Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Kingdom Crossing is the latest adventure from the folks at Sorry We Are French, still my pick for the best publisher name in tabletop and a team that also knows a thing or two about great games. Their last few titles have all been bangers: the IKI update/reprint, Galileo Project, Zhanguo: The First Empire, the In the Footsteps of… series, and the 2024 release Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon.
During my meeting with the SWAF team at SPIEL Essen 2025, I picked up a copy of Kingdom Crossing and was surprised to find a cover with art that made the game look cute and cuddly. The game is cute, but it is not cuddly. I noticed the names of the game’s authors on the cover: Marco Canetta and Stefania Niccolini, the same designers who brought both the original Zhanguo as well as the new SWAF edition to life.
Zhanguo: The First Empire is a very heavy strategy game, so I assumed that Kingdom Crossing was going to be a game with longer downtime and thinky turns.
Nope!
Seven Bridges Ain’t Gonna Be Enough
Kingdom Crossing is a set collection game with action tiles and the normal pool of Euro-game requirements—tracks, public milestones, individual scoring tiles, etc.—for 1-4 players. My plays took about 20 minutes per player, so a solo game will easily wrap in under half an hour and even with four players, both the box and my lived experiences lined up to be between 80-90 minutes.
Over the course of four rounds, players will take four turns per round to move their worker pawn around a map with four islands and seven bridges. Every time a player finishes movement, they must select a card from the two or three face-up cards in their current location, a mix of chances to boost their resources, their conditional scoring for cards at the end of the game. Or, players could choose income buildings known as Structures that trigger both when selected as well as at the start of each new round. Each non-Structure card is a member of one of the game’s five suits; collecting suits in pairs allows for additional bonuses during each new round’s income phase.
Movement is dictated by each player’s hand of six action tiles. In each round, four of these six will be played, to either move around the map or to “rest”, which triggers coin income from that tile so that players will have more to spend on future turns. Small paw tokens are left on each bridge as a player moves across each one, with points awarded to players who find a way to move across at least six, and hopefully all seven, bridges in a round.
So turns are breezy: play a tile, move the worker, acquire a card and trigger its immediate bonus. Because it is important to acquire cards in all five suits, hunting for the right cards makes for interesting turns…and with 10 different decks showing different face-up cards, it’s always an interesting adventure to find what you need.
Each card’s subtle differences in bonuses—a nice balance between free cards that earn a player cash, resources that boost one of the four tracks on each player’s mat, and income that can help avoid taking rest actions—made for the kinds of tactical play that I really enjoyed, despite a card market that is changing on every turn.
Kingdom Crossing mixes snappy turns with a mix of in-game and end-game scoring that is very simple to math out. A bit like my love for Galileo Project, Kingdom Crossing efficiently uses its time at the table and comes in a production that is mostly solid. Artwork by SWAF’s excellent in-house illustrator David Sitbon makes the game’s animal characters come to life in fun ways. The worker, house, paw and medallion tokens do the job, while the graphic design makes everything very easy to understand after just a few turns.
Mostly a Winner
Kingdom Crossing’s only physical failing is the included player boards. After just half of my first three-player game, the boards were so warped that I didn’t even have to lift the player boards to slot cards at either end. Mixed with the tiny resource tracker tokens, Kingdom Crossing made me—a spoiled brat now accustomed to the kinds of triple-layered player boards standard in a well-produced Euro from publishers like Mindclash and Eagle-Gryphon—yearn for boards that value the feel of a luxury good.
The game also includes cardboard money tokens that immediately forced me to reach for the poker chips. I don’t blame SWAF for this choice, but know that the “Megacredit” poker chips SWAF included in products like Galileo Project are nowhere to be seen in the Kingdom Crossing box.
As a design, I really enjoyed Kingdom Crossing and I’m impressively shocked that the same people who made Zhanguo made a game so different. Puzzling the movement each turn while also getting the right cards to drive a player’s income engine became a very satisfying decision space right from the jump. With a solo mode that is easy to administer, I thought Kingdom Crossing also wasn’t bad as a solo gaming experience. (Still, I recommend this at its highest player count first, because the card market movement forces harder choices.)
Kingdom Crossing is the kind of game that shows off the range of designers passionate about diversifying their design portfolio. Zhanguo: The First Empire had a lot of highs but it has proven to be a very hard game to table. Canetta and Niccolini’s work here will fit with core gamers, my kids (ages 9 and 11), and casual players looking for an easy-to-teach, non-confrontational race for points.
The only other minor downside for me is replayability. I really enjoyed Kingdom Crossing…and I’m not exactly itching to table it again beyond my review plays. The game hasn’t held the attention of my “game brain” now that I’ve wrapped those plays and I’m not really sure why. Kingdom Crossing never sank its teeth into me the way SWAF games such as Galileo Project and Shackleton Base have. Those latter two titles are never leaving my collection. Multiple friends own IKI and its expansion, IKI: Akebono, and most of us think IKI is fantastic.
Kingdom Crossing is fun, but I think its shelf life is a bit more limited, at least for me and my groups’ collective tastes. But if these are mechanics that get you excited, run out and grab a copy of Kingdom Crossing stat!
