Well that’s quite a title. How is a board game like sex? Let me start by saying that I didn’t set out to write this article. I started writing an article about how this game was able to raise so much money. I looked at all the aspects of its design and in the end came to the above conclusion. Then I stopped, dismayed… could I even publish this? Who was I going to upset… possibly the fans of the game? Possibly feminists, or you know other sane people, who find the content of the game rightly problematic? Perhaps other game designers who are uncomfortable with having games compared to sex? In the end, these thoughts were occupying me enough that I felt compelled to indulge my intellectual curiosity, with the knowledge that it might make some readers upset or uncomfortable. My hope is that it will also open avenues of discussion around the astounding success of this game. Having posted this to the KD:M Kickstarter comments page initially, I’m thrilled to say that it did generate lively and thoughtful discussion. Thanks for being such a great gaming community!

What is Kingdom Death: Monster?

Well the official site describes it like this:

Kingdom Death: Monster is a fully cooperative tabletop hobby game experience. Unite to survive by hunting monsters and collectively guiding the development of your settlement through a 25 year, self-running campaign.

So, it’s a cooperative board game for up to four players. It has very detailed miniatures, many of which are either sexual or horrific. It is very expensive, $250–400 for the base game depending on how you get it. The game is very complex, the miniatures are very difficult to assemble and paint, and the subject matter of the game is dark and troubling. So how did a game that seems like it would be so niche raise $12.4 on Kickstarter, making it the most funded game there ever?

The first point to make is that it IS a niche game. The backer number seems large: almost 20 thousand backers! But then you look at the second most funded game, Exploding Kittens!, with its $8.7 million and 220 thousand backers. Two thirds as much money from more than ten times as many backers. So, the answer to the question is not that KD:M has a broad appeal that generated a tidal wave of support, carrying the game to its record-breaking position. The Kittens made an average of $40 per backer; KD:M made $643. So, I’ll reframe the question: How did KD:M get a relatively small group of backers to pay so much for their game?

To answer that question I need to dig pretty deeply into the specifics of the game and into the minds of the backers.

Four disclaimers:

I’m a 1.5 Kickstarter backer so I have not played the game yet! The number of existing copies prior to the fulfillment of the second kickstarter is low and I just haven’t had the chance. I was part of the second campaign, I’ve bought a narrative sculpt to check out the quality and I’ve read a bunch of thoughtful reviews and watched several let’s plays of the first few ‘lantern years’ or gameplay sessions. I have a background in sociology, but I am not a psychologist. I’m going to talk about my experience of the campaign and game, but I’m not making a clinical analysis of anyone! I’m going to use a bunch of images from the game. I’ll be clear about what is part of the core game, what is an expansion, or a narrative sculpt, or a pinup, or something from the Kingdom Death world that is not part of the game. Many of the images will be explicit, many will be disturbing… some may go so far as to merit a trigger warning. I am not being condescending when I say that if you are upset by this kind of thing I would not continue reading. I would rather over-warn than cause someone distress, and there are some distressing things in the Kingdom Death universe. Some of the conclusions I draw are provocative. That’s on purpose. I’m not making any claims about objective reality, just making some interesting observations and speculating on their meaning. If you enjoy that kind of discourse, then read on!

Survivors fighting the Phoenix

What kind of game is it?

KD:M is a long form game. You play in a campaign made up of 25+ rounds. Each round is a ‘Lantern Year’ in the game and takes perhaps from 2–4 hours. Players guide the survivors of their settlement from its creation through the end of the campaign, or until everyone in the settlement dies. According to most reports things end in death rather often. In any given round, all of the characters being controlled by the players may die, but the game continues with the remaining survivors. A single campaign could easily last a hundred hours, and the game consists of a significant number of possible campaigns.

Lantern Years are split up into three phases: a ‘hunt’, a ‘showdown’ and a ‘settlement’ phase. The details of how all that works aren’t necessary for the purposes of this article, but they may be interesting and I encourage you to have a look at one of the detailed reviews or videos I link to above. The short version is that players kill a monster in a tactical battle, which has tight mechanics and is exciting according to most reviews. Players then harvest resources from the slain monster and take them back to their settlement to build it up and craft better gear for themselves. Next year they do it again. Every few years they are attacked by a much worse monster. If they have prepared well enough, they survive and continue until they defeat a final monster at the end of the game.

So the game is complex, deep, and requires a huge time commitment. That has fostered a very dedicated player base.

I say ‘has fostered’ because the current Kickstarter is the second that the game has done. In the first Kickstarter campaign, “5,410 backers pledged $2,049,721 to help bring this project to life.” The second campaign was designed to support those initial backers by offering them an update package for the game they already had to the new version, and the ability to add new content without duplicating the parts of the game they already had.

Probably the most important thing to say about the kind of a game KD:M is is that it’s a HARD game. The characters that you painstakingly guide through battle and level up die regularly, sometimes due to a single unexpected die roll or card draw. And the settlement that you are shaping over many sessions and dozens of hours can die out before you complete the game. Let me say that again for clarity: you can fail. You can lose the game after dozens of hours of play and have to start over if you are following the rules.

