Kill Chain Preview. Let’s Go Hacking
Transcript
Howdy there, YouTube. I'm back again today for another Kickstarter preview. And today, I'm very excited to talk about Kill Chain, a game of exploitation, escalation, and retaliation. This is for one to four players. Next that actually one to five players with the auto kill expansion, which I think you're going to be interested in. Ages 14 plus take about 1 hour to play. And this is from Fallen Dominion Studios, who made Fallen Land, which is absolutely brilliant. It is my favorite post-apocalyptic sandbox game in existence. If you dig that sort of theme, check out that game. But now, they turn their eye to hacking, the world of hacking, with Kill Chain. As we are going to go into the dark seedy underbelly. We're going to be attacking corporations.
We're going to be doing all sorts of cruel stuff, modding ourselves up, and Well, let's take it to the table, show you how it works, and show you an entire phase. All right, so we're going to take a look at what you're getting inside of Kill Chain. Now, I do want to mention this is a prototype that I have in front of me, so take everything you see here with a grain of salt. The one that gets to you will look nicer, neater, and fancier. But, in this game, you are going to be in a hacking syndicate. You're going to get one of these player boards right here to start off. And you got pretty much the same thing in all of the other player boards. But, the one thing to note of difference is you do have one asymmetric worker placement spot that's different on each one of these boards. Now, in the base game, you're going to get four of these boards. However, I will be mentioning expansion content as we go throughout as well. This is the async chaos, and this is part of the auto kill expansion, which comes with its own special deck of cards that has a really simple AI, where you just flip the card over, and then it's a if-then statement. And if the then isn't reached, then you go down to the bottom and do whatever that is. And that's how the the bot, the AI bot, takes its two turns. Really quick and simple.
But, we're not talking about the expansion right now. We're talking about the base game, so let's get into it. And right now, I'm going to be showing off the Virtual Dimension Syndicate group here, and their special ability is to trash one card to gain 10 crypto. Pretty sweet ability. So, let's talk about what's on our player board. So, first to start off, you're going to get some cubes, you're going to put them down here. You're going to start with five bits, three crypto. Those are the currency in the game. Then you're going to have heat down here, because you're going to be doing illegal things. Yeah, I know, shocking. You're also going to have two of your syndicate workers down here. You got to You got some cronies going out and doing various different things, and you can even hire a hacker, but only if you have a specific mod, which is a good time to bring us to our cards right here. Also delicious 10 dev cards. And you'll notice that they're all mods that have this right here, this thing, which means you will be able to plug it into the bottom of your area, but I'm getting ahead of myself. That's one of the oh so juicy actions we're going to talk about later. What you're going to do is you're going to shuffle these up, and you're going to draw four of these cards.
And this uh this is a preview, but I have got to tell you, I do enjoy this game, and it's because immediately, there's already decisions in every single facet of the game. Because on your cards, you got some really cool special abilities on here. So, let's go over how a card works. You got the You got that cost right down there. That's That's how much you pay, and then you can slide it in there, and then you get the special ability. You can use the special ability once every round, which is super sticking awesome. But right now, we're not going to focus on those cards. We're going to head back to our player board here, because we want to keep talking about what's on here. So, right here, you got this development space right here. This is where you're going to be putting all your your cool little bad tokens. These are fish and Trojans and rootkits and viruses, and botnets, and all sorts of stuff with various different special abilities. You're going to be developing them in here cuz this is your player board. This is where you're all tip tap typing. And so, what you do is you put them in here.
You'll get more heat from the cops. We'll talk more about that a little bit later. But this is your player board. You're going to start with four dev cards, but that's not all you're going to get. You're going to get three job cards over here on these boards over here. And the job cards are really very simple to understand. You start with three, and you can discard as many of these as you want, but you are essentially discarding points, and you're going to have to do some other stuff later on if you want to get more job cards. And this is how you're going to win the game. So, let's talk about the win condition in this game. The game is going to end and trigger end game when someone gets to 15 victory points on the track. And you're going to get that by job cards over here. And how it works out is there's two types of job cards. You have ones with these blue ones right here, which means that you do this throughout the game, and when you do it, you'll score that many victory points, and you'll get that much crypto. This one is phase of approach. Have a threat in each space of the development track at the end of the round. We'll talk a little bit more about that later when we go through all the actions bit by bit. But this one I definitely think we would keep cuz it feels like a reasonable one to do. Have the most botnet threats deployed on corporations. Well, we Let's just get into the corporations a little bit cuz over here there's going to be a sample corporation. We'll talk a little bit more about them later, but you are going to have your faction on here, and you're going to be trying to put your your little viruses and whatnot onto these different spots. So, this one is essentially saying, "Hey, you're going to have the most botnet threats, which is a specific type of virus on corporations." So, they're like, "Okay, yeah, we can get a whole bunch of those." Cuz this one is also have a threat in each space of the development track at the end of the round. So, those two would kind of synergize well, right?
