Kingdomino

Today's game review is of the 2016 release, Kingdomino.  For 2-4 players, it takes 20 minutes.

Overview
You are a ruler, anxious to expand your realm.  To do so, you'll add sections to your kingdom each turn.  Each section (a domino) has two types of terrain on it (forest, pasture, wheat field, lake, swamp, mountain), and may have one or more crowns on it, too.  You'll expand your kingdom (not exceeding a 5x5 grid), and earn points at the end of the game based on your crowns and contiguous terrain areas (see below).  Do you have what it takes to produce the most profitable kingdom in the land?

Simplified Gameplay
Kingdomino has 48 dominos, each uniquely numbered on the back.  Each turn, tiles are randomly chosen based on the number of players and placed in a column and sorted in ascending numerical order.

 Example: for a four player game, withdraw 4 dominos.  Their numbers are 32, 17, 25, and 7.  Place them in a column in this order: 7, 17, 25, 32.

Turn the dominos over so their terrain is visible.  Each player selects one domino and places their figure on it (the last player has no choice).  Then choose four more tiles following the same process and place that column next to the existing.  The player with the figure on the first domino of the first column then picks first in the next column of tiles, placing his figure on that tile and placing his original domino in his kingdom (next to his starting kingdom 1x1 square).

Turns proceed in such fashion, with each round being a 'draft' where the player who chose the smallest-numbered domino in the previous round chooses first in the next round.  Dominos are placed in your kingdom with two main rules:
- you must place at least one type of terrain adjacent to a matching one already in your kingdom.
- your overall kingdom cannot exceed a 5x5 grid (one domino is a 2x1 piece)

Once everything is placed, each player scores their kingdom by multiplying the number of crowns they have in a given contiguous terrain area by the number of terrain pieces in that section.  In the below example,
- the forest region equals 11 squares x 3 crowns = 33 points
- the wheat field = 5 squares x 1 crown = 5 points
- the mountain = 3 squares x 5 crowns = 15 points
- the lake = 1 square x 1 crown = 1 point
- the other lake = 2 squares x 0 crowns = 0 points
- the pasture = 2 squares x 1 crown = 2 points

Your total = 56 points.

A completed kingdom.  Image from here

Review
This is a nice little game- simple but fun.  The draft order is cool; generally, the more valuable tiles have higher numbers, so if you pick one of them in a given round, you'll have pick late in the following round.  That influences your choices and is a cool mechanic. The overall play time of 20 minutes is great.  I see why this won the Spiel des Jahres (German game of the year) this year.

Rating: A