I used to have a firm, slightly smug position on kingmaking, the situation in a multiplayer game where a player who’s out of contention can decide, through their remaining actions, who actually wins between two other people. I called it a design flaw, full stop, evidence the game hadn’t been playtested carefully enough, and I said this confidently at more than one game night, the way you say things you’ve absorbed as received wisdom rather than actually tested against your own experience.

Then we played The Old King’s Crown with a full table over the holidays, and I got eliminated from real contention early, out of the running for the crown myself but still very much in the game, and the rest of the session became, unmistakably, about who I decided to help. I resented it at first, actively, felt like the game had demoted me to a spectator with extra steps. And then somewhere around the third accusation thrown across the table, someone half-jokingly begging for my support, I noticed I was having more fun in that “demoted” position than I usually have when I’m still technically competing for the win myself.

That’s the part I hadn’t accounted for in my old blanket objection. I’d been assuming kingmaking was bad because it removes agency from the eliminated player, but in a game actually built around social maneuvering rather than pure optimization, it does the opposite, it hands that player a different, arguably juicier kind of agency, the power to matter without the pressure of needing to win. I still think kingmaking is a real problem in a heavier strategy game where the whole point is that your own decisions determined your outcome, Kemet or Arcs would genuinely break if a wounded player could just gift someone else the win. But I was treating it as a universal flaw instead of a fit-for-purpose question, and that’s a sloppier version of thinking than I’d like to admit to in public, especially given how much of my actual job is telling other people not to overgeneralize a rule past the case it was built for.

I haven’t fully forgiven the mechanic. I’ve just stopped pretending my old blanket objection to it was more than an untested habit of opinion I’d never actually stress-tested against a real table.