Kemet: Rise of the Gods

Matagot/Kolossal Games · 2025

Retranslation base game + translation of expansion, English to German

Kemet is regarded as a modern classic among strategy boardgames. It’s set in an alternate ancient Egypt in which the gods are dispatching their mortal followers to wage war on their rivals’ faithful and conquer all the lands of the Nile valley. The game incorporates base-building elements with great little pyramid models that need to be built up level-by-level in order to gain greater powers and stronger troop upgrades. Troops are represented by miniatures at around 25mm scale, but there are far larger and more impressive creature minis included that you can recruit over the course of the game. The game board is a lavishly illustrated map of the Nile delta, divided into various zones with features that impact gameplay. The game uses action resolution and a simple economy system with prayers as a resource. Total troop quantity is strictly limited, forcing players to weigh the benefits of extended area control against the greater punch of concentrated forces. Combat is resolved using cards, which are played and then revealed simultaneously, including a bluffing mechanism. None of the actual playing pieces, boards, tokens or cards have any text on them, relying instead on fairly extensive iconography. Because there are so many icons, especially on the upgrade tokens called “powers” that are a key component of gameplay, the player aids explaining what all the icons mean end up being actual booklets (where each card and token even gets its own name). As such, and because the rules for both base game and expansion are fairly involved, this project still weighed in at close to 18,000 words. The base game, Kemet Blood and Sand, had previously been localised for Germany by Frosted Games. This meant that the job came with the endearingly innocent assumption that I could simply copy most of the previous German version. At face value, there’s nothing really wrong with that, I guess, but it turns out that the original German version met with disapproval and controversy among the player community. I didn’t dive too deeply into the history, but there were multiple issues with the rulebook structure and linguistic quality that meant I put a lot more work into it than a simple copy-and-paste. I still had to stick to the originally chosen terminology for all the mechanical aspects and names of the cards and power tokens. I got why but I was still a bit upset, because the names were either strictly descriptive (thus lacking character) or somehow so far off the mark that I sometimes wondered whether the original translators had actually ever taken a look at the components or even understood the ancient Egypt theme. I didn’t actually get to work in any of the native layout files, which was a shame. But the structural overhaul and reworking of the gameplay examples is still of my design. And I translated all of the expansion content and the solo rules from scratch, with a lot of my suggestions for improvement and clarification ending up incorporated into the German rules, at least.