A Distraction! Kingdom Death: Monster
I've been lax in posting here the last few weeks! I haven't intentionally abandoned Steemit or my games review project--rather, I've been distracted by a game that doesn't neatly fit into my queue. The game is Kingdom Death: Monster (warning, some blood and nudity in images at link), a hefty cooperative campaign board game that's been the darling of Kickstarter two times in the last few years. I've had a few occasions to play the real thing in person with friends, but a lot of my time with it has been spent using Tabletop Simulator, a physics sandbox optimized for emulating the experience of playing board games and role-playing games at a physical table.
Four survivors square off against KDM's iconic starting monster, the White Lion. ...That tall grass is illegally placed, tch. Dang it, I always get something wrong.
My wife calls my relationship with KDM a "cyclical obsession," and I'd say that's pretty apt. I dive in, playing with whoever will consent to join me, and whiling away the hours playing solo when I can't find anyone. Eventually I burn out on it, because the game is very difficult, in ways both fair and unfair, and you can sink a lot of hours into the game before ever arriving at a fail state. Then something comes up to reignite my interest, and off I go again to get another few dozen hapless sods horribly killed in the dark.
The latest event to get me back into the game was the release of Maximo and Kijan's latest table, which goes to new lengths to assist the player in remembering all the fine details. KDM has a lot of moving parts. No individual rule or subsystem is especially hard to understand or even to teach, but as the game goes on, you accumulate a lot of modifiers and situational triggers that are easy to forget. (I've heard it said that no one plays KDM correctly. Messing something up is pretty much inevitable.) There are downsides to playing a board game with mouse and keyboard over an Internet connection, but the inclusion of sophisticated Lua scripting in a Tabletop Simulator build can be a godsend for this kind of thing. Maximo has gone into obsessive detail with this table, such that simply picking up a piece to move it will remind you of special movement rules in play, attack and wound rolls are calculated out for you with success and failure indicated by color-changing dice, and entire phases of setup fly out onto the board at the click of a button.
Look at all these bits and bobs! If it weren't for the hobbyist angle of assembling and painting minis, I would think KDM was meant to be a computer game all along.
Maximo isn't done yet, either. I've had the privilege of getting a peek at what he's working on, and it's undeniably massive. The board will be aware of positioning when it comes to effects like flanking, display the area of effect of monster attacks as dynamic overlays, and even assist with the complex timing of actions interrupting one another. The update represents hundreds of hours of development, all for a mod it's not even possible to monetize. Labors of love, amirite?
If y'all would read a Let's Play series of this game, I would gladly whip one up for you. There's item crafting, tech trees, gory critical hits, storyline decisions, baby-making, and oh so many random tables to roll on. Interested?
This seems really cool but i'm having a hard time grasping what kind of game it is. Is it like a D&D game with cards? I play a lot of Munchkin with friends but it seems a lot more complicated than that.
Would love to learn some more about it, i'll have to look into it. I found the line "No one plays KDM correctly" really humorous, reminds me of every time I try to get a game of monopoly going! In average though, how long would you say a single game may take? It seems to be quite complex and have a lot of roleplaying parts to it which makes me think it could be quite long.
KDM is sort of like of role-playing game with cards as one of the randomizers that goes into gameplay, and sort of like a tactical boardgame, and sort of like a resource management boardgame, all dumped into a blender and set to frappe.
I've seen some very interesting gameplay from one of the Euro wargame channels that I follow.
If you are at all curious about the game, I definitely suggest watching them play it. If anything can give you a sense of what it's like, it's that.
Oh man, I watched some of those! But I sat waiting so long for them to return to the series that I gave up and unsubscribed. (I seem to recall there was logistical difficulty with getting the person who owned the game into the studio, something like that.) I'll have to revisit the channel and see if they ever picked it back up.
They're up to Lantern Year 8, now. :)
It's a big complex tactical/strategic board game! It's only like a role-playing game in that you have persistent characters who have stats and level up. You don't really get to make decisions for a character like you would in an RPG (your character's actions outside of combat are often determined by random chance), and there's no freewheeling negotiated creativity; the choices are all mechanical in nature.
The game takes place over in-world "years" that take an hour or two apiece to play through. A winning campaign can last 20-30 in-game years; a losing one will tend to collapse well before that, but still might make it to the 10-year mark. So we're talking dozens or hundreds of hours depending on how dedicated you are!
I was tempted by the Kickstarter for this but I just couldn't figure out where it would stop. I was seriously thinking about budgeting $1000 into it and eventually I snapped out of it and walked away. :-D
If I had that kind of money, I would have done so in a heartbeat! But I'm usually broke, so I'm stuck begging my rich friends to let me play and infringing copyrights like a dirty pirate.
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