Tactics and Building Better Monsters

Hi! I’m ChaosFarseer, or Alex in real life. I’ve been working on a custom monster for a while, now, as well as obsessively commenting on other Kingdom Death homebrew monsters or content. This article is inspired by a friend of mine, who found quite a few Kingdom Death showdowns to be boring, straightforward puzzles, which led to thinking about the difference between a good and a bad showdown, which led to this. 

I’ve developed a general theory for what makes a good tactical experience in a game. I’ll talk about this for games in general, before focusing specifically on Kingdom Death. This likely isn’t perfect, so any comments would be appreciated!

Tactics: More than a Puzzle

So, we want a game to be fun, and for it to remain fun over time. I believe that the most reliable source of fun in a game comes from making interesting choices based on your preferences and exploring the outcomes. At that point, you develop your own play style and end up in a scenario of your own, which can differ from other players’ experiences. A healthy game will create debate over people’s preferences and choices, with lots of room to explore. Some choices will inevitably be generally better than others, but there should be plenty of options where it is unclear what’s best to do. 

Over time, some games will gravitate towards a single optimal choice, which is measurably better than the other options. At this point, your preferences are less relevant, and you are no longer making choices - you are following a script. The puzzle has been solved. You could mess around and try out other options, but if there is clearly something more effective, it can be very difficult to avoid using it. 

Normally, this applies to pre-game decisions, such as deckbuilding in Magic: The Gathering or choosing gear in Kingdom Death. But it also applies to choices during the core gameplay itself - if you know the best card to play or action to take on your turn, then why not just do that? When there are multiple valid options, you need to think about what you want to do, and you are more engaged with the game that way. 

Most tactics games appear to be good at maintaining this interactivity. In this context, I associate tactics with a combat game, usually with more than one combatant per team, where the players need to create short-term plans to get a win.

I theorize that, during the game, players often need to balance 3 major trade-offs when making decisions, and needing to balance 3 trade-offs makes it unclear what the best option is. 

Why 3? Of course, if there was only one aspect to consider (such as money), the best option is the one which gives you the most of it. If you have to balance two trade-offs (perhaps money and time), the options might be unclear, but it’s also likely that a small number of options will turn out to be generally better than the others. From there, it might be possible to reduce down to a single superior option. There could be more than 3 trade-offs, but 3 seems like the minimum number for a healthy game experience. 

Tactics Assessments

What does this look like for some games? Let’s look at some examples!

X-Wing Miniatures Game: Positioning, Action management, Dice manipulation. The key here is that each team needs to choose how their ships will move secretly and simultaneously, and ships are forced to choose their action with only partial information. Depth comes from predicting your opponent’s behavior and deciding whether to take risky, more damaging close-range shots, as well as deciding when to take a better, more stressful movement and forego your action. 

Image Caption:  You can perform a red maneuver, but you won’t be able to take actions until you perform a green one! 

 Supreme Commander: Area control, Mass / Energy budgeting, Army composition. The best units cost the most, can be countered, and won’t do any good if they’re simply in the wrong place. The game does have straightforward units which clearly counter other units, but players need to scout and set up radar installations to discover what is needed at the moment. Intel is a major portion of Supreme Commander, which helps make this a lot more than a straightforward rock-paper-scissors game. 

Image Caption:  The best anti-ground spiderbot isn’t any good against a gunship ambush.

 Gloomhaven: Positioning, Card management, Time. The closest game to Kingdom Death on this list of examples, Gloomhaven has a strong core system which provides lots of ways to combine cards and lots of opportunity cost. Cards you play will be lost over time, forcing the players to be aggressive, but you burn through cards faster if you cannot skip a turn and take a long rest. Adapting to enemy behavior seems relatively unimportant, although I have limited experience there. 

Image Captions:  Use the top half of one card and the bottom half of the other!

Note that competitive games often have a set of hard and soft counters, where no option is best because another option counters it. A lot of the game’s interactivity comes from this need to adapt to your human opponents during a match. A cooperative game’s AI is usually much more predictable than a player. 

So, Kingdom Death? 

Good question! Let’s look at the core showdown gameplay and trim out the content. So, let’s make up a fictional monster with as few mechanics as possible - it only performs Basic Action every turn as a regular Claw-like attack, and its Hit Location deck is entirely blank except for the Trap. The survivors are naked and try to punch this test monster to death. What kinds of factors do they have to consider? 

