Fit to Print vs Kingdomino

Fit to Print

Fit to Print is a newspaper game in two halves. In the first, everyone grabs tiles from the middle of the table at the same time, flipping over articles, photographs and adverts and trying to collect a mix that will make a good front page. In the second, everyone lays out their page on their own board, fitting the tiles together like a puzzle, and the scoring rewards a balanced paper: happy and sad stories in proportion, photos next to the right articles, adverts paying the bills. The real-time grab is loud and a little chaotic, and the layout phase is quiet and thoughtful, and the swing between the two is what makes people ask to play again. The illustrations, by the artist behind Everdell, are the kind children pull the box out for on their own. It scales from one to six, and it is one of the few games that is genuinely good at six because the frantic part gets better with a crowd. The rules take ten minutes and a first game thirty. Players who dislike real-time games will not be converted by this one, and the scoring has a few small rules that trip up a first play. For a family or a holiday table that wants something with more decisions than a party game and less weight than a strategy game, it sits in exactly the right place.

Best for: Family with Kids, 3-4 Players, 5+ Players

Kingdomino

Kingdomino takes the dominoes everyone already understands and turns them into a fifteen-minute kingdom builder. Each tile is two squares of terrain (wheat, forest, lake, grassland, swamp, mine), some carrying crowns. Each round a line of four tiles is revealed and players claim them in order of the tile they took last round, so choosing a great tile now means choosing later next time. You add your tile to a five-by-five grid around your castle, matching at least one terrain type to an adjacent square, and at the end each region scores its number of squares multiplied by its crowns.

The cleverness is that the good tiles are usually the ones with crowns, and crowns tend to sit on the tiles everyone wants, so the turn-order mechanism does real work. Do you take the mediocre tile that lets you pick first next round, or the lake with two crowns that sends you to the back of the line? Kids grasp the multiplication scoring by their second game and adults find enough to think about, which is the balance a family game rarely hits.

Best for: Family with Kids, 30 Minutes or Less, Board Games for Beginners