I've been lax in posting here the last few weeks! I haven't intentionally abandoned Steemit or my games review project--rather, I've been distracted by a game that doesn't neatly fit into my queue. The game is Kingdom Death: Monster (warning, some blood and nudity in images at link), a hefty cooperative campaign board game that's been the darling of Kickstarter two times in the last few years. I've had a few occasions to play the real thing in person with friends, but a lot of my time with it has been spent using Tabletop Simulator, a physics sandbox optimized for emulating the experience of playing board games and role-playing games at a physical table.
My wife calls my relationship with KDM a "cyclical obsession," and I'd say that's pretty apt. I dive in, playing with whoever will consent to join me, and whiling away the hours playing solo when I can't find anyone. Eventually I burn out on it, because the game is very difficult, in ways both fair and unfair, and you can sink a lot of hours into the game before ever arriving at a fail state. Then something comes up to reignite my interest, and off I go again to get another few dozen hapless sods horribly killed in the dark.
The latest event to get me back into the game was the release of Maximo and Kijan's latest table, which goes to new lengths to assist the player in remembering all the fine details. KDM has a lot of moving parts. No individual rule or subsystem is especially hard to understand or even to teach, but as the game goes on, you accumulate a lot of modifiers and situational triggers that are easy to forget. (I've heard it said that no one plays KDM correctly. Messing something up is pretty much inevitable.) There are downsides to playing a board game with mouse and keyboard over an Internet connection, but the inclusion of sophisticated Lua scripting in a Tabletop Simulator build can be a godsend for this kind of thing. Maximo has gone into obsessive detail with this table, such that simply picking up a piece to move it will remind you of special movement rules in play, attack and wound rolls are calculated out for you with success and failure indicated by color-changing dice, and entire phases of setup fly out onto the board at the click of a button.
Maximo isn't done yet, either. I've had the privilege of getting a peek at what he's working on, and it's undeniably massive. The board will be aware of positioning when it comes to effects like flanking, display the area of effect of monster attacks as dynamic overlays, and even assist with the complex timing of actions interrupting one another. The update represents hundreds of hours of development, all for a mod it's not even possible to monetize. Labors of love, amirite?
If y'all would read a Let's Play series of this game, I would gladly whip one up for you. There's item crafting, tech trees, gory critical hits, storyline decisions, baby-making, and oh so many random tables to roll on. Interested?
