Four of us are tracking a white lion. We’ve already hunted one and have used what we could scavenge from its corpse to make rudimentary weapons and armour. A bow made from its guts, an axe and some darts from its bones, boiled hide strapped to our chests and legs, a helmet made from a skull. We killed the first lion with little difficulty so now we hunt larger prey this time; after all, we’re better armed, more experienced.
Only I make it to the lion. One of us disappears into the mist, one of us turns to grass, one of us folds in on herself, as if being crushed by an invisible hand. My leg gets mangled in an opening in the ground. When I finally reach the lion, I lose an arrow at it. I miss. It claws my belly open and I die.
Welcome to Kingdom Death: Monster!
There are a lot of reasons to not like this game. It’s possibly the darkest, nastiest, most nihilistic board game available to purchase. You’re probably looking at half an hour of setup before you even get to play it, and teardown is similar. There’s so much admin that you probably think about playing it more than you’ll actually play it. It’s technically good for up to 4 players, but in practice one of you will likely die early into a hunt and have nothing to do for 2 hours. And there’s the price! At time of writing the core game will set you back about £400! And that’s just for the base game! There’s dozens of expansions, the largest of which costs about that again. And you’ll want to sleeve it, so that’s another £100 on card sleeves, and several hours sleeving the 1000+ cards.
But, and it’s a big but (everything about this game is big) if you can get past KDM’s faults; if you can justify the price, and the space, and don’t mind spending hours assembling minis; you’ll find a very special game in this monster of a box.
Firstly, let’s talk about that box. That enormous, black monolith. If you’re reading this then you’ve likely succumbed to the temptation of a big box boardgame in the past. But KDM makes Frosthaven look like Exploding Kittens. It doesn’t even fit in a Kallax! It’s not even one box, it’s technically two; one has the game components, the cards, the board, the beautiful 230+ page hardback manual. The other has all the plastic, the sprues full of miniatures. The monsters and survivors. Most of the minis are optional. You could technically make the 4 starting survivors and leave it at that. But you won’t. Because these are some of the highest quality minis you’ll ever see. They’re horrifying monstrosities sure, but they’re beautiful and detailed and there’s so, so, so many of them.
We should probably talk about the game itself. Once you’ve assembled your four survivors and the white lion, you’re good to go with the initial encounter. The game starts deceptively simple. If you’ve ever played a TTRPG like D&D or any dungeon crawler like HeroQuest, you’ll get the basics of combat. You can move, you can attack. Different weapons give different bonuses to your attack and wound rolls. Each survivor has a character sheet that tracks their stats, and you’ll be permanently changing their stats and attributes constantly as you both get stronger and also get wounded and maimed. The combat quickly ramps up as the game progresses though, with survivors getting combat arts and other special abilities; disorders which may help or hinder; armour set bonuses; weapon proficiencies; special actions you can take by spending a resource called survival. Then there’s the monsters. At the start of every encounter you build the monster’s AI deck. This dictates both the actions the monster can take, and also its health. Every time you wound the monster, you discard one of its AI cards, thus making it more predictable, but also potentially more dangerous. This AI deck system is KDM’s best trick in my opinion. It means every fight with each monster is unique. In one fight a particular ability might give you grief, but in the next fight you might not even have it in the deck, or you might end up hitting the monster straight away and discarding it.
The monsters also have a hit location deck. You draw one of these cards every time you hit the monster, and then roll again to wound, taking into account the effects of the location you’re trying to hit. These cards make the fights feel really thematic: You’re not just hitting a lion over and over again, you’re chopping off its claws so it can’t use its grab attack any more, you’re hitting it hard in the skull and dazing it, you’re chopping off its testicles and making it so furious it will only target you until you’re dead.
After every encounter you have a settlement phase, and this is where you develop your survivors. Crafting better gear from the resources you’ve scavenged; building new settlement locations so you can craft even better gear, innovating new ideas and sciences to make your survivors more powerful, attempting to have children to boost your population.
Each element of the game feeds into the others, making a really compelling core loop. You hunt to get resources that you use to build gear and settlement locations, but you never quite have enough to do everything you want, and there’s always new monsters to hunt, nasty nemesis creatures who will come to your settlement and wipe you out if you’re not prepared.
I could talk about this game all day, if you let it, it’s all consuming. It will take over your life, and your dining table, for weeks on end. You’ll be on the wiki putting together all the scraps of lore, looking at the many expansions even though you’ve not finished a run on the base game yet, pouring over BGG forums for the best loadouts and strategies. It’s incredible. It’s huge. It’s expensive. It’s hard, and unfair - frustratingly so at times. It’s very much not for everyone. But by golly is it fun.
For: Dark Souls and Monster Hunter fans, miniature hobbyists, and people who like to feel they’ve really earned a win.
Not For: People who hate RNG, those with limited table space, or anyone who wants their characters to have a happily ever after.
