Kingdom Death: Monster – A Post Mortem Review (Core Game): Part 1 (Patreon)

With the Gambler's Chest due to arrive some time within the next one or three months I believe at this point we're at the best time to complete a deep look into all the currently released aspects of the game (apart from the smaller promotional content); this is especially pertinent with the Kingdom Death Monster Simulator (KDMS) and physical versions being on 1.6 instead of older versions. The core game represents the first Kingdom Death: Monster (KDM) experience most players are going to have when they get either the physical or electronic versions of the game, I'll will review the KDM Simulator at some point in near the future; but I only have access to a bog standard version plus Gorm as I could not manage to budget for the $300 that APG wants when I asked Adam about getting it for content creation purposes. I do not want to play just core game KDM anymore, I played it over and over so many times to research and refresh my experiences before writing this piece.

I tried to make this a single part; but when I approached and went over 10K words I realised that's just not going to happen. So I'll put it out in two parts over the next two Fridays (along with a stitched together full version that will be released to the public in three Fridays time).

Finally, before we get into it, be warned I am going to be critical here, because I adore this game and I want it to be better for its own sake. I will praise areas where the game excels as much as point out and critique places where it could be better (5+ Player experience and deaths on the hunt when there are no spare hunting survivors anyone?) I'm also an entrenched player, I play this game a lot along with other board games in order to compare, contrast and understand game mechanics and as a consequence of all that I do have a certain perspective that might be nitpicky or prickly. Know that I push against the game at times out of a fondness and desire for KDM to not get left behind by more modern designs like Oathsworn and Aeon Trespass: Odyssey; Adam and his Team made a very risky decision to delay releasing content by half a decade and Complex AI Boss Battlers (especially Miniature AI Boss Battlers) have moved forward during that period with huge strides as new contender after new contender has entered the arena.

With that written, lets get to Kingdom Death: Monster the Core Game Experience, starting with the first set of mechanics – The First Story.

The First Story

KDM benefits from a very well written and evocative opening story; while it does lean into the old trope of a tabula rasa “amnesia” set of lead characters this does have the advantage of allowing players to have the same learning experience as their pawns do. It's also not only a solid narrative story; it's followed by a superb learning tutorial experience (which we have Anna Poots to thank for). One of the most elevated elements of this tutorial is the combination of light handholding combined with learning by doing rather than walking through each and every action in full. You're told how to set things up, you're guided in what happens initially, but you are asked to roll the dice and play through the encounter in full.

This is aided by both the survivors and Perri the Prologue White Lion being a very basic operational experience at this time; the four survivors have nothing more than a single piece of armor that protects one location, a basic weapon with a special ability a single survival and a single survival action. You can see here you're introduced to a bunch of concepts, but in a very simple fashion. You're taught about light wounds, serious wounds, armor points providing protection, how to attack, critical wounds, special abilities that can be used with activations and survival actions in addition to how to control a survivor unit at its most basic (move, activate). It's intuitive and simple, but still has room for stategic decisions. However, it's absolutely nota great showcase of what Kingdom Death can do; the White Gigalion solo scenario is much better for the job of showcasing the mechanical experience of playing the game.

Likewise Perri is set up to be a very basic, but teaching, foe. As a unit Perri has access to the full Hit Location Deck, but the top HL card is set up to be a teaching moment. The Strange Hand Hit Location fulfils a lot of different teaching elements in a single card:

All in this card we are taught that; the monster can punish failed attacks, that it can attack outside of its turn, that Hit Locations can reference other cards, that the Basic Action means something, that critical wounds can give you benefits, that you can spend survival for things other than Dodge and that some critical wounds result in persistent injuries with effects that you may learn in the future.

Perri's AI deck is set up in a similar fashion; its first attack is a Claw, which is a Basic Action with a party mask on and it teaches you familiarity with the basic action (without telling you that's what it is doing); but that's not all that Perry performs, Perry's AI deck; unlike the HL Deck, is curated. It contains a smattering of different cards that teach you various elements of the game if they turn up. You can learn about Moods from Enraged; Intimidates, Brain Damage and Insanity from Terrifying Roar and Size Up; that monsters can target specific locations and it really sucks to have the head get hit from Chomp; Maul gleefully informs you that you're not automatically safe when you're knocked down and that Grabcan put you in a really dangerous position, this is something all of Perri's kind love to do because they're big housecats.

