Designed by Marc Andre.

In Majesty: For the Realm, you are assembling a medieval village, drafting millers, witches, noblemen, soldiers in the like. Each character you draft will grant you some number of victory points based on your tableau, and some will have other effects as well (such as killing people in other people’s villages). Final scoring is based on set collection – who has the most of each kind of hero, and how many different kinds of heroes you’ve collected.

Majesty is short game by the designer of Splendor (a reasonably good game that doesn’t make this list), and is a solid game with good components that is great filler in between bigger fare.

Key Mechanic: Spending to Dig. Acquiring citizens is simple – players choose from a tableau of six cards. The card on the end is free to draft, but the next one costs one meeple – placed on the card. If you want the sixth card, you will need to place all five meeples to get it. Players who draft one of the other cares in the future also claim all the meeples on it.

Players start with, and can never have, more than five meeples, meaning that if you dig for a card, you’re limiting your options in the following turns pretty sharply. This sort of mechanic is fairly common as a minor mechanic in many other games, but works well as the central driving engine of Majesty.

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(Photo Credit: Z-Man Games)