The successful Kickstarter board game Kingdom Death is a complex game with a lot of depth and immense replayability. Four players must band together to slay fierce monsters and build a settlement to provide their heroes, known as Survivors, with the resources and tools needed to continue slaying monsters as the years go by.
It can be a bit overwhelming to dive into and developing strategies for winning is half of the game each time you play. It’s strongly advised you play with people familiar with the game to succeed, that being said there are some general tips you can use to help you with each playthrough.
10 Stick Together
While sticking together is a good idea throughout the game it’s incredibly important in the first few fights. Your characters are inexperienced, ill-equipped, and not very capable of taking on and defeating monsters. Having them by each other’s side in the fights is key to keeping them alive longer and putting the monsters down sooner.
There are certain fights that necessitate spreading out a little and as time goes on this becomes less and less critical, but honestly you should always default to standing together so your survivors don’t die alone.
9 Save Your Dodge
This is more important in the early parts of the game when Survival points are limited and it’s harder to regenerate them. You may feel tempted to spam the dodge ability to avoid receiving damage and keep your character in top health, but don’t do it.
Survival points are too valuable to waste on hits you can tank and you’ll want them for later fights. Only use dodge if it’s absolutely necessary to keep your survivor alive or avoid a serious blow. It may sting to take a few hits in the beginning but having those points in later fights will outweigh the pain early on.
8 Plan Ahead
This game is all about preparing for the final fights. The early fights should be seen as mini tests of your characters’ abilities and strengths, if you find yourself struggling early on you’ll be ill prepared for later fights.
While survival and victory is your top priority you should definitely have a long term goal in mind. It’s better to survive an early battle by the skin of your teeth then waste resources that should go towards later fights.
7 Have Builds In Mind
A good way to plan long-term is to have builds in mind for your survivors. Early on this is a little more difficult as you’ll have limited innovation and resources at your disposal. But as you start crafting items and your character stats should improve you’ll want to start drifting into battle roles.
What builds you focus on depend on what you can accomplish and the direction the game is going, but in general you want a tank-type, a main damage dealer, and a support, with the others being a jack of all trades or a backup to one of the other roles.
6 Rawhide Armor First
There are a number of armor sets you can build and each provide different bonuses to your characters and have differing costs. Regardless of your long-term goals, builds, or resources the first thing you should craft are full sets of Rawhide Armor for your survivors.
It’s relatively cheap on resources and provides survival and evasion bonuses. They also hold their own well into the mid game which allows you to dedicate resources towards more late game armor sets. They’re cheap to make and cheap to replace so definitely get your character’s outfitted in Rawhide.
5 Monster Grease Is Your Friend
Monster Grease is your best friend in this game as it’s relatively easy to make and provides your survivor with a bonus to evasion. Monster Grease costs a single Organ which is a very common resource throughout the game.
It does require you to have an Organ Grinder, but this can be acquired early on. Having Monster Grease on hand will be useful throughout the entire campaign so you should get your hands on some as quickly as possible.
4 Innovate As Much As You Can
Your settlement is key to expanding the survivors’ combat prowess and progressing in the game. Innovating should be your number one priority after dedicating some time to producing armor and weapons.
Arguably the first thing you should focus on is the Symposium. This allows you to draw an additional two cards whenever a survivor innovates which really ramps up your settlement expansion. Your settlement and what you can do with the resources you gather is the key to survival so strive to do as much innovation as you can between hunts.
3 Learn The Patterns
Each monster comes with a variety of attacks and combat patterns that they use to attack your team. Learning this is important to avoiding the worst attacks, finding weaknesses, and exploiting opportunities as they arise.
This could be anything from determining proper positioning in the fight to learning which stats are going to give you more mileage. So start paying attention to the creature’s blind spots, attack patterns, and abilities before diving in head first and getting killed.
2 Keep An Eye On Insanity
Insanity is an interesting mechanic in this game. Generally speaking your survivor’s insanity levels will rise and fall over the course of the story. Sometimes high insanity can be a good thing as it allow you to use certain items and unlocks abilities like Immortal Disorder that are actually very powerful.
The opposite side of this coin is that certain encounters will result in the instant death of all survivors who are insane or have high insanity. To be honest it’s probably in your best interest to have a team with varying degrees of insanity. This allows you to take advantage of certain items, but you still have a team if the worst happens when fighting the Screaming Antelope for instance.
1 Download Helpful App
The absolute best thing you can do when playing this game is to download an app like Scribe or Story Assistant. Many fans of this underrated game agree that these kinds of apps are an enormous help for managing your settlement, storing resources, tracking year progressions and so on.
This isn’t as necessary with Tabletop Simulator, but if you’re playing the physical game then absolutely consider using one and if you’re playing solo you shouldn’t start playing without one downloaded onto your phone.
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