• Positioning
• Survival management
• The Trap

That seems pretty good at first glance, but none of these areas are particularly deep. 

• A survivor doesn’t care too much about where they stand. The board is an empty grid, and the only spaces with any effects are the monster’s blind spot spaces. Why wouldn’t a survivor always stand there? There are no tradeoffs to make for positioning. 
• Survival management has some minor decision-making, but not a lot of it. It’s usually pretty clear when you want to Dodge (to avoid an After Damage effect or severe injury) or Dash (to cancel an attack or avoid a reaction), so the bigger question is whether to spend survival on other actions. However, if you have enough of a survival limit, there isn’t much of a downside to taking other actions. Since there are no ways to gain survival by default, it functions much like ammunition in other games - you either have some, or you do not. 
• At this stage, survivors care a little bit about when or whether to attack as the Hit Location deck gets smaller and the odds of a Trap increases. This is only a minor factor in decision-making, since the player may change the order in which survivors attack, but it is generally too random to worry about right now. Note that this is basically part of how survivors spend actions, so in the future, we’re going to roll together actions and survival into resource management. 

Overall, there are very few choices to make. On your turn, you attack the monster. On the monster’s turn, it attacks you. It’s a pretty boring game at its core. Without an interesting monster, there isn’t much left.

The Monster is the Game

Of course, Kingdom Death has a custom Monster in it, with a variety of unique cards. That’s a big part of its title and also its gameplay. The text on its cards adds depth to the player’s choices that otherwise does not exist. 

What this means, though, is that a bad monster creates a stale game. Interesting decisions come from the mechanics of the monster and nothing else; the core rules will not create sufficiently interesting decisions on their own. So, if you are going to create a monster, it is entirely up to you to make the turn-by-turn choices fun. 

How does a monster create that? Based on this theory of tactics gameplay, the monster should strive to create 2 or 3 sets of interesting trade-offs from its unique mechanics (ideally 3, of course). 

You might have noticed that there’s actually a whole lot of concepts that players need to manage during a fully-developed showdown:

• Positioning
• AI Targeting
• Survival management
• Action selection
• Other resource management (insanity, bleeding tokens, etc)
• AI and HL knowledge
• The Trap
• Unique mechanics

While that looks like a whole lot more than 3 trade-offs, many of them can be conceptually grouped together because they operate in a similar area and become good trade-offs in similar ways. More on that in a second, but for now, I’m going to group them as follows: 

• Positioning
  • AI Targeting
• Resource management (conceptual resources, not resource cards)
  • Survival management
  • Action selection
  • Other resource management (insanity, bleeding tokens, etc)
  • AI and HL knowledge
  • The Trap
• Unique mechanics

Now, let’s talk about how to make these types of trade-offs better. 

Positioning

There should be upsides and downsides to standing in various spaces, such that you sometimes want one or the other. If some spaces are clearly better without any downside, then it still doesn’t prompt interesting decisions. 

You can add positioning concerns through all sorts of means, such as Zone of Death attacks, relevant terrain, vulnerable spaces, directional monster movement, and so on. Monster targeting falls into this category since it’s usually based on survivor positioning. If the monster tends to target survivors in its facing, that’s a whole area which survivors will tend to avoid. (Although it also makes the monster’s targeting easy to control.)

For a good example of positioning with trade-offs, the King’s Man combines his weak blind spot with a basic action targeting the blind spot first. You can attack from there, but you’ll usually want to flee before the start of the monster’s turn… if you have the survival to spare. 

As an aside, it’s important to make the monster move as part of some hit locations. This is generally better than knockback at creating positioning variety, since it re-contextualizes the board positions for all survivors instead of just one. It’s also important since the monster does not move unless a card tells it to, and without monster movement the fight can become extremely stationary. 

For example, see the Phoenix - it likes to target either the closest threat or last threat to wound, and besides a couple of hit locations which teleport it, the monster otherwise stands still. The fight often devolves into every survivor standing in the Eye of the Storm spaces, with the target of the basic action dashing sideways every round and walking back.

Image Caption: Stand in these spaces and the monster will never move again!

