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The goal of this game is to kidnap cute, fat little human babies from a nearby village and bring them back to your kobold cave where you and your fellow kobolds will prepare them with a nice sauce or wine and eat them during an extravangant koblold feast. In the process, the cute, fat little babies will likely suffer injuries of some kind or get eaten before they can be brought back to the cave.
I find this hilarious. If you do not, stay away from this game.
KAMB! manages to be light-hearted and about eating babies thanks to its humorous writing and illustrations which depict the kobolds not as the lizard-men you may be familiar with but as cute, two-foot tall furry muppets. They're like bipedal little rat terriers or little Oscar the Grouches with sharp, pointy teeth.
The core mechanic is simple and uses six-sided dice. Kobolds have rankings of 5-10 in five stats – Strength, Dexterity, Agility, Speed, and Combat.
NOTE: The latest edition of the game uses the BEER engine and simplifies this to Brawn, Ego, Extraneous, and Reflexes. I have only played the first edition of the game. From my understanding, there are a few other minor changes but the core of the game remains the same.
Whenever you want to do something you roll a number of dice ranging from 1 to 6 depending on the difficulty of the action. If you roll equal to or under your stat rating, you succeed. If not, you fail.
The game brings a lot of fun through some additional character traits and by various "house rules" that are presented in the book, which are actually a huge part of the game.
I ran a Christmas-themed game for five players. Only one had played KAMB! before but character creation was quick and fun. You pick a name, start with a rating of 5 in each of the attributes and distribute 5 more any way you'd like. All kobolds also start with four core skills that they can use at any time without penalty and then select two additional skills. Any time a kobold uses one of these additional skills, whether they succeed or not, they add a "check" onto a 12-box track called the Kobold Horrible Death Record. They immediately roll 2d6 and add the number of checks they have accumulated, including the most recent one. If the number is above 12, the player rolls on the Kobold Horrible Death Chart and dies in the corresponding manner. Most of the entries are pretty humorous, and it's easy to add to them. I made up my own chart to fit with a Christmas theme with such deaths as being trampeled by reindeer, falling through ice, and having a deadly allergic reaction to snow.
The skills themselves are mapped onto attributes. So for a sneak skill you would roll your dexterity. The text isn't clear on what happens if you try to do something that one of your skills doesn't cover. The existence of the Kobold Horrible Death Record seems to imply that if you don't have the skill then you automatically fail since using any skill that isn't one of the four core skill results in you taking a death check.
Kobolds also have three edges (good extras) and three bogies (bad extras). All kobolds can smell the presence of chickens and babies in the immediate area thanks to their heightened senses and can also bark like a kobold, which allows the player to bark, growl and chirp like a kobold in order to reduce the difficulty of an action by one die. All kobolds also lack any kind of self-preservation and taste like a kobold, which makes them delicious to enemies and other kobolds.
Players roll randomly for their final edge and bogie which include Winning Smile (people think you're adorable) and Bouncy (you'll never die no matter from how high you fall) on the good side and Foul Smelling (you stink) and Kobold in Heat (you want to hump everything around you) on the bad side.
Random rolls for armor and equipment are next and that's it. Combat is handled like any other test with the player rolling to beat their Combat number. It's not an opposed roll. A particularly difficult opponent might require rolling an extra die. If you succeed you do a fixed amount of damage. Kobold claws do 1 damage where a club does 2. Damage subtracts from armor points first then your "hits" which are equal to strength. Once those are gone, you're dead.
I found one of the most entertaining rules to be the Kobold Soliloquy Rule. If you die, you're allowed to immediately roll up another kobold and keep playing provided you stand up, place your hand over your heart, and recite a brief eulogy describing your kobold's heroic deeds.
Other notable house rules include:
All Hail King Torg! King Torg is the king of the kobolds and is the one who sends players to capture babies. Whenever the GM says King Torg all players must immediately respond with All Hail King Torg! or take a check on their horrible death record. We played with all players having to respond, no matter who called out King Torg, which resulted in some players trying to slip others up by mentioning the king's name.
Eating things. Whenever you eat a chicken, you get 1 hit back. Eat a kobold and you get 2 hits back. Eat a baby and you get 1d6 back.
Drinking song. If all players sing a kobold drinking song together they can force the GM to reroll any roll once during the game.
