Brave heroes — knights — each looking to find their way through a large tower. Knuckling Knights is a two to four player game aimed at children, age four and up, where you must simply roll a dice, put your knights in the tower and hope to have enough knights to earn a coin!
The gameplay in Knuckling Knights is simple, as games designed with children in mind should be. What really impressed me, though, was the box. You are able to create a tower out of the box itself, slotting together the tower and laying out a tile to represent the castle grounds – complete with a dungeon in the recess of the box. Setup is extremely easy and the design is very clever. The floor tile that sits at the bottom of the tower is curved slightly, which really makes a difference when it comes to the gameplay — but we will get to that in a moment. The tower itself has an open-top, where players need to place their knights, as well as a door that can be removed if the dice lands on the appropriate side.
When it’s your turn you must roll the dice. It’s likely you’ll roll a two (or a one, if you are lucky) and that means that you must put that number of your knight tokens on the top of the tower. If you do manage to roll a door then madness begins. The door icon in Knuckling Knights means that the “door” slot on the tower needs to be pulled out, causing all of the knights inside the tower to tumble out. Remember that flooring that I mentioned earlier? It’s slightly curved, with a bunch of different holes in it, designed to take the knights out of the game. If any knights do survive their collision with the floor then the player who rolled the door is able to pick up one knight of each color before the rest are returned to whoever’s color they are. This is the best way to stay in the game, which is ultimately the aim.
If you roll the dice and there are no knights in the tower — and you realize that before you pull the door — you can chant a line about your knights coming back, which allows you to collect one of your knights from another player.
Your ultimate goal is to have the most knights when a single player has run out of knights to send into the castle. At that point, the player with the most knights wins a gold coin — the first to two being the winner — although we did play to three. I found the design of Knuckling Knights to be genius — such a simple idea, but done in a very exciting way. Children get really, really pumped whenever the door needs to be pulled, hoping their knights make it to the grounds and not into traps. It’s a really fun time for the whole family, but can also just be given to the younger members to play on their own.
You can find Knuckling Knights on Amazon.
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