 Some examples in detail: 

• Good: The Flower Knight. While you obviously don’t want to be in the Fairy Ring, that’s where the monster is, and it keeps trying to pull survivors inside. There might be ways to break this dynamic (such as Range 6 weapons), but it’s very interesting for survivors with melee weapons. 
• Okay: The Gorm. If you only have Reach 1 weapons, there are two clear safe spots are the back spaces of the monster’s flanks. But, if you want more people to attack, you’ll need to take some risks or have survivors dash in or out. 
• Bad: The Lion God has very straightforward positioning goals - always be in the blindspot or behind an obstacle. All of its targeting and its Whiplash trait focus on everything in Field of View, so you stay out of it. There’s no reason to do anything else. That doesn’t really invoke a feeling of hiding from the monster since it is so straightforward. 

Resource Management

Compel the players to make more choices about limited resources (in general, not literal resource cards). Players usually manage their survival, which is a finite pool for the entire showdown, and their actions per turn. They might also need to worry about bleeding tokens or other unique concerns. Card and trap management fall under this category, since they usually involve spending actions or survival to slow the fight down and play it safe. 

Note that if the survivors are not threatened, they will have little reason to spend resources. Let’s assume that the monster happens to stand still every turn. They won’t need to spend survival to avoid damage or surge, and they can take their time with alternative actions such as gathering resources from terrain or activating Rawhide Headbands or Cat Eye Circlets. This also generally applies if the survivors have a good enough tank character, who can consistently draw the monster’s attack and ignore it. Given the opportunity, survivors will take as much time as possible on safe actions and straightforward survival expenditure.

 
Image Caption: Everyone’s favorite reason to stop playing the game.

So, ultimately, the goal is to apply pressure on the players. Get them out of their comfort zone. Make them spend their precious survival, and get them to seriously consider whether they can take the time to Headband or Circlet. This can be done by giving the monster consistent and threatening firepower, often involving a start-of-turn or end-of-turn trait which makes attacks more reliable. You can also add other resources for players to manage, such as the Phoenix’s Age tokens which are consistently added once per attack. 

More subtly, you can also add some pressure through varied AI cards. If there is a legendary and terrible AI card on top of the deck, you have a major incentive to attempt to wound it off - but can you? Maybe you aren’t in your preferred position or everyone has spent their actions, so you need to decide whether to attack immediately and without all the preparation you would normally wait for. 

Some examples in detail: 

• Good: The Butcher. By inflicting bleeding tokens and drawing extra AI cards, the Butcher adds lots of pressure on the survivors. Nobody wants to spend an action to get rid of bleeding tokens, so they force the survivors to choose how far to push their luck. The extra AI cards make it harder to predict how many bleeding tokens are safe, while also making AI and HL manipulation actions less effective. 
• Bad: The White Lion. Cunning adds some minor pressure, but it’s very straightforward; you need to Dash away from Cunning or the showdown starts to go downhill. That’s not a choice, that’s a survival tax, and not a very expensive one either. Additionally, the White Lion is more likely to have turns which can be straight-up ignored, due to Ground Fighting, priority target, persistent injuries, or tall grass. 

Unique Mechanics

An easy way to add a third trade-off is to simply add one! Many monsters have unique mechanics to give them a distinct gameplay experience, and it also happens to give players something extra to worry about. And since there are so few established mechanics in the showdown, there’s lots of space to add your own. 

It should go without saying, but make sure your unique mechanic improves the showdown somehow! Complexity has a cost on a player’s brain, so your showdown should be better for it. 

If you are going to create a unique mechanic, you likely want to go all-in and explore it to its fullest. Gets you the most novelty, and also, it’s not like anybody else is going to be exploring the same area. Your monster might end up overly focused on this mechanic, perhaps, which can be a good or a bad thing. 

Ideally, regardless of how unique the mechanic is, there should be some interaction points between it and the existing mechanics. That way, more existing gear and abilities can affect it. The more detached a unique mechanic is from normal gameplay, the more of the game you are redesigning and the more work you will probably need to balance it, and the players will have less control. 

As an example, let’s make a monster right now!

Let’s say that I want to make a basilisk; survivors it can see instantly turn to stone.  

