It seems like board games get more expensive and more elaborate every day. They often have copious amounts of miniatures and thousands of individual components.
Why is Kingdom Death Monster so expensive? It’s a big game with a lot of content, great art work and complicated miniatures. It also has a ton of expansions which can run you well over $2000 all-in and which contribute to it’s very high cost. Read on to see why exactly it’s expensive and whether or not it is worth it for you to buy!
Content in Kingdom Death Monster Base Game
235 page Game Book
400 Unique Pieces of Art
90 Full Page Illustrations
Over 1000 Cards
18 Full Sprues of Miniatures
8 Monsters to Hunt or Fight – Base Game People of the Lantern Campaign
- White Lion
- Screaming Antelope
- Phoenix
- King’s Man
- The Hand
- The Watcher
- Butcher
- Gold Smoke Knight
7 REASONS KDM IS WORTH IT
#1 Miniatures
Kingdom Death Monster is known for having large, detailed models. The Phoenix for example is extremely large, has a ton of fine detail and to create the sculpts for this quality of mini costs a lot, which of course is going to push the overall price of the game higher.
The miniatures for the survivors can be assembled in various different poses and with different weapons and armor so that you can really bring a lot of customization to your survivors. Having miniatures that reflect your game state is a great way to increase engagement and make you feel more invested in what happens to them…so it will hurt more when they die! Kingdome Death Monster is one of the hardest board games you will ever play. It teaches you a lot about sacrifice and is not like any other board game I have ever played.
#2 Hard Cover Game Book
Kingdom Death has some story aspects to it. When you first start out you will read all about your first fight with the White Lion and how your settlement starts. The book is very high quality and filled with beautiful and detailed full page illustrations. The book is 235 pages and brings a lot of atmosphere and storytelling to the experience.
#3 The Game Box
Kingdom Death Monster has one of the best looking boxes around. It’s large with a great looking logo and is made of high quality materials. It is a show piece in and of itself!
#4 Art Work
The artwork in Kingdom Death is amazing even if it is controversial. I personally find the art very well done and it adds to the overall immersion and atmosphere of the game. However it may not be for some people as it does include some non-sexual nudity. There is not a lot of nudity but the art can be pretty graphic even when there isn’t any nudity. Monsters are often grotesque or suggestive and some of the poses and aspects of them can be pretty hard to look at!
#5 The Cards
The cards in KDM number about 1000 and are made from high quality card stock. Nothing worse than paying a lot for a game and getting terrible quality components, but that is definitely not the case for KDM. I will say though that some of the card colors can sometimes be off due to them being pastel shades, but the feel of the cards is great.
#6 Killing Monsters
Kingdom Death Monster is one of the most unique games that has ever been created. It will teach you things about life. You have to play it completely differently than most board games, especially dungeon crawler type games, as it has perma-death. I love how dangerous the monsters are. They each have a ton of AI cards that make them totally unique and deadly and you can hit them in various spots on their body, using hit location cards. Depending on where you hit them different reactions and or conditions can occur.
Failure – When you hit a monster but fail to wound it, bad things can happen. Usually it will attack you back or do something else nice and dangerous
Wound – If you hit the monster and you manage to would it, which is generally pretty hard, then it can react to you wounding it. Usually this is bad, monsters don’t like being cut up by some uppity survivor.
Critical Wound – When you critically wound a monster(mostly quarry’s) you may injure it for the rest of the fight or cause some very specific and interesting status effect applicable only to that monster. Also you very often harvest resources from it when you score the critical. Nothing makes me happier than getting a critical and getting those resources as they will allow you to get your gear built quicker.
#7 The Gear
I love the gear in Kingdom Death Monster. When you critically wound quarry monsters you have a chance of obtaining resources from them. Also when you fully defeat a quarry monster you will get resources depending on what level of monster you faced. this will allow you to build various gear sets. The gear sets from the monsters look great and make you much more powerful so you can progress and fight even tougher foes. It is some of the most thematic and overall interesting gear in any board game I have ever played.
Demand
Last but not least as to why KDM can be very expensive is that, unfortunately, sometimes things cost more because there are less of them; The Law of Supply and Demand. At certain times Kingdom Death Monster has been ridiculously expensive because there weren’t any copies available directly from the company and so the secondary market prices went way up.
