I Was Wrong About Kemet

Told this story shorter in the actual review but it deserves its own space because I still feel a little dumb about it. I owned Kemet years before I wrote about it here, played it exactly twice with just one other regular gaming partner at the time, both games flat and weirdly directionless, and decided the game just wasn’t good. Traded it away for something else at a game store that used to do trade credit, didn’t think about it again for probably two years.

What actually happened, and it took me embarrassingly long to piece together, is that Kemet at two players is a genuinely different and worse game than Kemet at four or five. All that teleporting-your-army-to-your-temple stuff that speeds up the game and strips out map control, at two players there’s nowhere near enough pressure on the board for it to matter, you’re mostly just taking turns poking at each other with nothing forcing real decisions. I didn’t know that going in. I just knew the game felt flat and assumed that meant the game was flat, full stop, no asterisk.

Bought a used copy back a couple years later after a coworker at the clinic, of all people, mentioned she’d played it at five and loved it. Got a real table together, five of us, actual triangulated pressure with people shifting alliances turn to turn, and it was a genuinely different experience. Not even close. I sat there mid-game thinking, this is the same box I traded away for being boring.

I’ve tried to be more careful since about separating “this game is bad” from “this game and I had a bad match on player count or table or mood.” Doesn’t always work. But I think about that first Kemet verdict a lot when I’m tempted to write something off after one rough session.