Kingdom Death: Monster
So…
This will be my first warning ever for this site, I hope the last but if I keep talking about Kingdom Death… probably not the last. Let it be known this article is Not Safe For Work. Though why would you be reading some painters blog at work anyway?
Okay. I both love and hate Kingdom Death for just one of the reasons above, it’s not safe for work. There are dicks everywhere, the women are not flat chested, their thighs are what every anime shut in dreams of. The guys are ripped and don’t mind showing some wang in the pin ups. Already I feel I have lost a good lot of you, not a good start. See that is part of its charm though, it’s unapologetic.
Lion God by Scott Hockley
Here is a monster with a giant wang coming out of its chin which it uses as a weapon, LITERALLY an item description is ahh delicious feculent... Once again, I am losing you. However, the point is this it becomes mundane, and so does the macabre horror of it all. Outside of your little village an endless sea of stone faces and you know somewhere out there, there are monsters. Only this horde of lanterns is safe. Nothing out there makes any sense… to us. It’s story and it’s game play are in harmony.
See, Kingdom Death has practically invented its own genre and they have some of the best models produced in the industry. Not even after the invention of 3D printing! You think you’re a smooth painter buddy? Well guess what, take a look at all of this skin oh! And light source on almost every model. Hope you don’t stuff up CHUMP. This is the second part about Kingdom Death Monster which drives people away… It's intimidating.
Kingdom Death Monster is perhaps one of the first post video game, board games to see the amazing complexity of video games and instead of saying let’s make something simple, they said let’s make something that can compare to video games. If you know Darkest Dungeon, which was released in the same year, with very similar themes, parallel thinking at its best. (Talking about parallel thinking, want to check out something freaky?, check out all of the different Harry Potters that were released in the same year as Harry Potter, now that’s a deep dive).
So here are the components of Kingdom Death:
The book
The game board
The settlement board
The hunt board
The location deck
The Settlement event deck
Four Gear Grids
Character Pad for character sheets (yes a whole pad)
Settlement Pad (yes for multiple settlements)
Monsters decks I won’t spoil anything but lets just say there are a lot
Monster Deck:
Hit Location deck
AI deck split into basic, advanced and super
Monster resources
Gear Decks special one inch by one inch cards which let me say good luck finding sleeves for. (Though some how I got them at HH)
Terrain Deck
Fighting Arts Deck
Special Fighting Arts Deck
Disorders Deck
And I think that’s all of it, bar the miniatures that come with it. I wanted to write it out by memory to sort of show how much can be involved. Except here is the thing…
The average play session of the game usually takes me and my friends about an hour to two. We usually get two or three hours in a night, sometimes we are super quick, other times we take longer and it's us not the game. But how can it be? you read everything I just listed off right?! Even with all those components, It just works.
Also, it’s one of the few games where you feel the impact of everything. Card flips, dice rolls, they will have you on the edge of your seat as you wonder what is going to happen what goes wrong next… It has the magic of the games of old! Like Hero Quest when you were playing with your childhood friends. However, there is one final hurdle which isn’t childhood friendly at all when it comes to Kingdom Death. The cost….
Currently the cost of the game is 420 USD. In Australian that’s 582 Dollary Doos. I got it for less because I bought it earlier but… Yes… it’s A LOT. So… What can you say about that other than I have outed myself as one of the most foolish and stupid of people, with no ability to control my spending… except you know there is more.
I have perhaps spent over the years, 50 sessions with this game with different groups of friends. That is probably on average about three hours because some I played more with than others. So that makes 150 hours of play! How much would 150 hours of movies cost? That’s about 75 movies. Or what about dinners out? Let’s not forget the time I enjoyed painting. So here is the dirty little secret about this article… It's not about Kingdom Death.
It's about you, and your hobby. Kingdom Death is like the final boss Monster (see what I did there?) of the hobby community mixing board games, cards and miniatures and yet it's just foreign enough for me to be able to give you the feeling you may have once had, or still have about your hobby. Explaining the themes of many games makes you want to cringe in disgust trying to explain them sometimes.
“Warhammer 40,000 okay so the Imperium are space Nazi’s well they are not Nazi’s because there is distributed power and an alliance with these post humanists called the Mechanicum who hate flesh… Boy is it getting hot in here or what…”
Then there are the minis.
“Yeah so these are the good guys, well relatively but they are really cool right, yeah I know the tanks look like boxes… oh yeah oh those skulls well some of them are icons and some are trophies… well, ya see uhhh…”
Then the game play
“So anyway you have these armies who face each other, now this big one if it gets hit you have to refer to the chart to see how well it is doing because the more damage it takes the less it performs, see that makes sense. Oh the cards well this is the stratagem deck and this the objectives deck and that’s for psychic powers…”
Finally the cost
“Listen sweety, honey I can explain, see the thing is that this one is really new and the model was redesigned… sleep on the couch… okay…”
You surely must have remembered your early days of trying to explain your hobby to other people. However, you have better answers now like, “The story has a lot of depth but on the surface it's just an excuse to play wargames”.
A lot of the time we feel we have to justify ourselves. Now I am not saying spend your whole household budget on toy soldiers or playing cards. What I am saying is be like a friend of mine, he loves cars, he loves puzzles, he loves Blood Bowl. He proudly displays it everywhere. If you love something, you shouldn’t put it in the closet, you should display it loud and proud, because if someone doesn’t like it… That’s their problem not yours.
Until next time friends, enjoy your hobby, display it proudly!
And keep those brushes wet