F@#$ Kingdom Death Monster

Kingdom Death Monster

Summary

Kingdom Death Monster (KDM not to be confused with KMFDM who are also terrifying) is a fantasy horror themed, fully cooperative campaign board game.   The heart of the game is tactical combat, which awards various resources which you can then spend.

Ranking

I guess this is as good as time as any to once again reiterate my views on Board Game Geek's game ranking list.  KDM is #34 and after several sessions, I'm reminded that BGG's list is a flawed review aggregater like Rotten Tomatoes.

A top 100 ranking on BGG means that (in general) enough people found something to like about it in the 18 months or so immediately after it's release.

Positive reviews never expire, so games which were ground breaking at the time linger near the top of the list despite probably being played out.  I recently watched The Dice Tower's panel on Top 5 over-rated games, and half the panel included Puerto Rico, currently ranked #16.   And I think that's because BGG's  rankings don't depreciate.  Puerto Rico was wonderful upon it's release, but it's played out now.  I have no desire to ever play PR again.

What does KDM's ranking mean?  That it does have some things that appeal to people.

 

What it has going for it

So right now, board game's FotM is legacy.  Game materials meant to be marked up with stickers and a sharpie.  Provide enough content within the game to give players a satisfying experience with only one run through of the campaign.

KDM is a step up (possibly down?) from that; it's a campaign.  A similar series of missions in a story, but you don't destroy game components or mark up the board like a single play through.

I find that appealing, because if you FUBAR up a poorly designed legacy game, you either quit playing or buy some kind of refresh kit.  KDM you can just relaunch the campagin.

It also has a nice fantasy horror theme going on.  Vivid descriptions of what the pool of 'survivor' characters face, in multiple areas; you really don't know where the next disturbing image will come from.

And the tactical combat part of the game has more going on than the typical example of the genre.  Which I describe as "move here, shoot that guy and roll dice".

Basic Game Play Run through

The basic plot is you're an amnesiac settlement thrown into a nightmare world and must relearn everything to survive.  Every year in celebration of your continued existence, you stalk and kill a trophy monster, harvesting special resources from it sou you can improve your hunt party.

A turn cycle has 3 phases:  Hunt, Showdown, Settlement.

Hunt:  the lead up to the combat phase.  A series of events drawn from a deck, about evenly divided among good results and bad results.   In our campaign, the good results seem only mildly good while the bad results aren't catastrophic but usually are a pretty serious set back.  The length of this phase varies, but is directly related to how tough you want the showdown to be.

Showdown:  fighting the monster.  I'll cover combat mechanics in a bit.

Settlement:  Some more events, one random and sometimes one scripted.  Build your economy, unlock new knowledge, make your guys better!   Basically, the fun parts of 4X computer games but on a smaller scale.

So yeah, that's it.  A string of events leading up to the fight, fight a monster to get stuff, use that stuff to make your guys better to fight the next monster.  Repeat.

Combat

The showdown phase has some neat things going on, both with the character's build and with the monster's actions.

The Build

(from BGG's image library link) 

So those squares that may line up from card to card may mean something.  Get red/blue/green squares linked on the tableau with the right gear, and you unlock a power.    So that's pretty cool, and players should definitely work towards that!   Our campaign hasn't found too many worthwhile green box powers, but we're also maybe half way through it.  There definitely may be more coming, which means possibly we're scrambling to get the old gear we previously thought of as useless. 

The Fighting

The boss monster has two decks which govern his play:  Monster actions and Monster hit locations.

The monster action deck doubles as his hit points, you wound the monster and what he does becomes more predictable.  This adds quite a bit of variance to what the monster does; tougher monsters get more and nastier cards.

The hit location deck is another thing players manage.  Multiple hits draw multiple cards and the player may resolve them in any order.  This is important, because the monster may interrupt follow up hits by breaking your weapon or running away.

Those two decks make it interesting.  Especially the hit locations, it's something else to try and optimize while playing.

The Problems

The Truck Tire Problem

I describe some games like this Tommy Boy scene.  

You're driving along driving along driving along TRUCK TIRE.   

Truck tire games abruptly escalate the challenge intensity without a corresponding increase in your ability to meet them.

You fight a monster, you fight a monster BOSS FIGHT TPK!

I find this frustrating; the normal fights are routine, only an occasional set back.  Then the boss fight where literally one round in, everyone knows we're going to lose.

The Resource Drop problem

Gear items need specific parts you can only acquire from a single monster type.  To complete an armor set, the party will need to fight the same monster multiple times.

Ok great in theory, until you need two Lion Pelts and only draw one so you need to fight the White Lion for the 8th time.

