Kemet: Blood and Sand

I’ve read a lot of bad rulebooks in this hobby and Kemet’s is genuinely near the top of the pile, dense, oddly ordered, and full of the kind of translation quirks that send you to a forum thread mid-setup just to confirm you’re reading a power tile correctly. It’s not a small complaint. It cost this game a full point on the strength of frustration alone before a single battle happened.

Once you’re through it, though, this is close to the platonic ideal of the area-control genre for me. The power tile market is the beating heart of it, every game you’re buying up a different combination of monster summons, movement tricks, and combat bonuses, and the game moves from a fairly symmetric opening into something wildly asymmetric by the midgame, which is exactly the kind of escalation this genre needs and rarely nails. Combat itself is tense and mostly deterministic rather than dice-swingy, which means losses feel earned rather than unlucky, and there’s a real thrill in baiting an opponent into overcommitting a battle card before you go for a temple you actually want.

Where the Egyptian setting shows up matters too, and it’s not just reskinned generic fantasy war. The scarab and scorpion iconography, the pyramid temples, the specific mythological creatures you’re summoning, all of it feels like it was built from the theme rather than painted over a generic template afterward, which is more than I can say for a lot of games in this genre wearing an “ancient civilization” coat of paint. The board itself is the one visual letdown against otherwise gorgeous components, plain where everything else is lush.

The honest caveat is player count. At two, this flattens into something predictable fast, I’ve heard more than one person say they stopped playing it two-player entirely, and I’m inclined to agree after a handful of tries. Get it to three or four and the diplomacy, threat assessment, and who-do-I-hit-first calculus opens the whole design up. Buy this for a table that can reliably field more than a duel, and be ready to fight the manual before you fight anyone else.