Played with a review copy provided by the publisher
In Lords of Worlds, players are tasked with creating the most valuable world possible. You do this by buying different kinds of land pieces, called terrain tiles, and adding them to your own planet. You’ll also hire helpers, known as assistants, and use them smartly to get the best deals. Then, you’ll follow your architects’ plans to build a beautiful land.
The main goal in Lords of Worlds is to collect terrain tiles and place them on your planet. You want to make long lines, or chains, of the same type of land. The longer these chains are, the more points they’ll be worth when the game ends. On your turn, you have two main choices:
– You can either hire assistants, which means drawing more cards to add to your hand.
OR
– You can play the cards you already have in your hand. These cards let you move your cart around the game board or pick up a terrain tile.
The game has different ways it can end, depending on how many people are playing. Once one of these end conditions is met, you finish the current round so everyone gets the same number of turns. The player who has earned the most points wins the game.
To get started, you set up the game board based on the number of players. You cover the spaces on the board with tiles, using a certain number of different types depending on how many people are playing. In the strategic way we usually play, every space that isn’t a portal is covered with a terrain tile that you can see. For the regular way, these tiles are placed face down, and then 12 are picked randomly and turned over. The first player gets to pick which portal is the starting spot, and all players put their cart on that space.
Next, you shuffle the deck of assistant cards and lay some out. You keep laying out cards until you have 6 piles. Cards of the same color are put into the same pile. However, you stop adding to a pile if the total value of the cards in it reaches 8 or more. You also stop immediately after you make the 6th pile, so the very last pile will always have just one card in it.
Players also start with a hand of cards. You draw from the deck until the total value of the cards in your hand is 14 or more.
On your turn, you can either hire assistants or play cards to do something on the board. I’ll explain the rules for the strategic version here, as that’s what we play most often. There’s also a simpler version that relies more on luck.
To hire assistants, you pick any one of the piles of cards and add them to your hand. Your hand can only hold 10 cards at the end of your turn. After you take cards, you refill the supply piles the same way as before.
If you choose to play cards, you can move, collect a tile, or do both. Moving costs one card for each space you travel. It also costs one card to move through a portal, which lets you end your movement on any space on the board. To collect a tile, you have to pay the number of cards shown on that tile. When you play cards, you must use cards of only one color. You can add wild cards to act as any color you need. If you are collecting a tile from a space on the board that has a color, you must play cards that match that color. When you do this, you get an extra 5 victory points right away.
The tile you collect is then placed on your personal planet board. You can put it on any empty spot or on a spot with an architect. If you place it on an architect’s spot, you immediately get points equal to the number on the tile. If you place it on an empty spot, you don’t score anything right away. However, you then get to move your cart to any space next to it and take that terrain tile for free, placing it on your board. You only get to do this free collection once per turn.
There are 4 special tiles you can choose to collect:
Architect – This basically adds another spot for an architect on your planet. Or, if you place it on top of an existing architect, you score points for the new tile.
Mix – This is a wild terrain tile. You don’t have to decide what type it is until the very end of the game when scores are counted.
Sage Tree – This tile gives you 3 victory points right away for every tile that is next to it when you place it.
Viewpoint – This tile scores 2 victory points for each tile in the biggest chain of land next to it.
The game keeps going until one player has triggered the end of the game. For a 4-player game, this happens when a player has 4 or fewer empty spaces left on their player board. After that, you finish the current round so that everyone has had the same number of turns. Then, the game moves on to the final scoring.
For each type of terrain, you count how many tiles are in each chain and then score points based on a chart on the scoreboard.
For each type of tile, you score points if you have 3 or more of that specific value of tile anywhere on your board.
The player with the most points at the end is the winner. There is no special way to break ties.
My thoughts on the game
As I was walking around the halls at Spiel 2025, I was quite surprised to find a game by Kramer and Kiesling that I didn’t know about! After a quick demonstration, I was definitely interested in trying it out. As I’ve come to expect with most games designed by Kramer, there are several different ways to play the game included in the rules. Our group decided to play the Strategic Variant for our first game, and we’ve never played any other way. (For those who don’t read my reviews often, this is one of my main complaints about Kramer’s designs – I really don’t like how there are usually multiple versions of the game in the rulebook. I’d much rather the game have just one best way to play.)
In Lords of Worlds, there’s a nice back-and-forth to your turns. You gather cards when you can, hoping to have the right ones to take advantage of what’s happening on the game board. Most of the time, taking the cards with the highest total value is the best move. However, you’ll always want to pay attention to piles of specific colors if you’re planning to grab a tile from a colored space on the board.
It’s important to watch what other players are collecting (and try to remember what cards they’ve recently picked up). Even if you could grab a tile you want on your turn, it might be worth taking a chance and picking up a nice big stack of cards instead. On the other hand, sometimes you might want to wait to pick up a certain tile from the board. You might be waiting for better tiles to show up in the market, especially if there isn’t a good tile next to the one you want on the board.
Generally, most turns involve picking a low-value tile to place on a plain spot on your board. Then, you take a higher-value tile for free and place it on an architect to score points. This seemed like a bit of a trick in our first game, but this clear strategy seems to be what every new player figures out, so it appears to be a planned part of the game, not a mistake.
The main way players interact in the game is by competing indirectly for stacks of cards and for picking up tiles from the board. Other than that, you’re placing tiles on your own planet board, and once they’re there, no one else can change them.
The game pieces all work well. It was a bit confusing at first to realize that the grey cards were the wild cards. We didn’t find this information easily in the rules, and usually, cards of all colors aren’t a dull grey color. Also, the single scoring board would have been much better if it had been turned into four player aids. The important scoring charts are hard to see from across the table. Having easy access to this information would be very helpful for players to figure out their options and to remember how the special tiles score points.
Lords of Worlds is basically an abstract game, and I do enjoy the challenge in the strategic version. You get to plan out your strategy throughout the game. You know from the start which colors and numbers are available on the board, although there are still plenty of chances for surprises to appear in the tile market. The amount of luck involved in discovering tiles in the basic version sounds very unappealing to me, and I probably won’t try it. This is the downside of having multiple games in the rulebook – I might choose a different version to play than you, and we might both like the game but not actually be playing the same game.
