At my favorite coffee shop, I ran an intro to advanced game of Kobolds Ate My Baby! (KAMB!). This is one of the quintessential slap stick, beer and pretzel RPGs of the day. What did I think?
Mechanics-In KAMB!, you have four stats. When you want to do something, you get a number of d6 based on the difficulty and must roll lower then the stat of your character. That’s it. The GM or as its known in this case the Mayor, may add or subtract from a stat, but that is it. My Thoughts-Slick and easy to do. I loved this!
Character Generation- Characters are made in less then 5 minutes. Let me do it from memory-Roll 2d6 four times for your stats, roll 1d6 for an edge, roll 1d6 for a bogie, roll 2d6 for armor, roll 2d6 for weapon, and roll 2d6 for a random item. Choose skills (up to six or your extraneous skill) if you choose the magic skill, roll 2d6 for a spell. That’s it. Since your characters have a 5 minute half-life, you will make them as quickly as they die. My Thoughts-This is BRILLIANT! Game doesn’t stop when you die, a new character starts up quick and we move on fast.
General Gamplay-Kobolds die quick and the game plays like the bastard child of a game of DnD and improv. The goal is to have fun and to roll with punches with as little plot as possible. The hope is to just have fun. Piss of the DM/Mayor? Take a death check and see if random arrows spear your player. Die from an epic fight with a cat? Stand up, and tell the noble story of Fuzzybutt the wizard and join back in right away. Table pissed at the DM for a roll? Have the party sing a Kobald Drinking song to make that ass reroll! My Thoughts-All this makes the game pure awesome! Dont look for a plot, but look for some fun! But honestly with the system and mechanics, you could do a serious game. I wouldn’t want to because of the fun, but you could.
The Book-The KAMB! book is 42 pages. You can read this in 5 minutes and it comes with an adventure. Best part is the adventure gets you into the game fast. Go to drive through RPG and you can pick up another adventure right now for free and a third parody adventure for 2 bucks!
My Players Thoughts-The group I played with is my DnD Next group. After 4 hours of KAMB!, my players now want to stop DnD Encounters and switch entirely to KAMB!. It doesn’t get much better then that. I wish I could take all the credit for this as the Mayor, but this system makes it easy.
Final Thoughts-Get this! I got this through the kickstarter and for the money I payed, I’m getting the color edition later. Bur right now I got the B&W edition and while color would make it look pretty, this games awesome start to finish. Go buy now and remember ALL HAIL KING TORG!
Random Awesome?!- John Kovali, the main artist of the game talked with me and my players via twitter during the game. That made of of my players squee when she realized that the also did art for her favorite game Munchkin.