On top of all of that, Perri and its AI deck seeks to set the mood for the game as one where the odds are stacked against each individual survivor, not only does Perri get the first move in the game (a subversion of what would normally be expected) but also Perri gets to hit on a 2+ and can sometimes deal multiple points of damage per hit. It might seem that the odds are massively stacked against the survivors who can only hit on a 7+ or 8+ and have no toughness, so they just automatically take damage on hits unless they spend their precious single point of survival to avoid a single hit. That's part of the point.

However, there is a ray of light that is there to give the survivors and their players some hope, half the time that someone scores a hit on Perri it turns into a wound, and that removes an AI card from Perri's deck, when they're all gone it's just one more wound and you get victory. Perri has just 6 toughness and 9 wounds. Also, the survivors have the ability to score up to four automatic wounds if they are willing to spend their Founding Stones and don't hit a location that cannot be wounded (Glorious Mane, Clever Ploy). Third is that the survivors can score critical wounds, something that the monster cannot do.

All of this combines to give a tutorial with a lot of things to teach players willing to read and learn while also giving veteran players a reason to return to this fight and not just skip it in every single future campaign. When you know what's coming you can throw that Founding Stone on the first turn for +1 strength; you can go in with fist & tooth, taking advantage of that 50% wounding opportunity in exchange for doubling your capability to score critical wounds and generate more resources. You can even sandbag with the intention of losing one survivor and gaining an early Graves trigger. There's a lot of texture and variability here in addition to it also being a teaching experience.

What follows after the showdown is the portion of the tutorial that lays down traps for the players to stumble into; Kingdom Death wants to punish you, and the way it does that is by either intentional deceit or just a "go do whatever" attitude. The survivor who sets up the first settlement location gains a courage, but is then made unavailable for the next hunt – an inexperienced player would feel compelled to pick one of the prologue survivors as the founder and then that survivor would be held back from getting to Age 1. Likewise the first settlement location, the Lantern Hoard, serves not only the thematic purpose of signalling to perceptive players that this is where ALL the settlement's ideas come from (and thereby setting up the big reveal in advance), but it also exists to fool players into investing unwisely. Innovating is right there on the location card, it's the first thing you look at and you're told you can only do it once per settlement phase. Plus it lets you use that Innovation deck you just set up during the Returning Survivors. It gives you a second Innovation like the Language one we just got; it just has to be the correct play right?

Well it's not, because KDM has hidden the important information away from a new player; you're not told how important gear is (it's at least equal in importance to Survivors, maybe more so), you're also not told that the next white lion is going to have 8 toughness and 11 wounds. You're going to need to be able to hit harder and last longer. It's not going to get easier here.

You're also not told anything narratively about that upcoming visitor beyond that there's a little Nemesis Encounter – Butcher in Lantern Year 3. The survivors have no idea what's coming, they're tabula rasas remember? Their mysterious benefactor 'The Lantern Hoard' can't tell them either, it communicates via inspiration, not direct words. All of this conspires to make the start of your first KDM campaign a really bumpy road; it is likely that your typical newbie group of players will innovate, make a couple of things that sound cool, and then rush out into the first Level 1 White Lion only to get their survivors turned into minced meat and broken bones. Starting a death spiral that will end with the lights in their settlement fading and winking out due to a lack of recovery mechanics in the game.

In addition, I've taught many new players the game and many of them have confessed that this game, even with a tutorial, feels impenetrable and frustrating. They needed my presence to help guide them through what was happening and why; it's a lot to take onboard a new board game when you're just learning what you need to do, but when you also have to operate the opposition that adds an entirely separate unit on the board who has different rules from your own. I get it, I can operate boss battlers without much effort because I do it so often that the core mechanism have become natural short hand due to internalisation. More than one player has expressed that they wished there was an alternative option to the first showdown that walks through every single step you take including stacking both the AI and HL deck to demonstrate each concept in turn (attack, intimidate, failure reaction, wound reaction, reaction reaction) and so on. Essentially scripting out the fight for at least a third or a half of it and checking in when certain signposts hit.

