Action Economy in Kingdom Death Part 1: Introduction to principles and Settlement Phase (Patreon)

Today we're going to go into a little bit of board game theory with a look at the concept of action economy; we'll start with an examination of the concept in general terms, before looking at some great examples from various board and card games and then finally we'll get into the specifics of how this applies to boss battlers and Kingdom Death in particular.

Any kind of board or card game is based around the concept of taking turns, either players alternate turns in some kind of order, the player takes a turn and then the game takes a turn or sometimes other variations like simultaneous turns occur. These turns can be a single action, or they can even be sub-divided further into various different actions.

All of the principles we're going to be walking through here work for any number of actions in a turn. Because the concept here is not about how many actions you have each turn in specific, it is instead about getting as much as you can from your turn/actions as possible. This can be achieved through a few different methods; action efficiency, action compression, action quality and action growth.

Action efficiency is the concept of trying to use a given action for the best thing you can possibly manage; one of the most interesting aspects of this is sometimes the optimal play is to do nothing at all. This is most common in games where a failure can occur in an action due to say rolling dice, and in addition you will be punished for that failure. Blood Bowl is a classic example of this; each player exerts a passive 'tackle zone' in the 8 squares orthogonally and diagonally surrounding it. This tackle zone forces any opposing players to have to dodge to escape. Because dodging creates a dice roll that can cause a player to fall over and a player falling over on your turn will immediately end your turn.

As such, players will avoid taking actions with players who might fall over from a dice roll more than achieve something specific. Kingdom Death also has this situation, where sometimes attacking the monster will result in a terrible situation for your survivors and it is best to do nothing; or perhaps move somewhere and perform some low value activation that can't hit a terrible reaction or even the trap card. Likewise you might not interact with terrain that has the potential to cause a knockdown against certain monsters. We'll get more into this concept later on when we highlight how endeavours and survivors (especially support & tank survivors) are operated.

Action compression is the concept of getting some tool that lets you do more than one thing with your action. This multiples the value of the action you have used. Arkham Horror the Living Card Game is a classic example of this, you have three actions per turn and one of them is to Investigate a location. you will normally find just 1 clue from the amount that are placed on the location you are investigating, however the skill card Deduction pictured here:

Doubles the number of clues you get to collect, therefore making your action equivalent to two investigations - bam! That's a 2 action compression at the cost of 1 action plus 1 card. Arkham is filled with numerous variations of this card; for example Vicious Blow is the guardian mirror to Deduction and it gives +1 Damage when attacking a monster, turning a basic attack from 1 damage into 2. Both of these cards can be combined with actions on assets like the .45 Automatic pictured here:

The .45 Automatic is another example of action compression. It costs 1 action to play, but it doubles your base damage for 4 activations. So you spend 1 action to play it; and then it pays off with the equivalent of +3 Fight actions; and those fight actions are higher quality to boot because they all have a passive bonus to your Might, meaning the fight actions are more damaging and more likely to succeed.

That additional bonus is what action quality boils down to, when facing a random element, things you have used mean your action has a higher chance of succeeding; but it is not the only way that your action can have improved quality. Sometimes you can spend two elements together; combining them to get more worth than an individual one would have been. To return to Arkham Horror for a moment; Skill Cards are the epitome of this. Skill cards are cards that cannot be used except during an action, they are spent to improve the action's odds of succeeding by the symbols printed in the upper left quadrant of the card – Unexpected Courage pictured above has two book symbols, meaning that it provides two icons to any test, improving the odds of succeeding. It is however less powerful than Deduction's action compression which is a class restricted card for only investigation tests.

This is similar to how the .45 Automatic works, but it requires a far higher investment. One of the key things about Arkham is you don't automatically get bonus effects for committing a card into the check. You're putting a card into the check for a higher success rate because it has matching symbols, and you can commit more than one card, you can even commit a card into other players checks if you are in the same location. In essence you are increasing the price of the action by choosing to pay more up front, and in return the card repays you with a stronger outcome (and sometimes additional bonus effects). It is the opposite side of the coin to action compression in many ways, and it is often intertwined with either compression or efficiency.

