June 29, 2024
The Kingdom of Shem Phillips: Explained
Architects of the West Kingdom, Explorers of the North Sea… sometimes when I’m talking about these games with folks who don’t play games, I feel like it sounds like every game is super generic. Further, when I talk about it with folks who play modern board games, it can feel disorienting. I had one friend say “some day I’m going to have to buckle up and figure out all these games”. Well, today is that day for you, person reading this article.
Shem Phillips is a designer from New Zealand. He’s designed and published a lot of games, and he has an ongoing series of games which all have naming convention of [Vocation] of the [Compass Direction][Geographic Region]. For example: Raiders of the North Sea, Scholars of the South Tigris, or Paladins of the West Kingdom. They all have gorgeous art from The Mico, and Shem actually found him and was the first studio to commission him for board game art, even though now he’s ubiquitous in the games industry.
Each “Region” has three games which makes up a series of games which generally study one design idea. The North Sea tends to be resource management, the West Kingdom deals with vice and virtue, giving you generally new ways of playing depending on how virtuous or not you play, and the South Tigris plays with dice, and often uses dice pools and even dice colors as a means of action selection.
They all have a euroy feel and do some degree of resource management. They tend to be on the heavier end of the medium weight and complexity spectrum — especially the later and later you go — the first ones in the North Sea are medium. At the same time, the stuff by the time you hit the South Tigris are much more complex and can take a couple plays to really dial in how all of the internal systems function.
Two final notes: so far both the North Sea and West Kingdom also have a campaign expansion where you and up to three others can play a series of games as campaign. Its fun and includes promo cards for each game.
Also, Shipwrights of the North Sea, Shem’s first game, was considered generally by the commenariat generally “okay”, so recently he re-released it as Shipwrights of the North Sea Redux, a shorter drafting game. Its great. Its not a second edition, its just a replacement of the original.
I’ll end with short descriptions of each one in order of release, really enjoy each of them, most have expansions and I have enjoyed how each modify the original game.
Shipwrights of the North Sea Redux (2024): Card drafting, resource management, boat building, shortest play time.
Raiders of the North Sea (2015): Build teams of raiders, go on raiding adventures. Won 2017 Kennerspiel des Jahres, not only worker placement, but picking up workers produces actions and matters which one you pick up.
Explorers of the North Sea (2016): Tile exploration and resource delivery.
Architects of the West Kingdom (2018): Worker placement which gather more resources the more workers placed, build buildings or help build the Cathedral to score points.
Paladins of the West Kingdom (2019): Build defenses against invaders, by navigating interlocking systems and virtues.
Viscounts of the West Kingdom (2020): Hand management with a quasi-Trajan style action selection system (with less brain burn) as your Viscount roams the countryside.
Wayfarers of the South Tigris (2022): Race to the finish while building a tableau of the scenes and astronomy of ancient Baghdad.
Scholars of the South Tigris (2023): Hire translators, translators documents, gain knowledge. Dice pool building where color and number matter.
Inventors of the South Tigris (2024): Coming soon!
Final Region: TBA!