Because then they'll get all the botnets out, and they'll get this one. This one elite blue have the most purchased blue cards in your deck. And you know what? I did have the option to discard up to three of these right now face down into the discard area, but I feel like all three of these could pretty synergize well together. So, we're just going to set that down right now because that's what we're going to be trying to play into. So, let's go back to our hand because I think we're ready to start the game pretty much. Our board is set up and let's just get into it. I want to get first to the Zozo delicious player reference card, which you do get two of. I'm not just showcasing two to show the front and the back. You get two. Much appreciated. We'll go through all the actions. But, what are you doing? There's one core rule on this. On your turn, you are going to take two actions. And only one of those actions can be a worker action.
So, that's the hard and fast rule. Then you're going to take a turn, the next player take a turn, the next player take a turn and it gets back to you. You'll take two more actions. Next player, next player, two more actions till eventually you decide, "Oh, you know what? I don't feel like I'm going to do any more actions." You flip this over. But, even that's an interesting decision because the first person to flip over their done token is going to get the first end of round card and they will receive that bonus. The next person will receive this bonus and once you get all the way to the back end, it's actually bad things that happen. But, we'll get into that later. That's clearly on the end round part right here, but we're not into that. Cuz now, one of the one thing I love about this game is there's already interesting decisions because phase A is really kind of cool. You're going to take a look at your hands and you're going to decide if you want to trash some of the cards in your hands. Put them down here in this trash pile. Oh, this is supposed to go at your little point tracker. It'll go over here on the zero.
But, back to trashing cards. So, in phase A, you have the option every round to trash up to two of your cards in order to get cubes for what the the colors are on the side right here. So, this one right here, if I trash this one, this is going to give me a red, green. That one will give me a red, blue. You're like, "Oh, what is that? Why do I care?" Well, you look down here. These are essentially going to be you kind of building your engine, how you want to do it. So, I'm going to trash these two cards. So, I'll get two red cubes and a blue and a green cube. And you got to believe it, they got some really nice stick of cubes in the prototype. I don't know exactly what's going to be the final version, but I imagine it's pretty nice in the prototype, it's probably pretty nice in the final version as well. And then we got red, red, blue, green. But these, however, go into the trash card. Now, this What does this mean?
Well, trash cards in this game are very interesting. In this game, by the way, this is the first player token. I'm the first player, we put it here for now. Somebody can take it later. But when stuff is trashed, you can't use it. And there's an action people can take over here called dumpster dive, where people can dumpster dive to get into their trash decks to buy back, or to steal other people's trash. Which means, yes, other people can steal your player your your starting cards. And they they they're good cards, too, as you're going to see later on. Let's take a look at actually, in fact, what we trashed just so you can see. This one is just It cost four bucks, and we gain six bits. That's really nice. Cuz bits, remember, we only start with five. So, just by playing this down, we're going to we're going to jump six. That's huge, cuz that's one of the two currencies in the game. And this one, red hat contractor mom, received the highest available bits location on the dark in the dark web without using a work up.
That's a great one, too. Uh what that means is, you're going to go to the this bits tracker over here. You're essentially going to be getting a lot of bits. Okay. So, uh we hopefully those blue cards that we're going to be looking for are going to get us some bits. But we're we're ahead of ourselves right now. Let's start with these cubes do. Cuz once we're done trashing, if we want to, we once again flip this over to done. Just so you can say, "Hey, we're done." And everybody collects their resources. So, if you trash a blue, you draw a card. If you trash a green, you receive a crypto, a bit, buy one card from the marketplace, and then replenish after that. Uh drop to two jobs and discard one. Another way to get those jobs. So, we're going to get two bits. Awesome. Loop, loop. We're up seven. We'll also receive one crypto. Great.
And we get to draw a card.
Excellent.
