In The Hall Of The Mountain King

Play as trolls rebuilding your abandoned kingdom under the mountain in In the Hall of the Mountain King. With muscle and magic you will uncover riches, dig out collapsed tunnels and carve great halls, while raising the toppled statues of your ancestors to their places of honour at the heart of the mountain. Gameplay is driven by the innovative cascading production system. Timing and tactics are key as you work to restore your home to its former splendour and win the crown.

You work on the same game board as the other players (but start at your own entrance) and dig a competing network of tunnels, using ever more valuable materials to lay polyomino tiles on the map. You want to extend your tunnels to connect with buried gold and materials, with workshop sites that can transform resources, and above all with toppled statues. Statues are the key to scoring, and you use carts to move them through the tunnels to the best scoring spots near the heart of the mountain.

An important aspect of the game is the cascading production. You start with a row of four trolls, and each troll shows the combination of resources – gold, stone, iron, marble, carts, runes and hammers – that it produces. When a new troll is hired, it is placed above two other trolls, forming a “pyramid”. The new troll is activated and receives its resources, and any trolls beneath it are ALSO activated and receive all the resources they have room to carry. In this way, as you hire more trolls, you get bigger and bigger windfalls of resources as the end of the game approaches. The timing of your hiring turns versus your building turns matters, as you try to maximise your cascades while making sure you get the trolls you want from the shared market and also stay competitive on the map.

The game ends shortly after the last player hires their sixth troll, after which the player with the most honour (earned for digging tunnels of increasing quality, for excavating great halls and for moving statues closer to the heart of the mountain, especially onto matching pedestals) is crowned the Mountain King and wins.