Kemet Two Player, No Rulebook to Trust

Clear day, no smoke on the horizon, and a through-hiker stopped at the tower long enough for a game before pushing on to the next shelter. Kemet was what I had that could handle it, dudes on a map, Egyptian gods, pyramids you teleport your army through so nowhere on the board is ever really safe. Fast and mean in the good way, we were fighting by turn two.

The rulebook is the one thing everybody who’s played this agrees on and not in a nice way, several reviewers call it flat out atrocious, one says it made them angrier than anything short of a family group text, and I believe every word, I had to run a rules video on my phone before the hiker’s ride would’ve even arrived. The pyramids themselves are a small annoyance too, three tiers to track by physically lifting and stacking little sand-colored pieces where the older edition just flipped a die, more fiddly than it needed to be for what it’s tracking. Set against that, the tile trays are genuinely great, one reviewer called them the best storage upgrade in years and I won’t argue, everything sits in its slot and the box travels well, which up here counts for something.

Endgame got mentioned a lot as the sticking point, once someone’s close to winning the whole table piles on and it turns into a kind of hot potato where the leader just gets hammered until somebody else limps across the line, and I felt that in our own game, my hiker friend nearly took it clean until three of my units converged on his temple in the last round. It surprised me how well it held up at two, plenty of reviews assume you need four or five to get the real experience but the tension was all there with just us. Minis are solid, bigger than the old edition, though mine came unwashed and a little flash-lined, which is a painter’s problem and not mine, I don’t have paint up here anyway.