So we have an extra card in our hand. Mod hacker may be hired for three crypto. Excellent. That will [clears throat] unlock this extra worker that we can use hopefully first turn. So, phase A is complete. That's phase A. And that's already an interesting decision because by trashing cards, you're not only getting rid of those cards for you to use and put into your thing and mod and do awesome stuff with, but you're essentially letting other people like double down on specific strategies by potentially giving me a very powerful card and then two of them. And then if somebody else trashes a three of them and it's just I'm getting ahead of myself. Lots of choices to come because once you get through this this side of sticker and reference cards. So what do we do? Phase B, really quite simple. Starting with the first player, me, you are going to take two actions. One of them, and only one of them can be a worker action. You can however take two non-worker actions if you want to. So let's go through the different actions.
We'll start with the actions on your board. This one's develop. What this one's going to let you do is start making these oh so bad things here that are going to be spread to those companies. So we did talk about those companies earlier and I want to talk a little bit more about them because they're really kind of interesting. Uh they each have their own levels of defense and they each have their own perks. And if you're in kind of control of your hacking syndicate hacking into this company, you can get those perks each round as an action. And once that happens, there's like a token that gets flipped over and it's consumed. So it's kind of like a little bit of a race aspect of like, oh, you know, uh they haven't done that action yet. So if I can do like a really cool thing on my turn, take control of that and steal that from them. And they are double-sided and when you set these out, you're going to have uh you'll have the number of players plus one. So you're going to have a good deal of variability with those. Like those an awful lot. But getting ahead of myself, you're going to be start developing that. It's going to cost you one crypto currency is up there. And then it also costs you the number of bits that you want to spend to do it because they range from two bits for fish, which is going to give you plus five attack versus target once and then remove because you're going to be able to attack both other players. And in this case, the different corporations. Denial of the botnet which cost 12 bits, which is going to give you rep plus rep equal to the number of corporations where you have a botnet deployed. So if you really focus hard on botnets, you're going to get a bunch of rep points cuz once again, end game trigger 15. Just 15.
So bit like right there just in itself like especially if once again, so we got two end of game job cards where these ones are going to score at the end of the game. This one is a during the round. So if someone pretends and Scott drew three of these blue cards, they might end the game relatively quickly and you might not have the time to develop your botnet, which well in that case you might be just toast. You got dumpster dive which we talked a little bit about earlier. It's going to cost you five crypto and it's going to allow you to take a trash card, put it into your hand, which is also nice. That's one thing I like about this game is when you go to market, which we'll talk about these actions a little bit later, you also get to put them into your hand and it kind of becomes one of those games where you're trying to combo and extend out your uh turns as long as you can. Like there was like a something like Terraforming Mars we played that where it's like, "Haha, I got to keep going and doing this and this and this and this and this." And that one definitely can have that possibility if you if you decide to do that strategy. And then last one we have here is trash one card to gain 10 crypto. And 10 crypto's a great amount of crypto. But once again, trashing cards meaning that other people can come get it. It's a risk reward kind of thing. So that's what's going on on your player board right here. But let's take a look at the other boards cuz these are other action spots you're going to be able to go into.
Up here, this is how you're going to get more jobs. Draw three, keep one plus you got to keep at least one and then you put it in the back in the job pile face down. We have publish over here where you can place one of your workers, which is going to give you the first player token plus one rep. So, if you can get to 14, you can jump right on that. We have the marketplace out here where you can purchase various different cards. We're going to talk about the cards a little bit later cuz there's a good deal of cards in this game. You can use cards in a variety different ways. For instance, on the development deck, you can use cards to upgrade your virus, which we'll talk about that when we talk about attacking corporations cuz there's so many different choices in this one. Back over here, this one, payoff. This is how you're going to produce heat. Well, that will make more sense a little bit later, but heat is very bad in this game cuz it's accumulative, which means, you know, if you get one heat, a bad thing happens.
