Kingdomino: The Board Game review - "Perfectly captures the board game!"

• The board game Kingdomino is now on mobile
• Play against bots or other players
• Unlock an unknown kingdom

Kingdomino, the real-life board game, holds a happy place in my heart. This was a board game we took with us on holiday one year, back before we had teenagers but when we had some tweens that were a little more challenging to get to spend time together.

All of us, for some reason, enjoyed Kingdomino. We played it in the mornings and evenings several times, and the game came home with us, sitting on our bookshelf. 

Though mobile adaptations often do not have the same feel of a family sitting around a table enjoying their holiday, I do like seeing how similar they are to the board game version. Kingdomino: The Board Game has four different gameplay modes for the original: Single Player (against bots), Pass and Play, Online Public and Online Private. There are some options to play with your family without lugging around the physical board.

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Playing these sorts of modes, which I primarily played against bots (where you could choose their level), felt a lot like the physical board game.

Everything works the same; you get a sort of outline board with a home base in the middle. You and the other players pick tiles, and depending on the tile's worth, get to play them in specific orders. Your goal is to create biomes that have multipliers on them to get the most points, with bonuses for having a perfectly square island in the end, for example. 

It's far easier to keep track of points in Kingdomino on mobile, as your points are just listed at the top of the screen under your character, updating after each move, so you can see if you are really far behind or not. At the end of the game, you can view the other islands created, and sometimes get fragment shards for another section of the game.

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The fragments can be used to unlock the fog-covered Lost Kingdom, which needs Magic Dominos, unlocking different rewards. These seem to be items that change the look of the game: texture packs for tiles and avatar pictures.

There are also daily, weekly and all-time leaderboards that can rank you all over the world. If you are a fan of achievements, you can work on them and claim rewards as you go, which gives you more shards for the Lost Kingdom. I have unlocked a few things like Frog and Medieval, but do struggle to see where these unlocks go. 

If you do really like the idea of having different art, there is a shop with one-off purchases that lets you change the entire theme back to classic (like the board game) or grab castles that come with different themes and colours to choose from. These customisations are quite fun and add a good way to spend money without it really changing the gameplay itself.