EDH Kingdoms and Variants

I like free-for-all multiplayer, but sometimes I want the games to go a bit faster.  It's nice to have some rules that speed things up while still maintaining a fun multiplayer atmosphere.

I saw a post on /r/MagicTCG many years ago providing role cards for Kingdom EDH, an adaptation inspired by Bang!.  I printed out the cards and played a few games, but it was pretty clear that the Usurper role was the most difficult to win with and least fun to play.

My playgroup unsuccessfully tried some alternatives.  It seems that others had a similar opinion, because I saw more variants of Kingdom arise.  (I found a lot of these on a different reddit (/r/EDH) thread.

• Kingdoms, from EDHREC
• Expanded Kingdoms, from Scotty Makes Games.  Here's an imgur album with the same card set.
• Regicide, the Game
• Imgur album of alternative cards
• An MTGSalvation thread on Kingdom EDH
• MTG Treachery, something very similar to Kingdom, but with lots of different roles.
• Highlander, another fan-created game that's very similar.
• Battle of the Gatewatch, a similar thing based on the MTG Gatewatch.

None of these seemed perfect for my playgroup.  I'm not certain why.  Maybe because they were either too complicated, or maybe because we just wanted to fix the Usurper problem with our own invention.  

This summer, I think we finally got it right.  We created four extra roles, which are shuffled together, then one is chosen at random to be the fifth card in addition to the King, Knight, and two Barbarians.

We tried to maintain the basic templating of the Kingdom cards from the original post I had printed cards from.

The randomness of the fifth role really adds an element of uncertainty to the game play.  Even though the intentions of the Barbarians and Knight may become clear before the actual role cards are revealed, the role of the fifth player remains hidden, keeping everyone on their toes.  In the few games we've played, it's a lot of fun.

Disclaimer: We didn't even play enough games to test all four of the different random roles.  Future changes may be coming.  Nevertheless, we considered that all of these were included, so they all played a part in our games.

To make it very clear, to play with these cards...

1. Print out the cards from the original album, aside from the Usurper card.  You should have a King, a Knight, and two Barbarians.
2. Print out the four cards shown above.
3. Randomly choose one of the four cards above without looking at it.
4. Put the original four with the chosen one in opaque-backed sleeves and shuffle those five.
5. Pass them out to the five players.
6. Whoever has the King card reveals their card to everyone.  They go first.
7. Play EDH.  Whenever someone dies, reveal their card.  Someone's winning conditions may be triggered.  If someone wins, they reveal their role, then the game ends.

If there are six players, then the plan is to choose two of the random roles instead of one.  Although we haven't playtested this, we'd like to think that the rules hold.

In addition, these can be used with Oathbreaker with a small modification: the King begins with 26 life and everyone else begins with 20 life (instead of 40 and 30, respectively).

Credit: I don't remember who came up with each role exactly, but I think Bob Solorio was the originator of many of the extra four roles.

Bonus: I put all the card images in one PDF for easy printing.