Finally we have Action Growth; action growth is the concept of gaining additional actions ahead of the opposition; this is very common in euro style games where workers are placed to generate actions. A spot where you can place a worker and gain additional workers is very desirable due to it giving you more actions in future turns. This is especially important if said spot is limited to no more than one worker per turn (so only one player can benefit from the extra worker). Agricola (pictured above) from Uwe Rosenberg is dominated by this; there is a spot called 'Family Growth' that appears in rounds 5 to 7. This gives you an extra worker and while said worker requires that you build a room for them in advance and if you can't feed them you will suffer penalty points – it doesn't matter. Agricola's game design demands that players aggressively seek to grow their family size and as such there is a huge amount of jostling between players to be the one to do this action first and as often as possible. It's actually one of the main reasons I stopped playing basic Agricola; there are not enough rewards to encourage alternative, leaner strategies.

In other games Action Growth can be gaining access to alternative, additional actions or automatic actions. Orleans for example has a type of worker you can get who comes with an 'automation token'. This token goes into one of your worker spots and fills it with an automated worker. Reducing the number of workers you have to put into a given action to get the pay-off in future turns (Orleans requires multiple workers per action to activate it, so an automated worker tends to reduce the costs of the given action by a third to half – but you still need to put workers into the other slots in order to activate the ability). It's worth noting that Action Denial, something which you can do during the showdown, is effectively Action Growth; just in an alternative direction.

The Settlement Phase

All of this brings us to our Kingdom Death specifics; we're going to start with the Settlement Phase. This is because the Settlement Phase is easiest to grok with in respect of these concepts. This is due to it being a direct translation of the Euro Worker Placement Game. A successful hunt will bring in 4 endeavours from the returning survivors, and these endeavours can be placed to activate various options on the settlement locations and innovations.

To start with you have very few options for your Endeavours. You can spend 1 of these for the chance of gaining a roll on the intimacy table, which is in itself a second roll to see if you generate more population. Population initially does not turn into additional endeavours; it's more of a buffer to ensure that you can send the maximum survivors hunting each lantern year and also to avoid the game over condition of 0 population and you are also rewarded for hitting 15 population for the first time.

The other options are to spend a lot of resources in addition to an endeavour to unlock either a new settlement location; which most of the time you can't do much with yet due to their need for advanced (perfect, leather) or uncommon resources (Perfect, Scrap). Also the Leather Worker and Scrap Smelter require innovations to properly utilise their gear creation options. So you'll look to unlock these when you've exhausted most of the useful options from the previous tier locations and you've gotten the prerequisite innovation (Ammonia or Heat).

Innovating is the final option that's open from the start; and to reiterate a vital point that I keep beating like a rawhide drum: This is NOT something you want to be doing in the early game. Innovations are shiny and exciting, but they are also gained in a random order and provide low benefits for a young settlement due to the low survival limit, low departing survival abilities and very scarce resources. Innovating is just an incredibly expensive option early on, not just because of how inefficient it is to use, but also because each endeavour spent there is an endeavour not spent on increasing population or protecting population with Stone Noses.

One of the best things you can spend your early endeavors on.

This is in essence a thing that's known as a “Newbie Trap”; which is an option that is enticing but can be more harmful than helpful if it is used without thought. It is so exciting to shuffle that randomised deck of random innovations and draw two randomly – and new players often cannot resist the call. Because of how this deck works like a slot machine and triggers dopamine hits, it can be very difficult for an inexperienced player to comprehend the vast power difference between gaining one exciting pull on the slot machine for a +1 Innovation versus the dependable and basic +1 Stone Nose/Augury Roll & a Bone Weapon & Half a Monster Grease & A Rawhide Armor Gear Card.

As gear is the greatest early predictor of a settlement's success; (due to the snowball nature of how a failed hunt = no resources), early innovations result in on average a weaker settlement that is less capable at success during the next hunt (and each additional failure triggers a further increase in failures, right up until the point the L1 Butcher turns up and slaps the last few survivors into the dirt – have I mentioned lately how well done the first four lantern years in Kingdom Death are?) Initial trajectory is so important for a settlement, so much so that I will often take a long hard consideration of scrubbing a settlement that falls on its face hard in the first 2-3 years. I want to have engagement and fun when I play and while saving a settlement on the precipice of failure can be engaging as heck, personally I don't find it fun to be doing that from the very start of a settlement's lifespan. There's no need to fall into the sunk cost fallacy when you're that early in a campaign.

So yeah, a lot of words to say that Innovating is a reduction in action quality and resource/action compression when compared to other options. Don't innovate before you have weapons on all survivors, a complete rawhide set, a second rawhide set started and at least one or two monster grease. I know the button is big, red, shiny and it triggers that dopamine rush when you do it, but it's a slot machine. A really expensive slot machine where the jackpot is Symposium, an innovation that won't even help you win showdown fights, or Dash/Surge which does give you high quality survival actions (more on that later) – but puts more pressure on your survival points, which you want to be spending on Dodge early on rather than surging with suboptimal weapons.

