Kemet: Blood and Sand Components Overview and Impressions
Kemet is a well loved board game with a strong and passionate player base. I’ve never had the privilege of playing Kemet, but have always been intrigued by what seems to be easy-to-learn gameplay yet deep, area control strategy. Two boxes came in for review, the 2.0 release of Kemet called Kemet: Blood and Sand, along with the Kemet: Rise of the Gods expansion and big box storage solution. In this article, we will simply be looking at Kemet: Blood and Sand!
First and foremost, I love that this game comes with a really nice insert with lots of rooms for player components, cards, and regular game pieces. A storage tray was also included for cardboard chits, so no need to worry about bagging up pieces either. Well, that is not entirely true, actually. The game comes with a bunch of stitched bags with logos for the various Gods and other elements in the game, and these bags are meant to hold all the game pieces which should make setting up Kemet a breeze.
Each player gets quite a few components, most are high quality plastic, and a few are cardboard chits. The chits themselves are a bit thin for what I would prefer to see in a board game, but useable none-the-less. These aren’t items you draw from bags or handle frequently, so overtime I doubt it will be a problem. Each player gets a number of small plastic tokens for tracking their prayer points and actions, These are high quality plastic with small engravings on them. They look really nice and are wonderful to use. The plastic pyramids each player uses throughout the game replace 4 sided dice from the original game. The pyramids are highly detailed and come in four pieces. Three are standard pyramid coloured pieces that stack, and the 4th is a triangle gem that sits at the tip. Everything here is high quality, with great attention to detail.
The highlight of the box is definitely the miniatures. Each player gets 12 miniatures in their colour, and these are very detailed, although some are a bit flimsy (spear ends or swords bend easily). If you had the time to pain these miniatures, I think they would look outstanding – I’ll simply be using the standard colours they come in! The fantastic quality and detail extends to the animal / monster miniatures as well. They are significantly larger than the miniatures you’ll get for the players, and have even more detail. Whoever was in charge of animal / monster miniatures over at Matagot did a phenomenal job.
The central board is incredibly beautiful, but will be overwhelming for your first few games. I do think they did a great job of highlighting the various regions on the board, but that doesn’t take away from the business. That said, it is equal parts beauty and functionality, which I think is a really nice touch. With time, I’m sure I will have a great handle on the board, where everything goes, and so on.
Card quality here is more than OK. With limited shuffling I don’t think there is any reason why you would need to sleeve this game. That said, there are so few cards in the game itself that sleeving this wouldn’t break the bank or take up a lot of your time. Everything should fit sleeved in the box as well, so no concerns there either. This update of Kemet also comes with player aids for all 5 players, which includes details on all the power tiles and cards. The battle tiles are nice cardboard tiles that, again, won’t be handled much as you play. The tray included in the box is equally as good for storage as it is for game setup: no need to lay out all the tiles for people to see, simply remove the tray from the box and set it down on the table! I love that so much thought went into how to get this game setup as quickly as possible – the attention to detail really shows.
Overall, I’m quite impressed with Kemet: Blood and Sand. It is obvious that a lot of love went into making this as good as it could possibly be, and setup Kemet to be a well loved title for years to come. Now, I need to get this to the table!
Article By Adam
