A Kingdom for Kieflings

I've been playing a lot of Magic lately, and have only recently gotten back into the swing of things in WoW, so naturally my gaming schedule was starting to get pretty limited what with the whole being in college business. Then I have a little conversation with a friend of mine about getting a game called A Kingdom for Keflings, some sort of Xbox Live Arcade game or something. He told me that the game was absolutely astounding, equivalent to reaching the highest echelons of Valhalla and drinking the finest ambrosia mead out of the skulls of your fallen enemies. Well, not really, but he did say it was so good I probably wouldn't even have time to play Magic anymore because I was too busy playing this game. I have never had any form of mead and I figure something that is supposedly the drink of the gods would be enough to convince anyone.

I decided to make the purchase and quickly hopped onto Xbox Live to do so. After much confusion and many attempts to figure out exactly how to get things set up (why oh why do I always forget to bring my Xbox headset from home!), I had the game downloaded and ready to play. At least, if I knew what the hell I was doing.


The basic premise of the game is to make a "kingdom" for your "keflings." Keflings are essentially tiny people that you control by picking them up and putting them down in places. Want that kefling to mine ore? Throw the guy at some rocks and he'll get to work. Unlike most RTS games though your keflings are pretty stupid. If you tell him to mine, oh he'll mine alright, but he will simply drop all the rocks he heaves from the earth onto the ground immediately next to him, becoming not so much a mining operation but something more akin to digging a whole to China, except for the fact that that is impossible in any realm of reality and that the ground doesn't actually get dug into goddamn you. You actually have to throw the guys at the resource and then the building before they choose to actually think about what the hell they're doing. And this is the easy part!

As soon as the game get's going things quickly spiral into ridiculousness. You use the resources to build more buildings, which allow you to make more buildings, which allow you to use more resources, which allows you to make more buildings, which allows you to make your keflings into educators and guild members which allows further use of more buildings and so on and so forth seemingly into infinity. You toil endlessly on progression progression progression, and strangely enough you have a damn fun time along the way. Somewhere between two to three hours passed while me and my bud played this game and never once did I question exactly how long we played....until! (cue dramatic music)

The important thing to remember here is that me and my friend are both big fancy college kids and whatnot, going down to the quad and popping our collars and calling each other brosky and wearing our foam visors and whatnot. College internet, for lack of a more eloquent way to put it, blows. The connection is mostly iffy to begin with, but at certain prime hours your connection goes from about three to four "bars" to "oh my god what have you done to me." By this point the time was about half past say-goodbye-to-your-internet-suckers and my friend promptly got disconnected. This had happened once before to him, so we were like "No worries, I'll just reinvite you to the game." I try to do this, and then as sudden as most onomatopoeia tend to sneak up on you I too was disconnected. The camera of my life did that distorted zoom in on my face, the creepy and frantic music played, and I screamed to the heavens as the kingdom we had slaved over for hours was cast into the dark maw of oblivion, returning to the ether stream from which it was borne.

The moral of the story here is always remember to save your game kids!