Kemet: Blood and Sand

I never played the original Kemet, so I came into Blood and Sand with no nostalgia to protect and nothing to defend, just the game as it exists right now, and what exists right now is one of the tighter conflict games I’ve played this year. Five different tech trees mean the shape of a game changes hard depending on which powers show up in the draft, and the whole thing runs on a simple, brutal engine, get points by attacking, which keeps everyone leaning forward instead of turtling in their own temple.

The pyramids are a real upgrade over the old D4 dice from the original edition and they look fantastic doing it, but they’re also fiddlier to read at a glance than a die face ever was, which is a strange trade to make in a game that already asks you to track five power trees at once. That tracking problem is the review’s real complaint. The rulebook is the weak link here, more than one long-term owner called it flatly badly written, and I ended up keeping the tile reference booklet open at the table for a solid four sessions before the iconography actually stuck.

Combat itself is where the game earns its reputation, quick, deterministic once cards are committed, and genuinely tense because losing a fight can undo two turns of positioning in one move. I do wish the endgame had a bit more variety in how it closes out a match, since most of my games ended the same way, whoever got their tech tree online fastest just kept snowballing.

It’s a better game than the original in almost every measurable way and it looks incredible doing it, big unwashed minis and all. Four stars, and I’d knock it up to five the day someone finally ships a rulebook that matches the quality of everything else in the box.