The cold winter nights are closing in, and the New Year is drawing near. For many, the wintering season is often a time of reflection. Me specifically? I’m reflecting on the best board games I played this year. There have been many wonderful tabletop titles in 2026, but so far, one among them stands king – or, should I say, queen?
The Queen’s Dilemma, a standalone sequel to The King’s Dilemma, is a legacy-style narrative game of political negotiation. The monarch ruling your realm has gone away to war, leaving six council members to steward the land on her behalf. You play one of these councilors, each with their own core ideology, regions to rule, and hidden agendas.
Your aims and ideals clash badly with your fellow council members’. Still, you must work together for the good of the kingdom, even if you are mainly interested in your own success. This is a competitive campaign, where the winner is whoever has the most Hegemony or Independence points by the end. To get these, though, requires more than a little cooperation.
Each turn, a Dilemma card is drawn from the deck. The flavor text describes a threat the kingdom faces. Perhaps the court cannot agree on a new national anthem, or maybe you need to decide whether child soldiers are the best way to expand your army.
Whether trivial or trying, the Dilemma will shift markers on the Ideology board. On it, six ideologies struggle against their opposite. Depending on the choices your council makes, the kingdom might favor Tradition over Progress, Diplomacy versus Force, or Liberty over Order. Or vice versa. Or somewhere in the murky middle?
Each councilor has two preferred Ideologies. Plus, at the start of each game, they’ll draw an Ideology card that shows which specific mix of leading Ideologies will score them Hegemony points at session-end.
It’s not always clear which way a Dilemma will push the tracks. Some scenarios offer uncertain outcomes for an Ideology, and you’ll have to use the narrative’s context clues to suss out which outcome you want: yay or nay. But you’re not the only one that gets a say.
Dilemmas are decided by a voting system, in which you spend Power tokens to show your support for one side of the debate. Whoever currently holds the Leadership token begins the process, and when the turn to vote returns to the Leader, the outcome is decided.
Except it’s not that simple. Leadership changes hands whenever someone new adds the most Power tokens to their voting board. There are several benefits to being Leader, one of them being the power to drag out a vote until it swings in your favor.
Another way to tip the scales is bargaining. Each councilor collects resources (money, food, or wood) from their ruled regions at the game’s start, and they might acquire more as play goes on. These are valuable tokens, spent to complete agendas, construct buildings on the map, or pay end-game taxes. You can also trade them for favors from fellow players. And, once they’ve accepted your bribe, the deal is binding.
Bargaining is a thrill in The Queen’s Dilemma. Firstly, because it’s very funny to beef with your buddies. Secondly, because there’s some serious emergent roleplay to dive into. The opposing goals of each councillor immediately add dramatic tension, and as the votes go on, you’ll develop shared histories with each of your peers. Private long-term goals and resource management add even more to consider. Each decision is so rich and thematic, and the game achieves this monumental atmosphere by simply letting the players talk.
Perhaps you’re the face of Liberty who loathes the stuffy lord of Order, but your goals actually align for once. Or maybe you just want them to believe that. Perhaps you’ll let them buy your friendship to gain a precious resource for your next agenda. Or you’re so desperate to move the Ideology track that you’ll throw any resource at the council to get your way. Heck, maybe you hardly care about this vote, but you want to hold onto Leadership for future chances to score points.
If you don’t care to throw your Power tokens at a problem, you can pass and gain a one-off bonus (more Power, the tie-breaking Moderator token, or one-off abilities). Once all squabbling, wheeler-dealering, and voting is done, you flip your Dilemma card to learn the consequences of your vote.
The Ideology track moves, new cards are added to the Dilemma deck, and extra rules are revealed. Specific players may be rewarded or punished more than others, depending on the card’s keywords and who has the Leadership token. Points and resources go up and down in response.
The beauty of this game is how it balances short and long-term problem-solving. It’s tempting to charge head-first at those end-game Hegemony points, throwing all you have at your intended Ideologies. But Hegemony might not decide the campaign. Independence points, earned through agendas and Dilemma resolution, might be deemed more important. It all depends on the kingdom’s stability.
A session ends after, at most, nine Dilemmas. A campaign ends when you conclude the game’s seven storylines. Some outcomes offer Scale icons, representing stability. Gather enough, and the highest Hegemony score (minus Infamy points you picked up by making poor choices) wins. Gather too few, and the highest Independence score wins.
The Queen’s Dilemma does a fantastic (and pretty cynical) job of capturing the people behind politics. These councilors have beliefs that drive their decision-making, but the decrees passed are influenced just as often by selfish, short-term wants. A desire to improve your social standing, honor your family legacy, or spite a political rival.
Give in to these short-term whims too often, and you lose sight of what keeps a kingdom happy, healthy, and safe. Don’t indulge them enough, and you’ll find yourself dragged along by the tide, losing control of the kingdom whose ideology you want to shape.
It’s a wonderfully executed marriage of narrative and mechanics. I haven’t finished all seven storylines yet (though, if I had, I wouldn’t spoil them), but those I’ve seen so far are stupendous. They lean well into the levity of arguing with your friends, then they’ll sneak in an emotional gut-punch when you’ve gotten too comfortable, showing just how grim the results of your choices can be. Sometimes harrowing, sometimes hilarious, it’s a harsh world that you’re tasked with ruling.
I only have one real complaint, and it’s the components. Offender number one is the paper map. The main area of this tracks who controls what region and how many Power tokens are up for grabs when you pass. Around the edges are spaces to track how many Dilemmas have been resolved, storylines, and any special Chronicle cards in play. It’s a little larger than it needs to be, given how little you interact with the space. Worse, though, is how easy it is for the paper to slide all over the place.
Additionally, it would have been nice for publisher Horrible Guild to provide a way to separate and store components. The game includes many, many, many tokens, and with no real way to organize them, things can get messy quickly. Each individual councillor gets a lovely box to keep important cards and tokens in (plus a booklet that tracks their own ongoing story), but that same production value is not consistent across the whole product.
Still, if you can look past appearances, you’ll find a lot to love. Fans of the original King’s Dilemma will find a more brutal resource management system. Personally, I think this creates more impactful, intense, and ultimately meaningful storytelling. I won’t put a numbered score on this review until I’ve completed the campaign, but at this mid-way stage, I can see The Queen’s Dilemma cruising for a nine or 10. It’s an easy addition to Wargamer’s best board games of 2026 list.
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A review copy of this game was provided by the publisher.
Source: Wargamer
