Ever notice how I miss Friday for news? Monday Taylor spoke about the rogue-like shooter Void Bastards getting a Switch (and PS4) port next month, and Mike wrote about the former Attack Attack! singer coming back to music. Tuesday, I spoke of WWE’s mountain of releases as well as the now confirmed cancellation of WWE 2K21. David also spoke about WoW‘s next expansion release, and Dari spoke of Super Mario Maker 2‘s last major update. Wednesday, Taylor spoke of a possible reveal of an Xbox Series S coming in May, and later I spoke of the announced Peaky Blinders: Mastermind coming later this summer. Finally, on Thursday, Dari spoke about the latest update to Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

Now on to the game (yes singular) being offered this week on the Epic Games Store. In fact, I didn’t need to play much of it this week, as there was something about it that tipped me off early. There’s a phrase around reviewing, something about the first hour or so is your opinion, the rest of the time you’re trying to change that opinion. You can do so by breaking the game, you can play it differently, or you can look for small things that you wouldn’t notice otherwise. Through playing a literal mountain of titles, you see patterns, you can tell where things go, and when something is turn-based I can see a pattern of where it’s about to go. Within minutes I had a comparison made in regards to For The King, medieval D&D.

Previously I’ve shown a slightly sour mood towards turn-based games for being what I’ll term, artificially slow. Of course, in the early tutorial, there is a lot of that throughout as you stop to read phrases that would make a dyslexic curl up in a ball and chew off their arm. None that gets in the way for most people, it’s the D&D portion that is the sticking point. What keeps people around is the digital board game experience that’s become common with games like Antihero: Buccaneers, Bounty & Boom! and all the digital versions of Risk, Monopoly, and otherwise. All of those games tend to have an AI problem, they are all dull and crap.

Before starting a game in For the King, you’ll be greeted by a couple of sliders that dictate how the game is played. You can up the chance of chaos, destroy the economy by giving everyone all the money, or mess with the third option which is your overall health. Only one of them gives a bit of depth to the game, but as chaotic as AI can get in a buggy game like Goat Simulator, a digital board game understands it has to work within some rules. That’s the problem, you can prescribe how disorganized and dysfunctional the AI happens to be, but with a human player there’s not a slider for them; At least not yet anyway.

If you’re playing for fun you really need people to play with, including that one friend that’s stupid enough to poke a bear in the testicles. If you’re playing to win, you’ll love For The King, as you can manage all the factors until you win almost every time.

For The King is a digital board game RPG akin to D&D with several scenarios to play out and a bit of replayability. It is available for free on the Epic Games Store all this week until the morning of the 30th of April. On Thursday, April 30th, it will be replaced by Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and for those who don’t want to be met by Skid McMarx, you’ll want to pick up Crashlands.

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