You'll never encounter a more brutal game than the pen-and-paper monstrosity that is Kingdom Death: Monster. Let's rattle off every one of its negatives:

Its print run is incredibly limited, meaning you can currently only buy the game from eBay resellers. Their insane price hikes make the game's retail ask of $400 seem quaint.

Game details Designer: Adam Poots

Publisher: Adam Poots Games

Players: 4

Age: 15+

Playing time: 60-80 hours, 2-3 hours per session

Price: $400 / £350 (sold out at the Adam PootsAdam Poots Games15+60-80 hours, 2-3 hours per session$400 / £350 (sold out at the official site

The box is crammed to the brim with enough content to terrify anybody. There's a 223-page book, a series of elaborate play boards, a gazillion minis, and hundreds of cards split into dozens of decks.

The minis arrive in pieces. Players are expected to put them together and take them apart throughout the stages of a given campaign.

A full KD:M playthrough, from the beginning of your characters' village to its end, takes no less than 60 real-life hours, if we estimate a little over two hours of play for every "year" of your campaign's 25-year lifespan.

Worst of all are the elaborate systems for improving your in-game characters. They would be fine in most pen-and-paper games, but the amount of death KD:M throws at your heroes makes all the build-up feel that much more bittersweet.

Should you count yourself among board gaming's biggest masochists, however, you're in for the four-player co-op adventure of your wildest dreams.

Putting the "pro" in "intestinal prolapse"

Sam Machkovech





Sam Machkovech

































A few months ago, I received a brief e-mail from my favorite board gaming friend on the planet—the kind of guy who goes to multiple "board game retreats" per year to try out weird new games that haven't even been translated into English yet. He gets excited about games, but he's not wordy, so when I saw his brief, big-group e-mail asking anybody to join a KD:M session ("it's ridiculous and awesome"), I jumped on the chance.

I'd heard whispers about this elaborate monstrosity from my gaming group, framed in an assumption that this whole crazy-sounding thing was Kickstarter vaporware. So I was shocked to hear that we knew someone who'd actually bought it—and loved it. A few days later, I arrived at that friend's house. That's when I saw the whole game spread out over his massive board-gaming table.

Surprisingly, there's a brief way to describe how the game works. At its core, KD:M offers two kinds of gameplay in each of its campaign "years:" a D&D-styled co-op battle against a single, brutally difficult boss monster and a 4X-ish management phase for your warriors' home settlement after each fight.

The first thing worth understanding about KD:M's quality is how it hooks players into its complicated systems so that in each half of the game, players are minding what consequences will play out in the other half. The decisions you make in a bloody battle reverberate in ways that you can foretell to some extent, while the pre-battle management of crafting, shops, skill upgrades, and villagers' romances offer a lot of "do we take a benefit now or hold out for even bigger stuff later" weighing at all times.

Before all of that, your group of four (and that number is firm) must wake in its first year, mostly naked and weak, to do battle with an out-of-nowhere monster. So long as even one of your warriors survives, he or she will build a settlement whose residents must contend with a new monster every year as part of a lantern festival, though in some years, players will get to choose which monster they hunt. Different monsters drop different, random loot, but certain crucial items, weapons, and armor sets require parts from specific monsters to be crafted, so you have hunt decisions to make.

For example, do we keep fighting the easy monster and try to finish its crafting possibilities? Or do we risk more deaths by facing a monster class we're not ready for so that we might craft stronger stuff that'll get us through the required super-boss fights in various years? After all, some years present required bosses by default, while card-based events force other fights to take place when you least expect them.

The battle phase shouldn't terrify anybody familiar with pen-and-paper RPGs like D&D. Place minis on a board covered in square grids; pick from a set of powers to attack and do other maneuvers; roll dice to determine success or failure. Kingdom Death's key difference is in its emphasis on specific body parts. If a monster records a hit on one of your heroes (meaning, a high-enough roll on a d10), it'll then roll a "damage location" die. Should enough hits land on, say, your waist, you'll be forced to roll against a mortal-damage chart. The mortal damage charts ranges from a mere knockdown to the lopping of your genitals to an intestinal prolapse—which means your hero can no longer wear "waist" armor—to full-on death.

Expect your heroes to roll against this mortal-damage chart on the regular. Boss characters have no shortage of brutal abilities. Player characters can find themselves in trouble even if they roll a successful "attack" roll, which then requires players to roll against a specific monster card. These sometimes offer perks for rolling a "crit" (usually meaning a 10, though sometimes also a 9), but they also punish players for not rolling a big enough number. Additionally, occasional "hits" turn up a card that says their sword stab, for whatever reason, still gets your warrior in trouble.

That's all to say that as a KD:M campaign extends over dozens of hours, expect fights that end with only one hero returning to the village to be considered a rousing success.

Listing image by Adam Poots Games