The key question for this concept is when do survivors turn to stone, and therefore effectively die. I could have the monster emit a cone-shaped zone of death from its front, and design new rules for hiding behind small terrain, but I might be better off using the existing concepts of facing, field of view and obstacles, so that players can grasp it more quickly. 

If I want to have the monster threaten survivors during their turn, I could start by saying that when a survivor spends their activation, the monster rolls a d10 and on a 7+, turns to face them. However, if I instead add several hit locations where the monster turns to face, it can then interact with all the effects involving hit location manipulation. 

I can also add some granularity to instant death by saying survivors gain petrification tokens, and when you get too many of them you die. But, it might be better to use -1 movement tokens or -1 permanent movement instead, so that a survivor’s movement attribute is relevant and this can be influenced by gear. 

(Note, it’s generally not great to have instant death conditions in your showdown, since it bypasses the standard mechanics for attack profiles and damage. Use existing mechanics if possible!)

Finally, note that a unique mechanic is optional. It’s usually a good idea, but there is still a lot of design space in Kingdom Death’s existing mechanics that can be explored. It is possible to make a fun monster using nothing but standard showdown mechanics. Just note that without a unique mechanic, you will likely need to emphasize positioning and resource management (perhaps with multiple resources at once), and very few of the existing core-only monsters in Kingdom Death are good at this. 

Also, let’s sort which monsters have a unique mechanic and which ones stick entirely to core mechanics. Here, the threshold of ‘uniqueness’ is whether the monster is built around something that does not exist on most monsters, and removing it would remove the monster’s identity.

Adam Poots Games: 

• Unique Mechanic
  • Good: Dung Beetle Knight, Sunstalker, Dragon King, Tyrant, Flower Knight
  • Okay: Spidicules, The Hand, Phoenix
  • Bad: Lonely Tree
• Core-Only
  • Good: The Butcher, King’s Man, Gold Smoke Knight, Slenderman
  • Okay: Watcher, Manhunter, Gorm
  • Bad: White Lion, Lion Knight, Lion God, Screaming Antelope

CCG Homebrew (spoilers included!): 

• Unique Mechanic: Storm Knight, Harvester Worm, Eye Jelly, Allison the Twilight Knight, Aries Knight
• Core-Only: Veriphidian, Drifter Knight, Shrieking Eel, Forsaker Sisters

Some examples in detail: 

• Good: The Dragon King. You could make the argument that this doesn’t use any new mechanics, but there isn’t any other monster which operates on a timer. In particular, it creates a rhythm and timing element to the showdown that doesn’t show up on other monsters. It does a fantastic job as a monster mechanic, creating varying amounts of danger per turn, and it keeps pace with survivor attacks through the Radiant Heart hit locations. For bonus points, Unseen Agony and Meltdown affect big enough areas of the board for other survivors to also worry about their positioning. 
• Okay: The Phoenix. Age tokens are an additional push-your-luck trade-off to worry about, in addition to bleeding tokens and positioning. You want to spend as few actions removing them as possible, but there’s always a chance that Disdain or hit locations will penalize them. The problem with its implementation is that age tokens are either trivial to remove or instant death, without much granularity. Note that the Phoenix’s Zeal is a very important part of applying consistent pressure, since the basic action adds an age token and has an attack profile. The monster has a decent number of underwhelming AI cards, so an end-of-turn basic action helps maintain a normal amount of damage per round. 
• Bad: Sadly, the Lonely Tree’s fruit do not create enough of a positioning challenge in the showdown. Positioning rules can be summarized as, your survivor should be adjacent to another survivor and not adjacent to fruit. When you add in that the Lonely Tree cannot move, it needs a lot more to make the showdown board more interesting than an empty grid. Maybe the fruit needed a much larger blast radius, where the damage decreases the further away a survivor is. 

Note that these aren’t the only options for providing interesting trade-offs, merely the most common ones. Since a monster can have all sorts of unique mechanics, the sky’s the limit! For example, we don’t have a monster where you have to balance major settlement or resource concerns during the showdown in addition to winning. 

In Closing…

Well, that was a lot of words! I hope this idea of 3 good trade-offs provides a new way to look at Kingdom Death and games in general. Or maybe it doesn’t, and you can tell me I’m wrong! Feel free to comment on this or ask follow-up questions; there’s a lot more here that I ended up leaving out.