Later on, when your settlement is established and you've gotten yourself a bunch of innovations and principles things will open up and a larger gain of resources means that you can be more free with grabbing innovations. For example Graves provides two endeavours when a survivor perishes on a hunt, meaning you can return with 5+ endeavours as compensation for lost hunters. This is a form of temporary action growth at a time where you need it most; though strictly speaking it's more of a compensation/insurance mechanic.

Cooking is a very impressive workhorse, this third tier innovation comes from the Lantern Oven and gives +1 endeavour every lantern year as a flat bonus. The earlier you get it, the more actions you will gain, but because most campaigns give you a Lantern Oven (or equivalent) as a free reward from story progression it is more action efficient to wait for the Lantern Oven to be gifted – that's something for free that's worth an endeavour, hide, organ and bone.

Collective Toil is an effectively free alternative/supplement to Cooking because it is a principle, and gained by reaching 15 population, it then offers you +1 endeavour for every 10 population, meaning that your average settlement gains between 0 and 2 extra endeavours every year as a reward for doing the thing you're supposed to be doing anywhere.

This root Music Innovation is a great example of improving action quality; Drums lets you turn an endeavour into a guaranteed gains of either the excellent Synchronised Strike or Rhythm Chaser, a “no heavy gear”, instrument based evasion fighting art. While instruments have their own issues (noisy + harvester); they still can be viable and valuable thanks to Nemesis showdowns, the Grim Muffler and the Gorm Gorn (an instrument without the noisy keyword). Because this endeavour pays out 100% of the time with a known quantity, it is a reliable endeavour and one that provides a stat-boost to boot (at the “cost” of a Fighting Art and Gear slot).

It also leads into Forbidden Dance, which is an endeavour of variable quality. You can lose 1 movement or gain +1 evasion (or gain the King's Step). So, it turns out that this endeavour is normally too risky to use on good survivors without rerolls to bail you out of the negative. But fresh newbies who've never been out on a hunt are perfect for rolling here, half the time you get good bonuses that will create a new tank or DPS survivor and the other half the time you end up with a stay at home survivor who can be used to absorb population losses. This is a way of improving the action quality of that innovation. If the worst result doesn't harm you in a significant manner (because you have a good population of “blank” plebeians to roll on this); then you're able to make the most efficient use of pulling the slot machine lever on this option.

Face Painting and Protect the Young are a great example of improving action quality; they reduce the odds of survivors dying and increase the odds of getting extra population when you reach the Intimacy table and also avoiding losing population with low rolls. Love Juice is another excellent population gaining tool because it provides effectively +1 endeavour with an automatic success on the augury table – allowing you to get straight to the intimacy roll without wasting an endeavour on either nothing or -1 resource +1 understanding.

This is a large part of what can make the settlement phase so engrossing and deep, every single place where you use an endeavour is meaningful and because the various tables show the odds in advance one can really work out what the most effective uses to help grow your settlement phase, hunt phase and/or showdown phase strengths each lantern year.

If you're so inclined the Settlement Phase is so deep and interesting that you can spend a very long time considering each and every endeavour activation and it can be very rewarding to do so. Just working out when it is the right time to stop generating gear and instead start the pivot into Innovating every year is a delicate art in itself; too soon and your showdown efficiency drops, too late and you have to stall on switching to L2+ White Lions and Node 3 monsters (all of which ask for a deeper pool of Survival plus extra survival actions).

If you check the Innovation and Settlement Phase tags below you'll find more articles going into each element of the settlement phase in more detail!

Before we wrap up I'd also like to highly recommend that if you want to become a stronger Kingdom Death player; it is always worth broadening your game experiences to include other games. There are plenty of mechanics Kingdom Death has in common with other games; and mastering those will develop both your competency as a player overall while also giving you a deeper understanding of the various tools available to you during a KDM campaign. Arkham Horror LCG is a fantastic game to deepen your understanding of action economy aspects and deck construction (which helps your efficiency with both AI/HL decks and the Innovation deck). That is not the only game which can benefit and grow your skills though, many of the articles which exist on this patreon wouldn't be here without my playing other games to broaden my general understanding of gaming theories and game design.

Next week we're going to follow up this with the Hunt Phase, Showdown Phase and also because I figure it is the right time to write about it, we'll bundle in a topic that is adjacent to this one; Gear Grid/Tableau efficiency! Squeeze as much as you can out of those gear cards, you can only take 36 of them with you (most of the time).