Kinfire Council hands-on preview – hidden cultists and Starless Nights

By James van Tonningen

Posted on April 29, 2024

Being a leader isn’t easy. Being a leader of the refugee city Din’Lux during an apocalypse is much worse. Since the Starless Nights returned with their transfiguring rains of darkness, Din’Lux is the last known safe haven in the world. As a counselor of the city, do you attempt to counteract a law another is putting forth for their own benefit, or do you have your minions stop a roving cultist that’s about to cause further mischief? Perhaps you should stop that rampaging wyvern before someone gets hurt… on the other hand, couldn’t you just acquire the resources you need for your future plans? Surely someone else will take care of those issues.

That’s the crux of Kinfire Council, an upcoming medium weight worker placement board game for 2-6 players designed by Kevin Wilson and published by Incredible Dream – the third in the Kinfire series of games. In Kinfire Council, each player takes on the role of one of the 6 councilors of Din’Lux, a city packed to capacity with refugees from the world ending Starless Nights. You see, every so often the sky starts to rain black goo that erases or mutates whatever it touches. The only thing that seems to stop it is Kinfire, a magic fire wrought from emotion, and the largest Kinfire lighthouse resides at the peak of the city.

Each councilor takes turns placing their workers to gain resources, trade for more powerful resources, or to take on the myriad challenges facing the city. Each councilor also has a Seeker, which can face threats outside the city, or benefit from prospective Lighthouse locations. To earn points, councilors will need to send materials to build Kinfire Lighthouses in outpost towns, meet City Needs, and take on threats to the city.

You see, the city has a cult problem. The cult in Kinfire Council operates as an extra player that shakes things up each round. The cult also unleashes powerful Threat cards that seek to damage and destroy the Lighthouses the players are building. The more damage they deal to the Lighthouse, the more points they get. If the cult gets the most points, then everyone else loses… unless someone decides to cozy up to the cult.

I am in love with this concept. Most games that have a betrayer or antagonist player assign that player randomly. In Kinfire Council, that’s a choice a player can make naturally, as a means to steal a win from a dominating player. Conspiring with the cult is also pretty lucrative, netting players -and the cult- a decent chunk of victory points if they conspire with them. The cult also has a bundle of points, hidden from all players, sitting like a bomb to be revealed at the end of the game, so it’s hard to say if any player is safe at any point.

As things get dicier in the city, enterprising councilors have a few options for increasing their capabilities. In addition to each councilor’s own unique abilities, their workers can also each be upgraded with abilities, such as ignoring the pesky tax for using the better spaces at the top of the city, being able to both arrest a cultist and use the space the cultist is on, or swapping resources out for powerful research cards. These research cards provide resources, long term benefits, and stop-gap solutions to problems and can be used at any time.

Decree cards also pop up each turn, with 2 by default, but more can be drawn in a single round. Some decrees give one player a permanent bonus, usually at the cost of the city having a new City Need to deal with, while others cause a single, game-shifting event, or create new end game scoring mechanics. Worse, voting on decrees requires your influence, a very limited resource that is also used for building lighthouses and meeting City Needs.

The balance of resources in the prototype version we got to play was already quite good, with scores coming quite close in our test games. We’ve seen come-from-behind cult victories as well as nail bitingly close contests between 2 or 3 players. As is often the case with prototypes, things have already changed pretty drastically from the version we got to play, so I’m eager to see the final form of this beast.

The game is already gorgeous. Incredible Dream often uses bright colors, especially in their Kinfire series, and Kinfire Council is no exception. The characters, which come from a stable of rogues and heroes from their previous games, all have lovely standees, and the map of Din’Lux that the game takes place on is wonderful. Each of the cards and towers also have their characteristic bright art showing various scenes in the city.

Some exciting things that we might be able to look forward to include a multi-tiered board to simulate the geography of the city. In addition, an expansion is planned which will allow laws to be passed that will swap out one city tile for another permanently, creating a legacy-light experience. That same expansion is set to add coop and single player options to the already burgeoning experience of the game.

If this sounds interesting to you, go here to check out the Kickstarter or learn about the deep lore behind the Kinfire series of games, including a Webtoon, galleries of art, and a World-Anvil . We also had a chat about Kinfire Council with Kevin Wilson on our podcast Tabletop Throwdown (publishes on Wednesday May 1st).

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This article is a paid promotion by Incredible Dream for their new crowdfunding campaign: Kinfire Council is a competitive game of strategy and politics for 2-6 players. As a member of the Council, you’ve been charged with rebuilding the great city of Din’Lux and defending it from the dangers of the Starless Nights. You can back the Kickstarter here.

Kinfire Council hands-on preview – hidden cultists and Starless Nights

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