The Rose King

About this board game

The Rose King is a two-player abstract board game with a play time of about 30 minutes, built around movement, territory, and tactical marker placement on a square grid.

A single pawn travels across the board while each player holds a face-up hand of cards. Every card shows a direction and a distance, creating the options for each turn. A player may either draw a card and add it to their hand or play a card to move the pawn the indicated distance to an empty square, then place one of their markers there.

The board’s markers form the heart of the game. Players score points for each contiguous region of their markers, with the score for a region equal to the square of its size. This makes connected territory especially valuable, while the limited judge symbols provide a way to disrupt an opponent’s position.

• Move a single pawn using cards that show direction and distance.
• Place markers on the squares reached by played cards.
• Use each judge symbol only once to move onto a previously placed opposing marker and reverse it.
• Score contiguous regions according to the square of their number of markers.

Hand management adds pressure: each player may hold only a maximum number of cards, so failing to plan carefully can force an unwanted move. The Rose King also includes rules for four players in two partnerships of two.

Originally published as Texas by db-Spiele, the game was republished in 1999 as Rosenkönig by Kosmos. That edition changed the setting from Texas to England and rethemed the factions as Lancaster and York from the Wars of the Roses, while retaining the abstract structure. It was published as part of Kosmos’s two-player game series.