Kingdom Death
Kingdom Death - Core game v1.6
Before I start, if you click in the image, it will bring you to the game webpage.
Kingdom Death Monster
I love this game, so I will start my blog writing about it. I had to go back to my email to remember myself when I got this game, it was September 1st, 2022.
I underestimated the volume of stuff that would arrive at my door and the number of hours this game would consume of my time. This is the father of boss battler games. But I would call it a lifestyle game, as you need to assemble miniatures and also paint.
The photos below are my own miniatures that I assembled and painted for the game.
Kingdom Death is a campaign game, taking 30 sessions to complete, each session around 2 hours, so 60h per campaign. But it has immense replayability! You strive to survive, in a dystopian world, where humans are prey, and the weakest form of life. Your goal is to survive 30 lantern years and fight a final boss (and hopefully win!)
I only purchased the core game at first and played 3 campaigns. I made a journal of my first play through, I went blind, and I discovered that not all monsters are what they apparent to be, and the “Butcher” told me a lesson. I may have spent around 100 hours alone in the core game, before I went ahead and purchased every expansion under the sun.
Things you need to understand about this game:
It is a boss battler and civilization building game.
You fight for your settlement to survive, your characters will die.
It can be more than a board game, with miniature assembling (like warhammer) and painting.
It is expensive and not easily obtainable.
Now with that out of the way, we can talk about the good and the bad part of it.
The good
Emergent narrative. Nothing is scripted, anything can happen. This is something I love for solo play, as you can go wild with imagination coupled with game mechanics and what is happening in front of you.
Very high replayability and continuously support for the game. New expansions are planned until 2030.
It offers many hours of leisure time, assembling and painting, intercalated with game play.
Top quality components, I can’t give enough credit for this point, but everything feels premium.
The Bad
Expensive. And the price keeps going up. I think the core game is $420 now(?). The only time in the year that it gets a discount is during blackfriday (this year it was discounted to $333 same as last year).
It can be very complex. I played many heavy games, but KDM(Kingdom Death Monster) can be up there with the heaviest ones (I am looking at you Gambler’s Chest Expansion).
It is not a once and done type of game, it will require your time investment as all campaign games do. But what puts this is the bad category is that it will require your time in order for you to “get good” and learn the fights and manage to progress. You will most certainly lose the campaign a few times before you succeed. In all my play throughs I only won 2 times.
It suffers of scope creep and delays. The game is already extremely delayed in the production timelines, and it is always pushed even further in the future. The final product is incredible and so much more than what was promised, but it comes at a cost.
Finally, I want to thank Poots for creating this game, it completely changed my life and my passion for miniature painting, solo gaming and journaling.
Myself and Poots at GenCon 2025.
