In the Hall of Mountain King - Deluxe (English)

Play as trolls and rebuild your abandoned kingdom beneath the mountain in In the Hall of the Mountain King. With might and magic, you'll unearth riches, excavate collapsed tunnels, and forge great halls while raising the toppled statues of your ancestors to their places of honor in the heart of the mountain. Gameplay is based on the innovative cascade production system. Timing and strategy are key to restoring your home to its former glory and claiming the crown! Working on the same board as the other players (but starting at your own entrance), you'll excavate a network of rival tunnels, spending increasingly valuable materials to place polyomino tiles on the map. You want to extend your tunnels to connect with buried gold and materials, with workshops that can transform resources, and especially with toppled statues. Statues are key to scoring, and you'll spend carts to move them through the tunnels to the best scoring locations near the heart of the mountain. A key aspect of the game is cascade production. You start with a line of four trolls, each showing the combination of resources it produces (gold, stone, iron, marble, wagons, runes, and hammers). When you hire a new troll, place it on top of two others, forming a pyramid. The new troll activates and gains its resources, and the trolls below it also activate, gaining whatever resources they can carry. This way, as you hire more trolls, you gain greater amounts of resources as the end of the game approaches. Timing your hiring and building turns is important to maximize your cascades, ensure you get the trolls you want from the shared market, and stay competitive on the map. The game ends shortly after the last player hires their sixth troll. The player with the most honor (earned by digging higher-quality tunnels, excavating great halls, and moving statues closer to the heart of the mountain, especially on matching pedestals) is crowned King of the Mountain and wins.