Strategy: Turn-Based Strategy - gamebastion.com

In regular Darkest Dungeon 2, your mind, body and soul are fixed upon the points of a horrible mountain, looming over the inn at the end of every foetid wagon ride. It's sort of Journey for plague doctors, or possibly The Hobbit: Cosmodick Turpin Edition. I enjoy feeling the weight of those distant peaks upon my brain and eyeballs, but it's nice to fire up Kingdoms, the new free DD2 game mode that's launched just today, and have a choice of disasters to trundle toward.

Over here is an inn being overrun by slathering beastmen. Over there is another, safer inn, but it's inconveniently perched behind a nest of tentacular cultists. In the middle there is you, with the customary DD party of half-dead, half-mad adventurers, equipped with an exciting smorgasbord of sharp edges, cursed artefacts, phobias and diseases. Let us proceed laughing and wailing to the launch trailer.

I spent around an hour with Kingdoms today ahead of launch, and while I'm not sure it'll rejuvenate your interest if you're absolutely sick of Darkest Dungeon 2, it feels well-wrought. Briefly, it's a turn-based digital boardgame with a worker placement element, in which you travel back and forth between upgradeable inns to stave off sieges and complete quest objectives in the face of an escalating threat. It begins with a choice of layouts and difficulty settings (see below). Then you compose a starting party at the Crossroads and set off through a relatively laidback borderlands region, as in vanilla Donkey's Dingdong 2.

Having reached and liberated the inn at the end of that trail, you're cut loose upon the full playing board. Pretty much every turn, at least one of the map's inns comes under siege from dark forces (that's the berserking Beastmen at first, with other factions to be unlocked). It'll fall in a handful of turns, depending on how much you've strengthened it using construction resources gathered on the road. You can rumble over to assist the inn, which means surviving any hazards