The Mountain King's Lair

Publisher: Iello

Version french

Troll, you've heard the call of the mountain! It's time to find our way home. Let's get our clans together! Let's dig up the rubble left behind by those accursed gnomes, search the great halls, find the statues of our ancestors and revive our Kingdom!

With The Mountain King's Lair, discover an innovative and highly anticipated strategy game based on a cascading production system. Unearth riches, dig tunnels, and set up grand halls by elevating the toppled statues of your ancestors to their places of honor.

A Mountain for Five Kings

All players play on the same board, but each player starts with a different tunnel, allowing them to start their exploration of the mountain following their own strategy. Tunnel networks allow you to reach resources and then spend them to reach even more interesting areas, create workshops to transform them, but also (and most importantly!) find the statues of your ancestors and transport them by cart to the sacred halls.

The Mountain King's Lair seduces in particular by its original game mechanics and its very marked interaction between players. Always indirect, it is nonetheless central to the gameplay: players must be the first to reach the most coveted areas and the best way to do this is to slow down the progress of opponents. If the Trolls start the game in separate tunnels, they inevitably move to a common area, a source of high voltage. It should be noted that players also share the same spells and recruit their trolls from the same pool of cards, for even more interactions.

A resolutely expert game

With The King's Lair Under the Mountain, make no mistake, you're immersed in an Expert game. As soon as it opens, a plethora of materials awaits you: wooden cubes, carts, tiles, gems, coins... And if the game is generous in its material, it's to better serve its original, ambitious and at least equally generous gameplay. Tile-laying, resource management, cascading production, anticipation, running, and blocking are all aspects that make The Mountain King's Lair an incredibly rich game. Players will be able to experiment with many strategies while exploring the mountain in order to reach the ultimate step to the throne of the Kingdom!

Finally, it should be noted that the cascading resource production system, a real playful innovation, gives the game a very particular rhythm. The game starts with rounds of development and observation, before providing a real feeling of ramping up with ever more complete, devious and rewarding rounds of play for players as the game progresses.

Two extensions included

The icing on the cake is that this edition directly includes 2 expansions in addition to the base game. The first, "Champions", will allow each player to play as a Troll Leader with their own abilities in order to bring more asymmetry to the game. The second, "The Cursed Mountain", is a module that allows you to play the game solo or with up to 5 players, in 100% cooperative!