They've also expressed similar issues with the First Settlement phase due to how overwhelming it can be and also how they feel “tricked” by the game into innovating early due to it being a form of “gambling”. It's hard to see how much handholding the game needs to provide for its players, but I think a tutorial that sets up a strong(ish) early settlement while hand holding each phase once would certainly be beneficial as long as an alternative was offered for experienced board gamers and KDM veterans.

On the subject of feeling “tricked” lets get to a really interesting portion of the game experience.

Cruelty in Gaming

Kingdom Death is at its heart a cruel, deceitful and callous game that wants to deliver a harsh and brutal experience to the players who engage with it, which is why we love it. For players who are not prepared for this they may be blindsided by game expects you to play in a specific manner, but does not seek to teach you that method. In this; KDM is very similar to rogue-likes and rogue-lites; games where playing, learning, dying and restarting with more knowledge of what works and what doesn't allowing for better progress next time. It is absolutely a cruel game, not just in what it does to its in game units, but also in the way that the game is set up to trick the players into making bad choices because they did not know they were bad ones yet. Because how can one avoid a bad choice if you don't have the information.

This is in part because KDM is inspired by the bleak and dark world of Berserk; wearing its influences on its sleeve with the setting being a direct riff on the Eclipse chapter from Berserk. But it also holds a lot of its roots in the games that its designer played while growing up, games like Warhammer Quest (1995) which also took delight in putting the player units into hopeless situations where they could perma-die at a moments notice (Level 1's triple Minotaur spawn in Warhammer Quest is notorious for that). In fact; we know this is the case because the games “ultimate weapon” the Perfect Slayer, is a Berserk reference locked behind a Warhammer Quest reference.

However, to continue exploring this portion of the post mortem review; I want to bring in some comparisons with another game which was inspired by Berserk and wears that on its sleeve; a 2018 RPG Maker game series from Finnish creator Miro Haverinen; Fear & Hunger is a game series with a lot of similar themes to Kingdom Death, though it is far less sanitised with a real not safe for work bent to its content. I'm not going to go into how dark Fear & Hunger gets as I am not reviewing that game here; instead I want to draw the parallels between the two games.

Fear & Hunger is a game filled with dead ends, failure states and really punishing mechanics that are not told to the player in advance. Each battle in the game is essentially a boss battle against a more powerful foe; one which has multiple different limbs that can attack individually. These attacks can deal damage that will deal severe damage, possibly dismember and mail your character permanently or even create coin flips that can result in death and game over. That's just the start of the entire thing; there's so much to the game series; with surprising moments, deep lore and so much to explore.

As a brief aside, if you are now interested in Fear & Hunger, I recommend first of all that you make sure you are fine with a video game that has extreme violence, sexual violence, punishing learning moments and a grim atmosphere of oppression and loss – secondly I recommend that you start with Fear & Hunger: Termina. This is the second game in the series and it has a lot more polish with a great deal less sexual violence; it's a game with some really deep world lore and a lot to love. Super Eyepatch Wolf recently did a video on the series and if you're curious, it's a good watch and it'll immediately tell you if the game is something you'd enjoy, or something to avoid. Also the lore is really deep and fascinating; if you want a good “podcast” journey about this game which I am sure is going to influence APG at some point in the future. Check out Worm Girl's two lore explorations of the games which are items 3 and 4 in this playlist. She does a great job at presenting everything for even someone who hasn't played the game and deserves the props for doing so.

The key difference between Kingdom Death and Fear & Hunger; apart from the fact that KDM, despite its reputation; wisely steers clear of sexual violence; is that Fear & Hunger is a game you can complete in a few hours, and allows for save states. You start the game and end up in a place where you're doomed? No problem, roll back to an earlier save or perhaps even start over, it's only a few hours and you can apply what you've learnt along the way. KDM on the other hand requires many hours of gameplay before delivering that game over – at times keeping a first settlement limping along until something like the King's Man or Phoenix wipes out the last few survivors. Board Gaming is a huge time investment when compared to video games, you have to set the game up physically, you have to operate all the rules, you have to play not just yourself, but also the adversary units and if you're playing this with other people you've also had to organise the sessions and manage expectations of a bunch of different individuals. Individuals that can have a wide range of understandable reactions to the gameplay, some may love it and feel challenged just as much as others may feel frustrated and deceived by you or the game.

