Dave Reviews: Blenderized Egypt

Kemet

War games about the ancient world are obviously not designed to re-enact every aspect of conquest in the ancient world. Warfare back then was mostly about not letting your troops fall prey to disease and boredom, and determining travel routes well in advance because it could take weeks to reach a destination.

But there's skipping the boring parts of army management, and then there's adding teleporters.

Kemet is a game for two to five players about armies, monsters, territory control, and eventually smashing the ungodly hell out of your enemies (unless you don't). Players pick a city, stick their armies and pyramids in the city, and set out a huge array of abilities to choose from. You have several actions per turn (the number varies depending on if you purchase abilities which give you bonus actions), and your goal is to balance things so you have enough energy/mana/Ankh Bucks to buy the things that will make you strong enough to hold temples for points (which can be taken away if temple control is stolen) and defeat your enemies in battle (which gives you permanent points). Focusing too much on the army will stifle your economy, and focusing too much on the economy will handicap your army.

So far, so normal. Here are the tricks in a fight: barring an ability that lets you expand the army, you can only move five troops together at once. However, if you hire a monster, that monster can move with an army on top of that five max. This can dramatically alter the strength of the force you bring to bear. Once battle is engaged, you play one of your battle cards, which can cause casualties, protect you against casualties, and/or just add to the effective strength of the army. You can also play other special cards, if you have any, that impact the fight. You attack and win, you get a point. (If you defend and win, you don't get a point, which strongly incentivizes aggressive behavior.)

What's possible—and not exceedingly rare when non-max strength armies fight—is that an army can be wiped out but still win the battle. If you attack and lose all your troops, you still force the opponent to retreat. This is most likely to give people a reason to take a miracle shot at dislodging an enemy from a temple when they're about to win the game, but it's still a little weird. In a slight nod towards logic, if you attack and win, you still need someone alive in order to earn a victory point.

The wide array of abilities you can buy are based not just on if you have the Ankh Bucks for them, but also if your pyramids are high enough level to get the abilities you want. Some abilities let you ramp up your pyramids faster so you can get better stuff! Of course, you need the Ankh Bucks, and you still need your army to be big and strong enough to win battles, and you can't quite do everything before things wrap up. It's one of those games where you start to get an ability engine going, and the game ends before it really gets steaming.

However, while in most games you can sort of see why the game ends when it does, even though you want it to go a little longer, Kemet really feels too short. Maybe an experienced player understands exactly what to do, and how to make the time limitation work in her favor, but when you're in the learning process it feels like you have the potential to get some really interesting things going when the game gets cut out from under you. A game of all new people who don't play very aggressively might actually be a lot of fun, as I'm sure a game between very experienced players is a quick, brutal affair, where any mistake is horrifically punished.

If that latter description is something that sounds like fun, Kemet's probably your kind of game. It does not allow for mistakes, or at least it doesn't allow you to make more mistakes than your opponent and still have a reasonable chance to win. On the bright side, if you do make that mistake, the game doesn't take as long as most war-type games, so the beating will be over relatively quickly. Bonus!

Score: Twelve functional pyramids out of fifteen.