This is a game for people who like difficulty. It is for players who find value in persistence and in having the stakes set as high as possible.

Why does it have the sexual themes and erotic side content?

This is a narrative sculpt called ‘Illuminated Lady’. It is not part of the game mechanically though it is part of the lore.

The sexual nature of much of the art in and around the game is a bit complicated. The creatures in the core game are horrific but not explicitly sexual. The sculptures of the survivors start out in only a few rags, but are not particularly sexualized. Some of the expansion content turns up the sexual body horror to higher levels. The mechanics of the game are largely not sexual, though your settlement can grow through a mutually consensual ‘intimacy event’. (The word ‘consent’ is used three times in that short rules section.)

It’s one of the sweeter pieces of art in the game. A moment of peace and beauty in their horrific world.

And then there are the ‘pinup’ models and the monsters that are not part of the core game. All bets are off here; the sculptures are explicitly erotic to the point of soft core pornography, and they are of both male and female bodies.

These are concept art for two new pinups from the current Kickstarter campaign.

Most of the pin-up models are stereotypically sexualized bodies, and there are more female pinups than male ones. The first Kickstarter offered only female pinups and the current one offers a more even mix. They can be categorized as ‘naughty’ to ‘silly,’ and occasionally, as with ‘Illuminated Lady’ at the beginning of the section and below, quite delicate and beautiful.

Can even finely crafted erotic sculpture be anything other than sexist in this context?

And then there are the expansion monsters. Penises and tentacle penises and breasts (not to mention vaginas and anuses with hands reaching out of them) become common, and the lore becomes more disturbing. The things your characters have to face in this world are legitimately terrifying and horrific. Also sometimes ridiculous.

The ‘Sunstalker’ is the most explicit expansion monster.

Why the combination of body horror and sex?

It’s often said that sex and horror have long gone hand in hand, and I think that’s largely true. So it should not be surprising to see them next to each other here. Adam Poots has said that the game is what it is because that is his artistic vision, combined with the vision of his artists, and that he wants to create a world in which those visions can be realized in a uncensored manner. I think that’s probably true as far as it goes. The next step is of course to ask why that is the vision for the world and the game. To some degree ‘because’ is an acceptable answer for an artist following their muse. But I think that we can get a bit more just by looking at the way the game works and how the erotic and horrific elements in it fit together.

The ‘Wet Nurse’ model is probably the most problematic sculpture from the KD:M universe.

The fact that the core game keeps both the sex and the horror ‘under control’ is important. For the game to succeed as a game it needs to find an audience, and while the general theme resonates with a relatively large number of gamers, I think that if the core artistic elements of the game were all from the extreme end of what is found in the Kingdom Death universe it would alienate far more users than it now does.

The game keeps its ‘artistic vision’ intact while making its core gameplay palatable by dividing the content up into categories that players can selectively expose themselves, and fellow players, to. Anyone finding a particular expansion objectionable can avoid it and distance themselves from its subject matter. Outside of the core game and expansions are the pin-ups and narrative sculptures that only users who want to surround themselves with that imagery need buy.

The ‘Forge God’ answers the nude women of the “Wet Nurse’ with nude male servants or slaves. Neither is a mechanical part of the game.

I think that it’s important to note that the disturbing and sexual content goes quite far. It becomes extreme, to the point where even the most positive reviews that I have read comment that while they may ‘be ok with’ that content, others will probably want to avoid it, or at least brace themselves.

Why the crazy minis?

There are two things that it is important to note about the minis in KD:M.

First, they are of incredibly high quality. The initial resin sculpts are among the most detailed and well-sculpted in the industry, and newer plastic versions have preserved that detail more successfully than any other plastic minis ever produced.

Second, they are very difficult to assemble. You do not get these beautiful (or horrific) models all in one piece. You get them on a ‘sprue,’ which often has a dozen or more tiny pieces attached to it.

These are just the sprues for the core game.

Each tiny bit has to be clipped from the sprue, then have the rough bit where it was connected filed smooth, then be glued to the other parts of that model, then have ‘green stuff’ (a modeling putty) applied to the cracks between the pieces to make them smooth, then be painted, then be attached to its base, probably after that has been painted. Just for the core game this is dozens, if not hundreds, of hours of work. Work that must be done before you can even play the game! To be fair you only need to put together 5 models before playing the first encounter in the game, and you can work on the others as you need them… but in the end you have to put the whole game together before you can play the whole game.

That’s a LOT of work. Why? Well, on one level that’s just how it has to be if you want the models to be as well-crafted as they are when you are done. But the game ‘could’ have been made with less stunning models and it would have been just as playable. So, why did they choose to make something of exceeding quality over something more easily useable?

I think the answer is similar to the reason that the game is so hard. This is a game designed for people who like difficult things. Building dozens of intricate models provides this kind of player a lot of personal satisfaction. It would just not be as compelling if all the creatures were just tokens, or even if they came pre-assembled.