seeking out low-profile titles over keeping up with big releases.

When not gaming, he enjoys walking in beautiful places, and overthinking just about everything. Also serves as a cantor at Mass whenever he can. Has a twin brother who shares many of the same hobbies and passions.