However, through repeated plays, paying attention to how the game responds to your actions and learning one can master Fear & Hunger to the point where you can mostly trivialise the threats. Turning from someone the game beats over and over to someone who can master any aspect of the game. You've learnt from all those failures.

Kingdom Death presents a similar challenge; the difficulty of KDM outside of pure random chance from dice & cards comes from knowledge; everything in the game can be beaten, defeated, trivialised, if you have the right knowledge and strategy. However, this is not a video game that costs under 10 euros, its a board game that costs hundreds of dollars and requires sorting, assembly and set up (a lot less of all of that if you get the KDM Simulator). KDM wants to be “Nintendo Hard”; and doesn't care if that is an experience its players are expecting.

The frustrating part of this is that we've seen through games like Oathsworn and Aeon Trespass: Odyssey; plus smaller scale boss battlers like Ashes: Red Rains, Townsfolk Tussle and Marvel Champions that there are better ways to do this experience; one doesn't have to fail over and over by learning through trial and error. However, that is the road Kingdom Death has chosen to walk, the road where one is punished rather than challenged. Which is why I write that KDM hates its players; it's an object, a system without feelings or values, so it doesn't really hate the player base, nor does its parent company hate the community – but it does seek to deliver cruel punishments to the unwise or newer player who decides that a carrying a drum is going to be 'their thing' in this game world.

In short, KDM's gaming experience is rough, spiky and uneven by design. You're going to do things that increase your chances of losing the campaign without even realising you're doing them, because the game's UI and Tutorial portion are not only concealing information from you, they're tempting you to make the wrong decisions and if you do not take time to either learn from others, or reflect on distant decisions made in the past. Kingdom Death hates its players; but it can be beaten down, broken and mastered. That's why I love playing this game despite its seething hatred and desire to hide the outcomes of my decisions from me; it is capable of telling staggering stories. Stories that scale the depths of breaking and loss or the heights of ingenuity and perseverance – get past those initial stumbles, master the game with experience and knowledge and there is a whole world to explore.

Gear & Gear Grids

The heart of a successful campaign of Kingdom Death is its gear; gear in KDM is so important that one can almost visualise the gear grids as being the player avatars in this world rather than the survivors who use them. Gear wins showdowns, winning showdowns brings more resources, more resources means more gear, more gear means more wins. This is the treadmill that the game's core progression loop is mainly constructed around; while Innovations offer an alternate way to scale power they offer less benefit early on, coming into their own once they are supported by a solid foundation of Gear & Survivors.

I really cannot understate just how good the crafting and gear grid systems are in this game. For while the AI and HL Decks are solid steps forward in the design of automated opponents in board games, the Gear Grid system and its affinity puzzle aspect are what makes Kingdom Death something players return to over and over. You have a grid of nine blank squares to fill in before departing to hunt a monster. Initially you'll only be able to fill just a portion of the grid, but through successful hunts one will gather more and more options; including weaponry, utility items and armor. Armor is one of the largest aspects of the gear grid; something that does hold back the game in some areas, but we'll get onto the armor issue a bit further down.

Because gear cards not only provide their own affect, but also have a bunch of coloured rectangles on their orthogonal sides; there is a whole separate skill to building a gear loadout. You see if one correctly places the right gear cards in the right places you can connect these halves into complete squares; squares that some other gear cards can use to give you additional bonuses. This means that not only are you picking gear for its direct stats, but you are also picking gear and placing it in meaningful locations in a tableau to activate bonus abilities. This is a wonderful experience that only grows deeper and more enjoyable the more options you have to slot in. In addition to building a gear grid, you are as a collective group of players constructing four gear grids that in theory work together to create a functioning party of hunters that each have a planned role; be that dealing damage, preventing damage, controlling the monster's behaviour or running about like an idiot until you die.

There's an absolute wealth of decisions to be made here and it is genuinely the best aspect of Kingdom Death's mechanics by a mile because it is a unique and new design that has both numerical and spatial portions to its puzzle. The weird world is interesting, the monster design is very unique for a board game and the settlement management aspect really helps break up the possible fatigue that just an endless parade of boss monsters would cause. However the real hook is the gear; it's a menu of seemingly endless possibilities and combinations that unfold and open up some really exciting opportunities.

