Familiar with games like The Quiet Year? This is in the same broad genre, starting with an empty map and cards (or dice) to help your group fill it out with events and discoveries. Unlike Quiet Year, it's got more direction and structure to things, suitable to its tightened focus on a more specific setting. The map is broken up into a giant hex grid and your group is represented by a ship you collectively move around the hex map. Each hex's border is marked with a color and symbol to denote what kind of thing you find when you enter the hex, which you pick randomly from a set of cards for each type of thing. (Conveniently, each list has a number of entries equal to common gaming dice so you can just roll if you don't want to print the cards or are gaming online.) A couple hexes will also be marked as Curios, which are essentially bigger, more important versions of a regular discovery, and are meant to be permission to go wild with establishing a major setting element or conflict. They also help prevent the game from turning into systematically sweeping the map to steadily fill in hexes, as they have timers that tick down as the turns pass, and you can miss the Curios permanently.

On top of that, there's a minor element of competition as each player also draws from a Secret Identity deck at the start of the game and gets a distinct goal to push how they play. Some goals are directly at odds with each other, and the Saboteur is at odds with more than half of the rest since you want to keep the ship from getting home and several other goals require it. This is largely to help flavor the kinds of things players will want to do with their events and discoveries - there's a scoring rule, but it's entirely optional. The game also has an eye toward a finished map's potential uses as a setting for other games, so whether various goals were hit or not are more about what these successes or failures mean to the ongoing setting. Did the Entrepreneur successfully get away with some alien tech discovered from the Odder Reaches? Then maybe your characters in a Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader RPG campaign have a special xenotech weapon on their ship and are back for more. Did the Saboteur succeed in keeping the ship from going home? Then your Star Trek Adventures crew has a mystery to investigate and possibly survivors to rescue from the earlier expedition.

Overall, it's general and adaptable across the gamut of popular space sci-fi settings, with the text encouraging you to lean into gonzo space opera but the cards themselves allowing you to rein it in if your group is going for something a bit more serious. Players are given agendas both implicit and explicit to help inspire them and keep it from being a stale fill-in-the-blanks exercise. The layout is clean and direct, easy to read, with any important words both color-coded and IN ALL CAPS to help skimming around for specific information. I'm not color-blind but it does seem to also have good measures to help with those who are, as the types of cards are marked by both colors and symbols - Meeting cards being blue and marked with squares, red Anomaly cards marked with stars, and the like. The map itself seems like the biggest possible inconvenience to play, as the game is eager to not require you to print stuff even if you're playing in person - except the map, which you will obviously need some way for everyone to see and draw upon. And when that's the worst problem to prod at, then I think this game is doing pretty dang okay.

I don't get to run or play much these days, but Spellbound Kingdoms is one of those fun, exciting, yet familiar systems that makes me want to badger my friends into playing. I've read it multiple times and each time I come up with new ideas as to how to use its systems and setting. A campaign against one of the monstrous kings of the Kingdoms almost writes itself, while the various player options let a party tackle the idea in so many ways that it doesn't feel like it'd ever grow stale. Want to be the tiny band of outlaws striking down the corrupt king in his throne room? Do it. Leaders of a mystical order of revolutionaries out to change the world in the name of their prophesied savior? Go for it. Powerful lords, generals, and high priests starting a civil war to claim it all for themselves? Heck yes. Mad inventors ready to blow up the realm if you can't have it? Please, let me run this game for you.

This book is one of the more imaginative takes on the whole... vaguely medieval European, dark lords and adventurers, fighters and wizards Thing that I've seen. So low a bar to clear that someone buried it six feet under, yeah? SK pole-vaults over that bar as the creator, Frank Brunner, was clearly having a ridiculous amount of fun writing the game and wants everyone to have at least as much fun playing (and even running!) it. Plus, Brunner's mechanics are just plain clever. My biggest issue is that the book could have used another editing pass to clarify a few spots, but as a rule the game is very straightforward with plenty of wiggle room for exciting nonsense.

The core resolution mechanic comes down to rolling a (small) dice pool to look for successes, though the dice can vary in size across the pool. It's not all d6s or d10s. They can also explode up to a higher die type (d6 to d8), or be reduced to a lower one by confounding factors (d6 to d4). It's hardly a new way to handle dice in a game, but Brunner sticks with it clean through the system rather than indulge in a bunch of unique subsystems. It makes it simple to tie all the different game elements together as it covers social combat, running organizations, waging war, waging shadow wars, chase scenes, and more. You could, say, roll the Force score of your organization to try to intimidate someone if you don't have a relevant skill ("You know who I work for, right?"), or divert some military forces to a raid against your foe in a shadow war ("Whoops, someone must have told the watch about your smuggling operation. Oh dear, who could it be."), or run one PC's chase scene clear through another PC's social scene to create a distraction for a third PC to take advantage of to steal something. And it's all just, "Okay, roll this stat. That skill? Sure, go ahead. Yeah, the distraction lets you use that other skill as well. Target number of 4." It's clean and direct.

This isn't even getting into the more "narrative" style rules the game runs with, as things like Inspirations and Mood are important to every character. These aren't just vague motivational statements that occasionally provide a bonus point, these are central mechanics to each character with meaningful scores and that can be attacked. Your Mood is important to keep up as it is a health bar that can be attacked socially or soak physical damage for you as your heroic spirit keeps you going, or spent to improve your rolls. Yes, this means you can insult-swordfight your way through a fight.

As for Inspirations, well, let me quote The Princess Bride: "Even death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while." These are actual game mechanics.

I could go on. And on. And on. I already have a fair bit, though. So, to summarize... I've read this game clean through twice and am considering a third read just for the fun of it, and to see what other new ideas start bouncing around in my head.