Kemet & Ta-Seti Expansion First Impressions

Posted on July 16, 2013 by Jesta ThaRogue

Kemet makes you think, “War! What is it good for?”

Well, buying power tiles and holding Temples apparently…

In Kemet, players each represent an Egyptian tribe and will use the mystical powers of the gods of ancient Egypt – along with their powerful armies – to score points in glorious battles or through invasion of rich territories.

The conquest for the land of Kemet takes place over two phases: Day and Night. During the day, choose an action amongst the nine possible choices provided by your player mat and perform it immediately. Once every player has taken five actions, night falls, with players gathering Prayer Points from their temples, drawing Divine Intervention cards, and determining the turn order before the start of the new day.

As the game progresses, they can use Prayer Points to enroll magical creatures and have them join their troops. In addition to intimidating enemies, these creatures provide special powers!

So the goal is to get 10 points. You get points by winning battles when attacking, controlling temples, buying certain power tiles and levelling up your Pyramids.

You have 3 Pyramids represented quite cleverly by large D4s. One of each colour, White, Red, Blue.

I’m not sure if it matters but I picked the Kittie people. Actually, it doesn’t matter at all as they’re all the same, and neither does the starting position. Kinda nice to have it like that.

So this game gives you a lot to do with very limited resources. You only really have one resource, Prayer Points.

These prayers points are used to take one of the 9 actions (Well, 5 different actions split into 5)

Actions

Buy a Power Tile – This single action is split into 3 – White, Red, and Blue. This stops any player from buying multiples of the different Power tiles in a turn. Each colour has a different focus with Red on Attack, Blue on Defence and White on… something? Cheap shopping I guess as they make other things cheaper.

For example, this tile, the Goddess, was the first action I took in the game. I bought it as it makes all other power tiles 1 Prayer Point cheaper.

Each tile is worth a number of Prayer Points depending on the level and you can only buy a tile that is equal to or lower than the level of the respective colour Pyramid you control.

Pray – Gain 2 Prayer points… There are 2 of these in your action selection Pyramid.

Level up your Pyramid – Pick a Pyramid and pay a number of Prayer points to level it up. Once a Pyramid gets to Level 4 you gain a victory point so this is 3 easy victory points for you. 30% of your target.

Recruit – Replace the dead dudes in your army.

Move – Move a unit of your troops or teleport them to an obelisk. There are 2 of these in your action selection Pyramid.

Once you move into the same space as an enemy unit you can attack. Combat is interesting.

Combat

Firstly as I mentioned earlier you only get points for ATTACKING and winning so you can just ‘Turtle’ as they say. That is, stay home and be bored all game.

Each player secretly selects a battle card from their hand which will give them +x to their attack, between 1 and 4.

You then add your number of units plus that bonus (plus other bonuses from Power tiles etc) and whoever has the highest total wins the battle. If the attacker wins they get a victory point.

These battle cards also show how many casualties you inflict on the opponent. You compare your Casualty score to the opponent’s defence score and you each lose units equal to this number.

So you can win the battle but lose more men. Nice touch.

Of course, if you lose all your units but win the battle, you don’t get a point, so something to watch out for.

So yeah, I liked Kemet. Would I play it again? Yes. Would I go out of my way to play it again? No.