Löwenherz

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Löwenherz: Grenzen de Macht
Players control a handful of castles scattered across the land, attempting to expand their territory and take control of valuable resources.
Designer	Klaus Teuber
Publisher	Goldsieber Rio Grande Games
Players	2–4
Age range	10+
Setup time	20 minutes
Playing time	60–120 minutes
Random chance	some
Skills required	Strategy, Planning, Resource management

Domaine: Land, Wealth, Power, Prestige
Players control a handful of castles scattered across the land, attempting to expand their territory and take control of valuable resources.
Designer	Klaus Teuber
Publisher	Kosmos Mayfair Games
Players	2–4
Age range	10+
Setup time	20 minutes
Playing time	60–120 minutes
Random chance	some
Skills required	Strategy, Planning, Resource management

Löwenherz (German for "Lionheart") is a German-style board game designed by Klaus Teuber and published in 1997 by Goldsieber in German and by Rio Grande Games in English. A revised edition, titled Löwenherz: Der König kehrt zurück in German and Domaine: Land, Wealth, Power, Prestige in English, was subsequently released in 2003 by Kosmos in German and Mayfair Games in English. A computer implementation of the revised edition was also published by 2003 by Dartmoor Softworks. It is considered to be one of the three "brothers", as Löwenherz was born from the same idea that brought forth Settlers of Catan and Entdecker. Like the other two, Löwenherz is critically acclaimed, the original edition having won the Deutscher Spiele Preis and the revised edition having won the Schweizer Spielepreis while finishing fifth in the Deutscher Spiele Preis.

Throughout this article, Löwenherz will be used to denote the original edition while Domaine will solely refer to the revised edition.

The players in both games take on the roles of regents in a kingdom in disarray - in Löwenherz, this is as the old king is dying, while in Domaine it is due to an unexplained extended absence. Players seek to secure territory under their control before either the king dies outright (in Löwenherz) or returns (in Domaine).

[edit] Gameplay

Both games are played on a modular board, using randomly-placed smaller boards. These boards form a grid pattern, and the kingdom in question. At the start of the game, players place castles with the objective of scoring points by sectioning off areas of the board using walls (in Löwenherz) or boundary markers (in Domaine), each section containing only one of their castles.

In Löwenherz, the main part of the gameplay is by bidding on action cards. Each action card contains three actions, in which each player chooses one of the three. If two or more players choose the same action, players negotiate to determine which player may perform the action. Domaine has each player having a hand of three action cards, which players can either sell for money or played for a price. Actions include the following:

Placing walls and boundary markers
Expanding a closed region into other players' closed regions
Placing knights to protect closed regions - players may only expand to other players' regions if they have more knights
Collecting money (in Löwenherz only)
Drawing a politics card, which give the player other abilities (in Löwenherz only - Domaine incorporates these into the action cards)
Removing an opposing knight from a neighboring closed region and replacing it with one in the friendly region (Domaine only - this is a politics card effect in Löwenherz)
Preventing two neighboring regions from expanding into each other (Domaine only - this is a politics card effect in Löwenherz)

Points are scored according to the closed regions they control. Certain squares on the board are worth more than others, and, in Domaine, may generate additional income for the player.

The game is played either when a player achieves a prescribed amount of points (in Domaine, at which point the king is said to return), or when an action card is drawn that ends the game (in Löwenherz, a special action card depicting the death of the king ends the game, while the game ends in Domaine when all action cards have been drawn and players run out of cards to play). The player with the most amount of points (or with the most money in case of a tie) is declared the winner.