But then if you get two heat, the first bad thing happens and then an additional bad thing happens and it just keeps stacking on top of each other and that's how you can get rid of some heat by rolling some dice. So, I should have a special dice up here, a yellow one that's like a D6, but I don't and I've lost it forever. Uh over here we have bits, we have crypto, pretty self-explanatory, get yourself some cash worker placement style. Uh and you do, as more people go on the spot, the values do change. And then persistence, which is going to allow you to beef up your attacks on corporations. And you can probably sense a theme that you're probably going to be attacking corporations a good deal in this game. But before we can do get into that, I want to give you I will just read a smattering of cards so you can get a a feel for the kind of cards you're going to see in the game. This one, guaranteed success on corporate attacks. That's a fantastic card right there. And up here, here's the attack value, here's the defense value. 20 is the highest you can see, really sticking good. But cost up here in the upper right hand corner, eight crypto. That's a good chunk of change. But you also notice that if you decide to trash this thing, look at the amount like three, you get an orange, a red, and a purple. So, immediately how you use this card like somebody might be looking at this cuz they're about to launch a massive also attack on a hacker network. Somebody else is like, oh my gosh, I just want to get those oh so delicious connections right there because they're going to who knows. But then also the color of the card, once again, I can to you get upgrade. This one, virtual private network, prevent your corporate threats from being attacked this round because a lot of attacking in this game. And as I mentioned, you're not just going to be attacking the corporations, other people
are going to be trying to attack you because they want to be the ones that have the control over the corporations. I mean, haven't you been on the dark web? Don't you know about all this? But that's a nice one. Uh use another player's mod location as your own. Oh, you got that great mod over there? Yeah, me too. Gain the same rewards that other player from a mod they just used. But, as you can see, good variety of cards in there in that marketplace, which is going to just kind of lend you into various different strategies that you want to steer into, and they will be cycling through, which is nice. So, it's not going to become like a stale, stagnant market the way the game flows. Ooh, the last thing I forgot to mention, super important down here is the number of rep points that you'll gain at the end of the game for having this card.
Once again, if you happen to trash this two-pointer for some reason, someone else could come pay five crypto and steal it. What? Always with the interesting decisions. But let's finally get to these corporation tiles and how they work cuz it's really pretty fascinating. It adds a really unique press-your-luck aspect to this game. Because on each one of these boards, you're going to have a unique and different action where you can place your worker as per normal. However, after you do the action on the bottom, you immediately roll your die, and if you get a five or a six, then you get to skip work and go to a different action spots. Which, pretty cool. You get a one through four, then they stay there.
Press your luck at its finest. But let's go through the remaining actions just so you know what we're doing here cuz we got corporate gains which we'll talk about after we go ahead and put something on here because we're going to attack or defend. And how this works is really quite simple. We're going to pretend that we've been brewing up this Trojan right here on our on our little player board on Alpha level one. We're going to pretend we just got that going on right there and we're going to say, you know what? On this action we're going to do the non-player action of attacking the Argo Aquacorp.
And attacking corporations isn't it just about getting your threats out. It also gets you a rep point it for every successful attack.
First you're going to tell what target level you're going to do, either one, two, or three. And how this works is you take their defense level, which is this number right here, and you multiply it by that. So if you're going to try and to do a level three, then you would have to beat a nine defense. Now, that's part of their defense cuz they're also going to draw a corporate defense card, which will add defensive modifiers, but it also might do something unique like give one crypto to another player or losing bits. So you as the player, what are you packing? Well, first thing you're going to do is you're going to play one attack card face up. And as we mentioned earlier, the attack cards are the numbers in the top left corner. So we really want to slam this home. I'd say, you know what? We're going to go with a We're going to go with a 10.
We're going to spend this. We also get to add any bits that we want to cuz remember that's one of the currencies in the game. We go down on that track and maybe let's say we spend five bits. So we're at a 15 plus we're going to roll our D6 and add that to it. So we'd be rocking 16, but before we got to that 16, we should have declared that we were in fact going to go to level two. So we'll say we're attacking at to two, which means we just need a six. We're playing it safe. We had a 16. They would flip over their one corporate defense card, and it would be bam, that one. Oh, and we would won by one. That would have been amazing, and they would have been like And then all the person who mocked you for spending five minutes would have been like, "Oh, good good choice." And it's like, "Oh, we created memories." So fun. Any who, continuing on. But now, what you get to do is you get to bam, place it on your track because you have your own syndicate. I believe I was yellow, so it would go over there.
And now, that's really good because you get whatever special ability is on this one. And this particular one is plus three attack for this this target. So, we're going to be even better attacking the Argo Agriculture Corp. Now, the rewards you get for threats are based on if you're in level one, but since we got to level two, we're actually going to double whatever our reward is. And if we get to level three, then you get to triple it. And And but this actually remains after use, and we're allowed to claim the corporate gains, which corporate gains, which is one of those non-worker actions we talked about a little bit earlier because as an action, after I got done attacking, I might be like, "You know, for my second action, I'm going to go ahead and play in the corporate gains for Argo Agriculture Corp." That gets consumed. I draw two cards, and all of a sudden, that one person who passed is like, "Oh my gosh, I think I'm going to go to the bathroom." And you You're having a good time cuz maybe you got more mods cuz that's another one was to execute the mod and install the mod. Those are also two non-worker actions. So, if your whole turn would just be placing down a mod on your player board face up, and then flipping it over to get that special ability. You also play cards from your hand, and there's like we mentioned, there's a good variety of cards, but that's a non-worker action.
