How to Play Kingdomino

Kingdomino is the game you can open, learn, and finish before the pizza arrives. It won the Spiel des Jahres, Germany’s best-known game award, in 2017, and it earned it by being simple to learn with real choices in every round.

You are a ruler building a kingdom out of land. Each domino has two squares of terrain. You connect them into a 5 by 5 grid around your castle, grouping matching land into territories. Crowns printed on some squares make those territories score. The twist is how you get your dominoes: everyone drafts from the same line, and the order you pick in depends on what you picked before.

This lesson follows the original Blue Orange rulebook (2016) and notes where the 2024 edition differs.

Prefer to watch first? Watch It Played teaches the rules on video in its Kingdomino How To Play video. Watch it, then come back here for the rules in writing and the rest of the course.

What is in the box?

• 48 dominoes. Each has a number from 1 to 48 on the back and two squares of terrain on the front.
• 4 starting tiles, one single square each.
• 4 castles, one per color. Assemble them before your first game.
• 8 kings, two in each of four colors.

There are six terrains. Most players call them wheat fields, forests, lakes, grasslands, swamps, and mines, and so does this course. The flavor text in some printings of the rulebook uses other names, so do not worry if yours reads differently. The art is what matters.

How do you set up?

1. Each player takes their pieces: a starting tile, the castle in their color on top of it, and their king. In a two-player game, each player takes two kings.
2. Shuffle the dominoes and stack them in the box, number side up, as the draw pile. Two players use 24 dominoes chosen at random, three players use 36, four players use all 48. Put the rest back unseen.
3. Lay out the first line. Take one domino per king in play (four in a two-player or four-player game, three in a three-player game). Line them up by number, lowest next to the box, then flip them face up.
4. Place the kings. One player takes all the kings in hand, mixes them, and draws them one at a time. Whoever owns the drawn king places it on any free domino in the line. The last king gets whatever is left.
5. Lay out the next line the same way, beside the first: numbers sorted, lowest by the box, then flipped.

How does a turn work?

Play goes down the first line, starting with the king on the lowest-numbered domino. When your king comes up, do two things, in order:

1. Place your domino. Take the domino under your king and add it to your kingdom.
2. Choose your next domino. Move your king to any free domino in the new line.

Then the next king down the line does the same. When every king has moved, the old line is empty. Lay out a fresh line beside the new one, and play the next round.

That is the whole engine. The domino you just chose is the one you will place next round, and its position in the line sets your place in the turn order.

In a two-player game, each player does both steps twice per round, once for each of their kings.

The connection rule

A new domino must touch your kingdom in one of two ways:

• Next to your starting tile. Your castle’s square is wild, so any terrain may touch it.
• Next to a matching terrain. At least one square of the new domino must sit beside a square of the same terrain already in your kingdom.

Touching means side to side, never corner to corner. Only one end of the domino needs to match. The other end can sit beside anything.

There is one more limit: your whole kingdom, castle included, must fit inside a 5 by 5 grid. Your castle does not have to be in the middle. You can grow in any direction, as long as the finished shape fits in 5 by 5.

If you cannot place your domino legally, you discard it and score nothing for it. If you can place it, you must, even if it spoils your plan.

How does the game end?

With four players, all 48 dominoes come out over 12 rounds. When the last line is laid out, players still pick from it as usual. Then everyone takes one final turn, placing that last domino without choosing a new one. Three-player and two-player games also run 12 and 6 rounds.

How do you score?

A territory is a group of squares of the same terrain connected side to side. Count each one:

• Squares times crowns. A forest of 6 squares with 2 crowns in it scores 12.
• No crowns, no points. A huge lake with no crown scores 0.
• Same terrain, separate groups. Two forests that do not touch are two territories, scored separately.

Add up every territory. Most points wins. If players tie, the player with the biggest single territory wins. If that is tied, the player with the most crowns wins. If it is still tied, the players share the victory.

The rulebook also offers two bonuses you can add from your first game: Middle Kingdom (10 points if your castle ends in the center of your 5 by 5) and Harmony (5 points for a complete 5 by 5 with no discards). Lesson 7 shows how to plan for them, and lesson 12 covers the other variants.

Where the 2024 edition differs

The 2024 Blue Orange Edition rulebook keeps the game the same with two changes. Three players lay out four dominoes a round and discard the one nobody took, so all 48 come out. And its two-player rule is the 7 by 7 Mighty Duel, which lesson 11 covers.

That is everything you need for game one. If Kingdomino is your family’s first step into modern board games, our list of the easiest board games to learn has good company for it.