Survival of the trendiest
Kabula is a 1-4 players satirical adventure Fantasy game. You have landed on an Island guarded by a powerful Herald that you want to slay. However, the Herald is protected by the Kabula, a mystical tree that grants immortality. Your goal is to snatch the Kabula for yourself, and then slay the Herald once and for all. The campaign for the game will launch on October 19 on Kickstarter.
In the game, you play as a hero with a unique ability, starting gear, and three personality cards, each characterized by two hashtags. On your player board, you also track your health points and resources which are body parts of five types. They can be fresh, used, or in a “rage” state. The body parts can reach the “rage” state when you suffer enemy attacks or when you fail to inflict damage due to your attack being defended. In the solo game, you play as two different heroes, each represented by a different miniature, who share the same player board, so they have a common health value and a common body parts pool. Over the course of the game, you will be able to tame a monster to become your Familio, which also comes with its own health and pool of body parts.
On a Hero turn, you can perform as many actions as you want until an action requires you to end the turn. However, all actions have a cost in body parts that you must pay. The available actions are tied to the locations you are standing in, to your hero’s specific abilities, and to equipped items, except Walk (to move two steps) and Rest (to retrieve all your body parts and end your turn) which are common to all heroes. Depending on the location, you can visit dungeons, trigger encounters, or visit cities and go shopping. The items you can find (either through looting or shopping) are divided into weapons, snacks, and armor parts. Weapons grant you attack actions, snacks heal and nourish you, armor parts will give you ways to defend yourself against monster attacks in the form of actions that you can take out of turn. Many attacks involve rolling an Aim Die, that may feature a body part; this can specifically trigger additional weapon effects or passive defense abilities from some armor parts.
Monsters have a behavior of their own. When a monster takes its turn, you flip a coin, and depending on the result, the monster will act differently, as specified on its monster card. These actions usually involve moving across the board and attacking. When you slay a monster, you can either take the body parts listed on this card or, if you wish, make it your Familio by flipping the card over. Your Familio takes a separate turn just as any other hero and has separate body parts and health points, as well as a list of actions it can take.
You track your popularity on your Personality cards, each featuring two hashtags. Whenever you resolve an encounter with a matching hashtag, you add one tag token to the corresponding Personality card. Taming a monster will also grant you a tag token if one of your hashtags matches the monster trait. Finally, once a Personality card has received at least one tag, it grants you a way to receive even more tags of that type by fulfilling specific conditions. Once you reach three tag tokens on a Personality card, it takes over, meaning you discard the other two Personality cards. It also makes you “Trending”, which is the prerequisite to try to steal the Kabula from the central Sanctuary. Once you do so, the Herald will switch to a more aggressive behavior, leaving you with the task to defeat it in order to win the game. Unless, of course, you meet your death before that by losing all of your Health Points, in which case the game is over.