Finished a campaign of King's Dilemma, and what a great legacy board game it was!
The game is fairly basic on the surface: your group plays a council of nobles advising the King, and each round you deliberate over an event and vote. Each outcome will move some resources up or down on a track (with each player aiming to finish the game with resources in specific locations), and may add short-term or permanent changes to the gameplay mechanics.
What started innocently enough -- free the chained lady, investigate some clues, join forces with another nation -- quickly devolved into making horribly corrupt and morally reprehensible decisions to further our houses.
The council has voted AYE to sacrificing several prisoners to be melted alive in experiments to alchemically create gold.
It was remarkable how truly awful we became to move a couple resources up or down while vying for first place each game.
There's definitely weak points, but they're not big enough to ruin the experience:
- some entire games had nothing interesting happen in the story
- some players didn't always pay enough attention to the story to know what was going on (it's very wordy!)
- setup got a little complicated / annoying by the end with so many things to remember to do. A checklist would have been useful in hindsignt
- I wasn't a fan of the ending sequence process. It was novel, but didn't have as much punch as it could have
I really enjoyed playing it through to the end. While I don't think I'd ever play a second campaign, the game will definitely sit in my top boardgames list for a long time.