However, there is a spot in the game's gear mechanics which represents a fly in the pie. Armor and Armor Sets. So, the game offers five different locations where survivors can be hit by the monsters, and you need armor for each and every single slot, otherwise you have just enough soak to take one or two hits before you start suffering severe injuries.

This means that alongside having a weapon powerful enough to harm the particular level and type of monster you are facing; you also need protection, and that means around six of your nine slots are eaten up by compulsory choices (unless you have Crystal Skin) so most of your time is spent putting together fifteen or twenty pieces of protective gear that have to be replaced as the monster challenge level increases. This in itself is quite a limiting factor that forces play in a particular direction, and there is an argument that KDM's system would benefit for either more gear slots, armor pieces that covers more locations per slot or better shield options (which provide an alternative through giving protection to all locations with less slots taken up).

But!

The real rub in this is the existence of armor sets, a card that you unlock if you wear all items of a matching set. Wear a load of animal skins stitched together from head to toe? Boom, you're now a proud owner of the Rawhide Set bonus. You a closeted furry who's always admired Simba? Dress up in a full set of White Lion Armor and not only can you now get a bonus with daggers or katars, but you can pounce at the enemies while saying “uwu”. This means that full armor sets are one of the defining goals of the settlement's advancement, you don't want a mismatched pile of whatever you could manage to cobble together from a the body parts of Tom, Bambi and Foghorn Leghorn, but it is never going to compare to a matching set even if it does look more fashionable.

There is also a second issue surrounding gear; in that utility items are always useful from start to finish of the campaign, but weapons and armor have to constantly be replaced as you progress through the campaign because that's the primary way you get to scale your power. Armor uses hide, a LOT of hide, and that means some campaigns can just fall apart from the start because there are few protective options that use bone or organs. One can get a natty little skull helmet to protect their brain helmet, or slather themselves up like an oiled bodybuilder with monster grease or make some warrior paint through a wild mixture of animal poop that fools the monsters into thinking that they're not dangerous (or food) – but none of this holds a candle to armor points, and armor points mean prizes. There's a lot of fun in building whatever you can manage from the disparate resources the game throws at you when you complete another gruelling showdown, but if all you get are bones & stomachs? Well you're going to inevitably fail unless you're a bunch of skull worshipping bad asses who fight better naked anyway.

There's a lot to love in KDM's gear system, but it is inherently hindered by design with the randomness involved in the resources you get (which is a good thing) and really held back by the necessity and dominance that the child of hide; armor and its sibling the armor set card, has over the game (not such a good thing).

When it comes to weapons, things sing a similar song; there's absolutely no doubt that there is one mechanic in weapons that trumps everything else and that is Deadly/Luck. We have two versions of this mechanic; one for attacking which is shared between both survivors and monsters – aka Perfect Hit and a second one which exists for survivors only; Critical Wounds.

We'll start with Perfect Hits; because this mechanic exists in a bit of an odd place. When it was present on the Counterweighted Axe (CWA) it could dominate campaigns effortlessly, however that was because of the CWA's automatic wounds mechanic bypassing the HL deck. In a post 1.6 world we still have automatic wounds on Perfect Hits, but it is either greatly limited in the number of triggers it can achieve or it is on the Acid Tooth Daggers and they require drawing the HL Deck cards; meaning the attacking survivor not only has to miss out on Critical Wounds, but they also have to deal with Wound Reactions and the Trap Card. Perfect Hits otherwise appear on only in a few other places like fighting arts (which are hard to build around due to their temporary nature) and similar. Monsters on the other hand just get access to the base ability of “Always Hit on a 10” which strictly speaking isn't automatically a Perfect Hit. Perfect Hits can be modified, Lantern 10 cannot. There is a Perfect Hit interaction mechanic with the Flower Knight, but it is only on a high level version of the monster.

What this means is Perfect Hits are mostly ignored outside of specific builds and can be forgotten entirely by the more casual player; which is a shame and as such I do hope that we see more gear leveraging Perfect Hits and perhaps even some Survival Actions or Innovations that do more with it.