There needs to be some mechanism where the 'common' drops become easier to get the more times you fight the same monster.

The events vs fight problem

KDM is a deadly game.  Last time we played several characters levelled up and got some neat abilities.  I asked everyone, why are you getting excited about that?  Your dude's just going to die.

And it's events that are the biggest killer.  A random card just kills the best guy, or a random card kills 3 guys. 

I don't mind that casualties are high.  I mind that casualties are from meteor strikes the party has literally no control over.

Is the price tag the elephant in the room?

Kingdom Death Monster costs around $400, or 4 times a really expensive games or 10 times a mass marketed offering from Rio Grande Games.  You're not buying game play.

1. Lots and lots and lots of plastic miniature models.
2. Seriously, there's enough mini's to create a decently sized Warhammer army.
3. Maybe I'll find another picture to seriously demonstrate how many figures the game comes with.
4. The rule book is a work of art.  Case bound, glossy paper and full of fantastic art.  It's a well put together book that would probably retail for about 75$ all by itself.

So my friends bought this game, not me.  My actual cost is 0.  Having said that, I don't value the mini's or the book that much.  My game experience wouldn't dramatically change if we were using card board figures and plastic stands.

Final Verdict

This game remains worth playing.  I want to know how the campaign ends.  I seriously don't know if I'd want to do another campaign any time soon.

It's a good but not great game that hit a zeitgeist for a subset of board gamers which launched it into BGG's top 50. 

F&^% First Martians. No really.

I bought this game that I was pretty excited about - First Martians

It re-implements the mechanics in Robinson Crusoe (2012) , but this time with astronauts that have recently arrived on Mars.  Robinson Crusoe is a cooperative game where you are stranded on a remote island and have to build up from nothing to accomplish some task before time runs out (like build a signal fire, or elude the cannibals).  It had a little tech tree, and a fantastic mechanic where you had to deal with events that happened or it might have future consequences (like you see signs of a tiger - do you either spend the time to hunt it down and kill it now?  or risk that it MAY show up later...hunting you).  That game was a little clunky in several ways, but thematically it was fantastic.  Very tough though.  You can play it with as many as four people, but honestly it works best solo or two player.  Additional players don't add anything but another mind to puzzle out the best move.  You each technically play a character, but not really.  You assign the resources and actions in the most optimal way possible.  So if you're playing with a group, cooperation has to be at 100%, or you lose.  There's no "you do this, I'll do that, and we'll see who was right."  I usually play by myself, and sometimes with my son, Paul.  He made his own scenario once which we played, and it was actually great.

I love Robinson Crusoe.  More of that is really appealing to me.  My kid likes Robinson Crusoe.  My kid LOVES the ides of colonizing Mars.  As I said, when I heard about First Martians, I was pretty excited.  I'm the bull's eye of the target audience for this one.

I was warned this was a drudge to learn, and they were not kidding.  The second iteration of these rules should be better, more elegant - they even switched to an app instead of a deck so they could give you just the events they wanted, in a logical orders, and manage the "future consequences" seamlessly behind the scenes.  That improves the story telling, but the game is not better.  It's more clunky.  It's more fiddly.  More contrived.  I watched a 50 minute video designed to teach you to play.  I watched it again.  I read the rules.  Then I tried to play the game with Paul (with some success, we won!).  Then I watched the video a third time.  Then I read the FAQ.  I've now spent more than four hours learning the game, I've played it three times, and I'm only marginally confidently that I've got it down.

And that's not even the biggest problem with the game - in Robinson Crusoe, you are building something.  You're fighting back the island and all its challenges, but each turn you have more than you did that turn before.  You're improving your situation.  Maybe you have a pit trap dug to help with food.  Maybe you mapped out part of the island to help with your effort to explore.  The challenge of the game is to accomplish your task in the limited time frame.  In First Martians it's the opposite.  Everything's peachy when you start, but as you try to accomplish your goal, everything is crumbling around you.  And it seems counter to the theme.  For example in the first scenario you're supposed to be making the HUB more like a home, but by the end you're lucky to fall across the finish line amid the cascading malfunctions.  You're just holding things together against all these clocks long enough meet the scenario criteria.  It's dispiriting.  Depressing even.  And hard.  Really hard.  Harder than Robinson Crusoe, which is a game that has a reputation for being on the brutal side.

In short, too much complexity without enough payoff for a difficult game that's theme can be kind of a downer.  Still, I'm too invested to give it up.  I'm gonna try again tonight.  I'm 1 for 3 on the intro scenario, and that's on the "easy" setting.  There are several more one off scenarios and a couple campaigns that I want to try.  I'll keep you posted.