Travel back in time to a land of magic and mystery. Travel to the sand swept lands of pharaohs and pyramids! In Kemet – Blood and Sand you play one of five Egyptian gods vying for power and control over the lands and the devotion of the people.
Kemet is one of those games with an epic feel to it, good components, excellent mechanics, and can be played quite easily in a reasonable time frame (under or around two hours).
Each turn you have a number of options, including praying for prayer points, spending these points for power tokens, raising pyramids, recruiting troops to help control districts on the game board and moving troops. You might also be able to recruit creatures gained from power tokens and move these around too.
During the game you will want to control temples and other districts. These in turn can grant prayer points or even fame (or victory) points. If you have nine fame points before you take an action and no one has more, you win.
One of things I like about Kemet is that ii is quite a quick, dynamic game. You cannot turtle and expect to succeed. The game rewards action and battles. The miniatures for the creatures in particular are excellent and appealing to me and maybe one day I’ll get round to painting them.
Each turn you have to weigh up your options, take actions carefully bearing in mind your opponents’ plans and time attacks carefully. There is a degree to which you can use diplomacy if a player looks like they are accumulating fame points too easily and it is incumbent upon players to watch what their opponents are doing.
There is a clever mechanic whereby permanent fame points can be acquired through buying certain power tokens or by controlling certain strategic sites at night. Temporary fame points though can still help you achieve victory, but they are dependent on controlling temples and fully built pyramids.
Overall, Kemet doesn’t have the depth of other games or the variation in play, but for you get in the box it does offer what is effectively a skirmish game with plenty of player interaction. To cap it off, it is full of Egyptian themed content.
