Barony Board Game Review

It’s been about a decade since Barony first was released, and while the gameplay hasn’t changed all that much, sometimes it’s nice to overall an older title and bring it into the modern age. While the original Barony was perfectly fine – it had a really nice table presence to be sure – getting your hands on the Sorcery expansion wasn’t easy. Now, that’s all included in this relaunch!

We did a complete review of all the components in Barony, so be sure to give that a read. The game got a complete overhaul for its 2025 release, and we are really digging the look. While the original used a lot of rich, dark colours, the 2025 release is sprucing things up. The game tiles remain relatively similar to the original, but the updated player pieces are a lot more vibrant, and really pop on the table.

That said, just because a game looks good doesn’t make it a good game. Despite all the talk of knights, towns and cities, Barony is a fairly abstract strategy game where players will jockey for specific positions on the board to score points. In one sense, this is a “troops on a map” experience, but incredibly simplified. Dominance of any of the game’s various hexes is pretty simple to understand, which makes this experience fairly accessible to all.

If a player ever has two of their own pieces on a hex compared to a single piece of an opponent, that hex is taken over and the opposing player pieces are removed from the board. Players can coexist on a tile if they each have a single piece on it. Players who end up with two of their own pieces on a board “protect” that hex as no other player can move in as long as there are two pieces of a single color.

The thing is, you can’t just stack up knights, cities, and towns together and defend all game long. Players will need to spread out to earn tokens, as tokens will provide victory points. When settling towns and cities on specific hexes, players will take tokens corresponding to that hex. Building on fields will net you 5 points, while building on plains will get you 4 points. These points aren’t safe until you cash them in – until that happens, tokens can be stolen.

Cashing in tokens equates to increasing your fame within the region and increasing your rank. Players are competing to obtain the rank of King, and every 15 points cashed in increases your rank and “locks” in your points, i.e. they cannot be stolen. Players can increase their points by values of 10 when they build each of their additional cities, for a total of 20 additional points.

As long as you play the base game without the Sorcery expansion, nothing happens randomly or suddenly. Adding more knights to the board, or moving knights, is a pretty slow process. Players only get one action on their turn, and for many of those actions you’ll be either placing knights into cities or moving knights.

When moving, players get  two moves on their turn, and each knight can only move one time. That means at maximum, you are moving two knights one space each. That makes Barony a very strategic and tactical experience as you react to others around you. Noone is going to suddenly shoot clear across the map to wipe you out – that doesn’t happen. Instead, movement is slow and methodical, with plenty of strategy and lots of thought required. Taking things from others is great, yes, but making sure you are also getting points yourself is important too.

The Sorcery Expansion adds a bit of variability to the game, and in my opinion, actually makes the game less desirable to play. I think with the right group, this expansion could be a lot of fun. For me, I like the idea that I can see what others are doing around me, and don’t have to worry about someone magicing themselves multiple spaces and screwing up my gameplan.

It takes a bit of the strategy out of the game, which again might be fantastic for some, and not for others. That being said, I’m glad this expansion is included but is not required to play. It is basically a module in the main box that you can choose to use or not. That goes for variable player powers too – those, however, I’m way more likely to use after my group understands the core concepts.

Overall, Barony is quite obviously and easy-to-understand, hard to master game that provides deep levels of strategic thinking to play well. You might assume that snagging the 5 point field tiles is the best way to win, but since these tiles are the least common, and end up multiple hexes away from each other, you’ll spend too much time moving towards them instead of racking up points.

Reading the board – which is randomly generated each game – and determining how you should balance collecting points quickly versus getting higher values is incredibly rewarding, but also equally frustrating if your game isn’t going as expected.

Overall, though, I’ve had more positive games of Barony then negative games, and even when I’ve lost, I enjoyed the experience overall. This might be classified as a “mean” game as you fight between yourselves, but with so much going on, and so many tiles to choose from, it’s a lot less mean than you might think. In fact, more often than not, those who won the game only took over other players’ spaces at max a couple times per game. They won because of strategic play.

If you like strategic play that has almost zero luck, Barony is going to be something you enjoy. And it looks great too!