Advert: This game was loaned by Red Cannon Games via the UK Board Game Review Circle. All opinions are ours and our reviews are always honest.

The Krazy King is on his deathbed, surrounded by his many children. With a wheeze, he decrees that rather than choose a favourite heir he’ll cast his crown and fortune into the sea, but if he had only one child they would get everything. And so begins a treacherous game of thievery and assassination amongst the royal siblings, all fighting it out to be the surviving heir to the throne. Sound familiar?

👥 2 to 4 players
⌛ 10 to 30 minutes
🧠 8 years+

Gameplay overview:

To win Fight for Inheritance, you have one goal: be the last Royal standing! There’s one main deck in the game, the Action Deck, and hidden within the stack are deadly assassins ready to take you out.

Each player starts with 7 action cards, 2 bodyguards cards and a Royal Character card that has its own special power (called Royal Decree). On your turn you can do any or all of these actions, in any order:

• Use your Royal Decree (this can only be used once per game).

• Play as many action cards as you like – action cards do a wide range of things, like stealing cards from other players, peeking at the top cards of the deck (to check for assassins!), and gaining extra gold.

• Spend gold – these are a specific type of action card that you can pay into a central treasury to buy more bodyguards, bribe another player’s bodyguard to work for you, or ‘make an excuse’ to end your turn without drawing a card.

At the end of your turn, you have to draw a card from the top of the action deck unless you’ve paid gold to make an excuse, or played an action card to avoid it. 

Uh oh, did you draw an assassination attempt? It’s a good job you have a bodyguard! Discard the bodyguard and place the assassination attempt back into the action deck wherever you like.

Out of bodyguards? Then you’re out of luck, and join the ranks of the perished Royal Siblings.

If you manage to dodge the assassination attempts and become the last player standing, congratulations! You won your Father’s approval and inherit his Krazy Krown. It’s just a shame there’s no one left alive to celebrate with you.

Our first impressions:

• The theme set-up gave me instant Stardust vibes (one of my favourite films – and the reference at the start of this post!), so the concept was an instant hit for me! And while I personally wasn’t drawn in by the art work initially, the gameplay won me over. 

• Similar to other card games like Exploding Kittens, Fight for Inheritance has light bluffing and silliness trying to get other players to draw the assassination attempts before you do. But it also has a few interesting additions that make it stand apart from similar card games, particularly the ability to spend coins for extra mitigating actions like getting more bodyguards or ending your turn without drawing. You also start the game with the variable Royal powers (although I’d say some are more impactful than others).

• We’ve only played Fight for Inheritance at 2 players (which is why it’s First Impressions!). We thought it worked well – mostly – and we had a great laugh playing it. And it’s really straightforward to set the deck up for 2 players because the cards you need to remove are clearly marked.

• There’s an action card called Secret Bribe that you have to hide face up on the table for 3 turns to be able to activate the effect (it can be hidden under something). We liked the silly fun of this challenge – but it’s quite hard to track the turns and does rely on honesty. We also think this is one aspect that works better with more players, because in a 2 player game you’re focusing on each other much more and it’s harder to be sneaky!

Fight for Inheritance has a few additions that make it stand apart from similar card games, particularly the ability to spend coins for extra mitigating actions like getting more bodyguards or ending your turn without drawing.

• The standard 2-player set-up uses 1 assination card in the (quite large) action deck. This sometimes made the game feel a bit slow because there’s a chance that the assassination card doesn’t show up until you get towards the end of the deck. We used the 3player set-up instead (2 assassins in each half of the deck), which we felt worked better.

Final thoughts:

If you like Exploding Kittens or similar cheeky games where you’re trying to eliminate your friends and family, then you should check out Fight for Inheritance. It’s a quick, fun game with a super simple set-up that will get a lot of laughs around the game table. A regular gamer will be familiar with the basic mechanics (eg. Action cards) but combining them with the coin mitigation feels like a fresh take on this style of card game. 

Red Cannon Games will be demoing Fight for Inheritance at UKGE next month so do be sure to pay them a visit at stand 2-248.