Attacking other people's viruses is a worker action. So, maybe on somebody else's turn, they're like, "I'm attacking your your guy right there." And if I don't have cards in my hand for their defense value, then I might be hosed because it's once again, you going to play one card, get the defense value, roll a dice and the bits and that's your total and it's just offense versus defense. And if they win, boom, bye-bye Trojan. And now, maybe next round you don't have control of the Argo Agriculture Corp or maybe you hadn't used that ability yet and now you can't because you have to have majority here. And we talked about persistence a little bit earlier and that particular example, if you added persistence to this, it would be like, boom, you add another one to the stack and that would then make it so you would have more area control of these different corporations, which once again, you're going to have the number of players plus one. So, there's going to be area control, there's going to be pressure luck, all sorts of different mechanisms, rub them together here. And then the last major action to talk about is just ending your round. And once everybody ends their round, you get to phase C.
But, once you've ended your round, it's really quite simple, you can't do anything else. However, you can still be attacked. So, having cards in your hand, not a bad idea. I lied, there was one more action, which is to remove the heat, which you do by discarding a card and then going down one on the heat track. Because, as we talked a little bit about earlier, the heat is very bad. We're going to find out about the heat in phase C because we're going to pretend that everybody's done token was flipped over and now phase C. First, you're going to take a look at your heat index down here. And the heat index does a variety of different bad things including losing bits at reboot, gaining a job that you don't have the opportunity to refuse and once again, that is losing victory points if you don't achieve it, uh not being able to use your hacker, all the way up to losing a rep, which, you know, not great.
And it's accumulative. So, if you have three heat, you deal with the penalties of one heat, two heat, and three heat.
Next, you're going to take a look at the different corporations, aka the area control, and you're going to gain rewards based on the viruses, the threats that you happen to put out there. Now, if at this point anyone has 15 victory points, you'll go to game end, which we'll talk about in a second. But, if no one has at least victory 15 victory points, then you refresh your hands of cards, you reset the corporations so they're consumed, go back to whatever the special ability is, recover your workers back from all the different worker placement spots they were at back to your board, reset your mods back so they're ready to rock and roll, and then you flip your player token from done to not done thing, and you do the same song and dance we just talked about. So, let's talk about how the game ends. So, when any player reaches 15 rep, they're going to finish the current round. After resolving the final round's heat effects, the threat rewards, you're going to proceed to the end of the game. Now, for final points, it'll be whatever you got on the rep tracker board, rep from cards you purchased at the market, which had the yellow symbols down here on the cards, and then you either gain or lose points for the jobs you did or didn't complete.
Whoever has the most rep score wins the game. If there's a tie, the player with the most deployed threats is the winner. If there's still a tie, the player with the most crypto wins the game. Now, that by no means is all the rules in the game, but I feel like you've got a pretty good gist of what's going on. The game really gives you a good variety of ways to score rep, whether it's through your threats or pursuing jobs, corporate attacks, or just picking up cards that'll get you points at the end of the game. Oh, no. Another thing I want to talk about, though, is the expansions. In particular, the root access expansions, which is going to give you asymmetric leaders that are going to give you an extra worker placement spot. They're also going to change how much crypto and bits you start with. They're going to have a cool special ability. They slot in like so, which is really kind of neat. And they get their own two special mod- two special starter cards, which once again, if you trash, other people can steal from you. So, they can steal like your extra special ones. Really kind of cool.
And the Shadow Protocol expansion, which I can't really talk too much about cuz I didn't get that one sent to me. But, it's actually going to have like these these boards that are traveling around and like doing bad stuff. And I forgot to mention, too, in the during the AI one, that you that allows you to play as an extra player or you can play against it and there's a cooperative mode included, too. Really kind of cool. But, that is Kill Chain. If this one looks like it might be your cup of tea, be sure to check out that Kickstarter link down below. Tell them Bower's Game Corner sent you. Also, if you're in the market for some Kickstarter work for your upcoming Kickstarter, be sure to check out my Fiverr link down below. Have yourself a good one. Bye-bye.