A tiny Scottish indie has just out-painted the big studios. The Old King's Crown, the debut release from Edinburgh-based Eerie Idol Games, has taken the Artwork and Presentation prize at the 20th Golden Geek Awards, beating competition from much larger publishers. Every illustration is the work of one person, designer-artist Pablo Clark, and the win is the kind of moment that shifts an indie's trajectory overnight.
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Start organising for freeThe Old King's Crown is a 1-4 player area-control card game set in a crumbling fairy-tale kingdom, where players draft creatures into rival courts and clash for control of contested locations. Each round you commit cards face-down to courts you want to influence, then flip and resolve, with a healthy dose of bluffing and combo-spotting baked in. Clark's hand-drawn cards lean into a storybook woodcut style, with each card functioning as a window into its own little world. That visual coherence carried it past Innovative Design and Heavy Game finalists too, where it was also shortlisted. The game first hit retail in 2025 and ran a successful Gamefound second printing earlier in 2026 alongside a new expansion, Songs of Home.
For UK players, this is a domestic feel-good story. Eerie Idol is a small Scottish outfit selling through Made in Camelot and a handful of independent retailers, and seeing them on the Golden Geek stage argues against the "everything good comes out of a $9M Kickstarter" theory of board game design. If you're heading to UK Games Expo at the end of the month and you've not played it, track down a copy or a demo.
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Set up your group for freeThe Old King's Crown is available now in second printing through Eerie Idol Games and select UK retailers. If your local club hasn't tried it, pitch it as game night next week.
Sources: BoardGameWire | Eerie Idol Games | Gamefound
