I Almost Traded Kemet Away After One Bad Play

I had the trade listing half typed out the same night I played Kemet for the first time, still annoyed, still replaying the ending in my head where I got tabled in what felt like forty minutes flat before I’d even figured out what half my own cards did.

That first game was rough. Four of us, none of us had read the rules closely enough beforehand, and by the time anyone understood how aggression actually pays off in that game, one player had already snowballed into a lead nobody could catch. I remember feeling actively frustrated in a way I don’t usually get over a board game, less “well, that didn’t go my way” and more “I don’t think I want to play this again,” which is a different feeling entirely and one I don’t get often. I opened up a trade thread that night and got about two sentences into describing the game before I stopped and just didn’t finish it. Went to bed instead.

Something kept nagging at me over the next few days, honestly just a sense that the frustration I felt wasn’t really about the game itself, it was about how badly we’d played it the first time through. So instead of listing it I read the rules again properly, actually read them this time instead of skimming while someone else explained out loud, and roped my wife into a second game a couple weeks later once I understood the aggression mechanic well enough to actually teach it right.

Completely different experience. Once you understand that turtling is a losing strategy by design, the whole game opens up into something much sharper and more interesting than the one bad session had let on. We played close, traded the lead twice, and I came away from that second game thinking it might be one of the better area control games on my shelf, a complete reversal from four days earlier. I’ve since gone back and painted a chunk of the Kemet miniatures too, which I almost never finish for any game, so that tells you something about where it landed for me.

I’ve got a rule now, unofficial, mostly just something I tell myself, three plays minimum before a game gets listed for trade, especially if the first play ended badly. Some games really are just bad and no amount of rereading the rulebook fixes that, I’ve had a few of those too and they deserved to go. But Kemet taught me that a bad first game and a bad game aren’t always the same thing, and I’d nearly let one masquerade as the other because I was tired and annoyed on a random Tuesday night.