I Was Wrong About Kemet

Told this story shorter in the actual review but it deserves its own space because I still feel a little dumb about it. I owned Kemet years before I wrote about it here, played it exactly twice with just one other regular gaming partner at the time, both games flat and weirdly directionless, and decided the game just wasn’t good. Traded it away for something else at a game store that used to do trade credit, didn’t think about it again for probably two years.

What actually happened, and it took me embarrassingly long to piece together, is that Kemet at two players is a genuinely different and worse game than Kemet at four or five. All that teleporting-your-army-to-your-temple stuff that speeds up the game and strips out map control, at two players there’s nowhere near enough pressure on the board for it to matter, you’re mostly just taking turns poking at each other with nothing forcing real decisions. I didn’t know that going in. I just knew the game felt flat and assumed that meant the game was flat, full stop, no asterisk.

Bought a used copy back a couple years later after a coworker at the clinic, of all people, mentioned she’d played it at five and loved it. Got a real table together, five of us, actual triangulated pressure with people shifting alliances turn to turn, and it was a genuinely different experience. Not even close. I sat there mid-game thinking, this is the same box I traded away for being boring.

I’ve tried to be more careful since about separating “this game is bad” from “this game and I had a bad match on player count or table or mood.” Doesn’t always work. But I think about that first Kemet verdict a lot when I’m tempted to write something off after one rough session.

The part that still bugs me is how confident I was at the time. Not a little unsure, not “eh, maybe it’s fine at a bigger table.” Fully certain, told at least three people the game was overrated, probably said something dismissive about it to whoever bought my traded-in copy at the store, no idea who that ended up being. I had two data points and treated them like a complete sample. That’s not really a Kemet problem, that’s just a me problem that happened to show up around a specific board game.

What actually broke the spell was watching that coworker talk about her five player game, the one at the clinic who mentioned it offhand while we were restocking supplies in the back. She wasn’t trying to convince me of anything, she was just describing a specific turn where three players ganged up on the person in the lead and the alliances flipped twice in one round, and something about the specificity of it made me realize my two flat games hadn’t had a single moment like that in them. No pressure, no reason to gang up on anyone, because at two players there’s nobody to triangulate against. I’d been playing a version of the game that structurally couldn’t produce the thing she was describing.

Buying it back felt a little ridiculous, honestly, walking into the same store, half expecting someone to remember I’d traded the exact copy away and ask why I wanted it back so soon. Nobody did, obviously, it’d been two years and it’s a used game store, but I felt it anyway. Got the five player game together within a couple weeks, ended up on the losing end of one of those exact alliance flips I’d heard about, watched two other players decide mid-turn that I’d gotten too far ahead and needed to be dealt with. Lost badly. Had a great time losing.

I still play Kemet at two occasionally, when that’s what the night calls for. I just don’t judge the game by it anymore. It’s a different animal at that count, worse in some specific and knowable way, and pretending otherwise is how I ended up trading away a game I now genuinely like.