Shadows of Kilforth - first impressions
I bought SoK yesterday as a gift for myself for my patron’s day today. I started playing yesterday evening; this first game is still on, but I just wanted to already say I am thoroughly impressed.
I am a “theme kind of player” (vs. the mechanics folk) so I am especially grateful for the numerous official tweaks for making the game easier and simpler, scattered around the rulebook. The game seems to still be handing me my ass (only 8 Nights left and I am just in Chapter 4), but I am definitely superbly enjoying things, and not feeling guilty of houseruling, because the variants are officially supported (the 4+ sucess, no Plots, -1 Night at start, auto-Stealth; but forgot about the Adventurer mode), yet the game is still tense for me.
As a special, incredible highlight, yesterday at some point I just sat still in awe for a while, contemplating in shock how my Vampire Lordless Bushi went on to suck the blood dry from a fragile, innocent Musician. And he did it just for a single gold coin, to progress with the Saga, and because he’s an Oath Breaker. What a monster he has become - and all that totally within and because of the game’s framework of rules! And the subsequent flavor text of the Saga was how “now you must overcome the darkness within you”… Wow, just wow - and all that only in my very first playthrough. I love also that there’s an official sandbox variant “Exploration”. It is the kind of thing I was looking for, as a story engine, coming from Shadows of Brimstone, and I totally didn’t expect this to be already built-in.
Finally, I find the rulebook really approachable and quite well organized. The rules are more complex than I thought (on YouTube it all looks so easy), but somehow I tend to quickly find things and they are usually where I expect them to be - and in the rare exceptional cases, the thorough index easily accessible on the back cover is a blessing and thinking of it already gives me this warm fuzzy feeling of a solid supportive companion.
Yes, there are a few tiny things I feel could still be done even better (e.g. being partly color-deficient, I don’t see the color synergies, will have to print the BGG post for them - maybe could be reflected also in geometry somehow next time for folks like me; some shallow box for the token pool, doubling as an insert, could be great - might need to look around on my own; an extra card per player for tracking the special Move/Confront/… APs could help, could be printed on the dividers to save space, plus maybe with a Max Health track; double-sided HP/AP coin-like tokens shown on BGG also look less fiddly than AP+HP stacks). But those definitely don’t break my immersion and I’m still looking forward what the game will show me in the future.
I didn’t read the Sagas in advance because I only have one opportunity to play the game for the first time 😄 so I want full surprise, but I feel the combinations of keywords and various types of cards should provide enough variability in the creative prompts to not become boring to me too fast in a longer perspective. I love that this game provides races and classes somewhat off the beaten track (big reason why I chose it over GoK; whereas in CoK the resources game seemed too much of a distraction vs. narration to me - but maybe I will still get it eventually, will see). Also I was especially looking for a “dungeon crawler/adventure/sandbox” game where combat would not be too prominent - I still feel it could be reduced much more, the tin-soldier wargames legacy of D&D seems not letting go easily across the whole industry - so I am happy various other abilities are important in SoK, even though I understand its apparently the weakest game in the series in this regard when it comes to Ancients (I just read that GoK had lvl-4 Skills against that, and CoK has multi-Attr Ancients).
All in all, I am impressed by the game; I had some hopes and wishes when buying, expected to be disappointed, but instead was amazed and surprised. I feel it may fit me better than AH:LCG as a narration generator, with more emergent and unscripted storytelling, and less prepwork overhead (I discovered I dislike heavy deckbuilding as I’m absolutely not a min-maxer type). I wonder whether SoK or SoB will end up seeing more playtime from me (and there’s still the Dungeons of Infinity container ship wading on its way somewhere around Senegal) but I cannot be more happy to even be asking this question, I would love if they both stayed the staples for my solo entertainment that I could be looking forward to spending time with!