Another smash-hit boardgame goes digital: Kingdomino is coming to Steam

The family-friendly tile-placement game Kingdomino is coming soon to Steam, after a mobile release earlier this year. Soon you'll be able to strategically assemble dominoes into your own fiefdom and compete against friends online. (Or, of course, you can play solo against bots.) This award-winning game is simple enough that almost anyone can have fun with it, but packs some pretty competitive tile-drafting depth for groups who like to dig into strategy.

Kingdomino was a big hit in the tabletop world: it won the prestigious Spiel des Jahres, one of the biggest prizes in that world, which tends to favor games playable with family groups that aren't overly complex but still have some new and interesting stuff going on. I've played a whole lot of the physical version, because the game really does hit that mark well, being a quick and fun option when you're hosting a group of people that perhaps aren't as deep into the thinky games hobby as you are.

The basic concept is that you're assembling a kingdom around your starting castle tile using dominoes that are each made of two connected terrain tiles: a forest attached to a field, etc. You want to place them so that big groups of connected territory can score you lots of points, but there are two things getting in your way: firstly, the selection of tiles that come up will inevitably not be ideal for your in-progress arrangement, and second, everyone else is drafting from the same set of dominoes, potentially even snagging the ones that would really tie your landscape together.

The shiny coat of paint on this new digital version signals pretty obviously that the game was first developed as a mobile offering and is now being ported over to PC — daily quests and currencies and cosmetic unlocks are present in the Steam demo that I tried out for one game session.

But I also found a lot to like about this treatment: they've gone above and beyond adding little 3D details and buildings and animated figures to the various tile types, like farmers harvesting in the wheat fields and little dockhouses in the lakes. The game is very cute, and collecting castles and player pawns with unique aesthetics to make your kingdom feel personalized sounds like some harmless fun.

There's a mode called "Lost Kingdom" that's new to the digital version, and seems to just be a single-player area where you'll make custom dominoes out of questing currencies and slowly reveal a shrouded landscape... which I believe will reveal some of these aforementioned cosmetic rewards. The game also features a whole list of achievements you can earn over the course of many games.

Kingdomino currently has a Steam launch date of November 20th, but you can wishlist or play the free demo now. The demo doesn't include online play, but does allow you to play 2 full games in whatever other mode you'd like.