Baby horrible death. Any time a kobold does something stupid while carrying a baby, 1d6 is rolled. If it's even, the baby lives. If it's odd, the GM rolls on the baby horrible death chart and the baby dies horribly and hilariously.
Another great feature is that it has a clear winner, which is a bonus for one-shots. Players gain victory points throughout the game and the one with the most at the end wins. The game ends when all babies have either been brought to the cave or have died. Bringing a baby back to the kobold cave garners the most points but you also get points for killing townsfolk, cows, chickens, dogs and other farm animals (based on their relative strength).
Overall, I was impressed with the amount of fun KAMB! brought to the table. There was laughter throughout the three-hour game. The players were responsible for a lot of that, but the game encourages you to perform hilarious mayhem.
The book comes with a 19-square grid layout of a complete town, East Bumble. I wanted a different town for my game and it was easy to construct. I just drew a grid and created my own Christmas village for the game. I put a little bit of prep work into this, but the game provides a random chart you can roll on that then gives you townsfolk and buildings to place in each square. There were quite a few things in the village I did myself, but the chart helped a lot when I was stuck and I probably used the chart to populate half of the map.
Positives from Play
1) Once you have a map, the game really runs itself. The grid system gives everyone a good idea of where they are in relation to the cave. A kobold might move to Square 1. You read a couple of sentences, like "There is a farmhouse in a barren field. You can smell apple pie and baby!" Mayhem will ensue.
2) The Bark Like a Kobold trait is one of the greatest things in the game. Everyone was barking and yipping throughout the game to lower the difficulty of actions. Some people were doing it every action. I had no idea what a kobold sounded like until playing this game. It really seemed to get people into the game and made me laugh.
3) Kobolds drop like flies but dying is fun. I didn't have many people die due to losing hits, but horrible death checks were racked up like points on a pinball machine. Remember, you have to roll any time you use one of the two additional skills whether or not you succeed. The skills are all useful enough that players are frequently tempted to use them. You can reroll attacks, add damage, cast spells, run really fast, and other useful things. We had kobolds getting trampeled by reindeer and carolers, getting flattened by pine trees, torn apart by ravenous wolves, and getting brained with chunks of ice.
4) It's fairly quick to make new characters. This is a huge plus. Extra copies of the character creation rules would help alot. We ended up passing the book to whoever died and moved on with the game. This worked okay, but sometimes it did result in a little slow-down.
5) Because it's quick to make a new character and because you're not really penalized (you start back at the cave but retain victory points), no one minded when they bit the dust. Everyone seemed to enjoy recounting their deeds as well – I know I was amused by them. During the game valorous and deceased kobolds had stolen pies, been attacked by chickens, fought cats, and got entangled in a pile of rope.
6) There's a good element of competitiveness. Because you do get points, players try to screw each over. But the person who instigates an action that returns points gets to ultimately decide how those points are distributed. If Player A starts a fight with a cow and Player B kills the cow, Player A still gets to decide how those victory points are distibuted. They can keep them all for themself or they can give a few to Player B for striking the final blow. The players worked together and hindered each other in about equal measure.
Negatives from Play
1) Combat can drag. Not in comparison to other games, but for a beer and pretzles game it can drag. When kobolds are fighting NPCs this isn't an issue, but kobolds attacking kobolds can take some time due to the use of skills, edges and bogies. I found the key to running combat with townsfolk was to roll fast and keep description short and sweet. In general, a fight to the death with a farmer might take three to five exchanges which involve a player roll and a GM roll. I lowered the hits of some villagers in order to make it run faster.
2) Playing time was longer than I anticipated. Reading it, this seems like a game that should take an hour. We played for three hours and that's after we initiated sudden overtime, leaving only two squares left in play. This may be because I overpopulated my map, however. The game did not get boring, but it seemed like it was treading close to the point of the group ready to be finished with it.
In the end, Kobolds Ate My Baby! more than delivered on the fun-factor.
Substance of 4 because it pretty much does everything it promises to do. It has fairly cohesive rules that encourage mayhem and hilarity, provides you with all the stats for NPCs, and gives you everything you need to run a game.
Style of 3. The first edition of the game is a pamphlet. Around 8 1/2” by 10” pieces of paper folded over and stapled with an orange cover. The text is legible, layout is clear and adequte, and there is some fairly humorous art. Nothing spectacular, but functional.
