So I've not played Kingdom Death for a good year or so, and so in the last week I fell headfirst back into a new campaign and I am already a third of the way through a campaign, which has reminded me about why I love this game so much.
If you don't know what Kingdom Death: Monster is, it is a tabletop miniatures board game that has very mature themes and imagery, echoing the style of the Beserk manga, and many other gritty anime series. The premise is that the survivors - 4 humans dress in nothing more than loincloths and who have awoken in upon a plain of stone faces - fight against a monstrous white lion with pieces of stone pried upon from the floor. Surviving this initial encounter (in game terms you play through this as your training hunt) your survivors are joined by others and start a camp. Using the parts of the lion that you just killed you fashion armour and weapons and set out on more hunts.
The game cycle thus is "The Hunt" which consists of a series story evens revealed on cards or using the d100 table in the gamebook, "The Showdown" where you face the monster you have been hunting, and "The Settlement" where the returning survivors come back with the spoils of their hunt and make new gear and grow the settlement as they learn new things as a collective, such as painting, music, or the concept of family.
On the surface, because the game line has optional "pin-up" models, and the very Freudian monsters, the game can come off as very sexually charged. However, the story events of the game for the survivors are all built around creating families, teaching, partnerships, and cherishing what makes us human vs the monsters which are a distortion of those ideals.
Gameplay in Kingdom Death for the most part is relatively simple. Survivors move and make an action in a turn. Movement is grid-based, and attacks roll a number of d10 vs a target number. Hits translate into Hit Locations being drawn from the deck, and rolling to wound is again just a case of rolling a d10 + a strength modifier vs a toughness.
What makes Kingdom Death more interesting is that Hit Locations are unique to each monster type you fight, making monsters different depending on their type. For instance, Spidicules has legs which if you wound you put in a separate pile as you get a bonus result if you defeat it and have taken off all the legs. Hit Locations also have Critical Wound results which give further effects, and which if achieved cancel out reactions. Reactions on wounds are not on all cards, and can depend on the wound occurring or failing. These reactions trigger movement, or attacks, or some other effect that the monster enacts.
Wounding a monster results in one of the AI cards of the monster being removed. And this is where the AI deck for a monster comes into play, as each deck is randomly generated from the cards available for that monster, making most showdowns quite different, and also the monster falls back into certain fighting methods as the AI deck is reduced - and god forbid that the last card in the Butcher's deck is the Infinite Kick card!
So what has made this dive back into Kingdom Death so exciting? Well, first I am using expansions that in effect means all the core game monsters are replaced with those that fit a different theme - that of the Abyssal Woods. The Woods changes the hunt cycle a little, and by having monsters that fit that theme (Spidicules, Flower Knight) it gives the sense of a very different nightmare world being explored. Also given the lack of face to face wargaming going on, having such a deep and expansive solo miniatures game to play is a great bit of fun, coupled with the emergent story that is played out as the random events are rolled. Survivors have died, some have returned from the dead. Others now wield a legendary weapon, and some have acquired fighting skills that make them expert hunters.
Kingdom Death is quite the game to get into, with many different monsters to use as alternatives to those in the base game, plenty of expansions that provide new story events, and various kits to build survivors with different armour. If you want to get a better idea of what Kingdom Death is like, then check out the video series I did with Beasts of War/OnTableTop.
Also, if you are interested in my thoughts on gaming, check out a recent interview I had with Terry on Mage the Podcast.
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