In contrast Critical Wounds/Luck/Deadly exist as one of the four core pillars of Survivor Showdown Mechanics (Along with Evasion, Deck Scouting and Block which it synergizes with as we'll discuss shortly). The heart of the matter is that not only does a Lantern 10 always cause a wound, but we also have various effects that either benefit the survivors or permanently debilitate the monster. All of that is pretty reasonable, but the thing which really tips the entire game in the favour of Deadly is that critical wounds are a mechanic that allows you to generate additional resources and thereby “cheat” the system by becoming stronger a lot faster than normal.

Deadly/Luck is in essence a zero opportunity cost option that allows your weaponry to earn a lot of additional investment on its cost. It encourages a gameplay plan that involves setting up the Hit Location deck as much as possible so survivor attacks line up Deadly against Resource gaining critical wounds. That takes time to set up, which is why Block and Evasion are the other two pillars, they buy you the time to stall and dig for the resources you're looking for.

I personally would prefer to see Deadly removed from being such a common option and instead have resource rewards adjusted upwards to compensate. It's very difficult for designers to plan for a solid and engaging curve of increasing difficulty when they have to account for the difference between Average Joe players and Deadly Diva's in the same game system. This tends to be at the very heart of what causes some players to feel the game is 'really hard' and others that it is 'too easy'. If you have lots of resources, you have the tools you need to overcome any problem and you can avoid the all or nothing nature of showdown victory/defeat; if you are not farming for resources then the game's margins are so much tighter and losing a single showdown can put you into a losing spiral really quickly.

Deadly's importance homogenizes the game's weapons almost as heavily as armor sets do; however, we do experience a more varied selection because Deadly is less important against (most) Nemesis monsters and two survivors with Deadly is enough for a successful hunt party, that leaves room for two other options; though they are often a bow, spear and shield in some combination. It's tough to assess, still I will say I'm very excited for an early game without the White Lion/Screaming Antelope/Gorm because of how much the texture of the entire campaign's play can be altered. Hopefully the Crocodile and Prawns (Smog Singers) do not give us just a flat translation of the Cat Eye Circlet/Wisdom Potion and maybe we also get a revised version of the Rawhide Headband. We'll see, it's time for the next phase.

The Hunt

I'm not going to dwell on the Hunt portion of KDM's design here in this post mortem, the simple truth of the matter is that it is an antiquated design that was disliked in the 1990s. It is in truth wholesale lifted from the Games Workshop 1995 game Warhammer Quest; specifically it's the travelling system that Warhammer Quest employed to add randomness and flavour to the experience of travelling from a dungeon to civilisation.

In the hunt phase you decide on the level of civilisationlevel of monster you are travelling towards. The higher this level, the further you need to travel to get to it. Along the way you'll encounter random events; either ones themed to the specific monster you are hunting, or themed to the world. These moments represent a little insight into the flavour of the creature and world you are inhabiting; they tend to be evocative and interesting, however they are also held back by their callous and erratic design.

Kingdom Death firmly believes that 'roll a one and you die' is a good way to balance the experience, and while on a mechanical and theoretical level this does make some sense. As a player it is just miserable and boring. The game's showdowns are designed around the concept of four vs. one, that's a key part of the game mechanics and ethos, while there's no doubt that survivor death is intended to happen, when it occurs on the way to the showdown, rather than during it. It feels cheap and frustrating. It also beggars the question as to why, if getting there is so difficult, why is the journey back, carting the corpse of an animal all the way through a dark landscape filled with scavengers, completely trouble free?

In short; the Hunt Phase is the lowest point of the game's design and one that every single other boss battling game either ignores, or replaces. There's a good number of reasons for that, in fact I've written a bunch of them above, but I do acknowledge that the Hunt Phase exists to wear down survivors on the way to their showdown, it makes the condition you are in when you enter, uneven. That has merit. Four players choosing their champions and their loadout; only to have one of them fall into quicksand and die before even getting to see the big old time rooster on the other hand, doesn't.

It's a bad phase and is in desperate need of an official replacement, until then all we can do is make sure we bring enough rerolls and avoid all the pitfalls like bringing that stupid noisy drum, Derek stop it, we don't need your rata tat tat!

Next week we'll have the second half of this article, it's another 6000 words and growing at this point. Until then, good luck, have fun and be a good survivor to others.