You stole my kill!
Exploring kill steal mechanisms in Orléans and other board games
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This week we are looking at a board game mechanism that derives it’s name from the video game world: kill steal.
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Kill stealing
If you’ve ever played first-person shooter (FPS) or MOBA games, you’ve probably experienced something like the following.
You get the enemy down to their last hit points, but then someone else swoops in, kills the foe, and gets the XP and/or improved K:D ratio. You did all the work, but they get the credit for the kill.
This is kill stealing. Sometimes it just happens in team play when everyone is focused on the same enemies. Even when it isn’t intentional, it can be considered bad form or go against the social conventions of online gaming. Other times, kill stealing can be a way to grief in a game, intentionally stealing kills just to be a jerk.
Recent video games have implemented some ways to handle kill stealing, including highlighting assists (e.g. K/D/A ratio) and awarding points/XP based on damage dealt vs. who got the killing blow.
In video games, kill stealing is almost universally considered to be a problem to be solved. Can it be used in tabletop board games and roleplaying games?
While not an extremely common mechanisms, kill steal does have an entry in Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design and BGG:
Players contribute towards completing a task, but only the player who finally completes it gets a particular benefit or bonus reward (even if others share in the base level benefit).
This mechanism takes a problem from video games and turns it into a really interesting mechanism that adds tension in tabletop games.
Kill stealing in medieval France
In Orléans (Stockhausen, 2014), players use bag-building to assemble farmers, merchants, knights, and monks in medieval France. Each player has a board where they use tokens representing character types (e.g. knight) from their bag to trigger actions. The actions include gaining more tokens for their bag, moving their player token on the map, and advancing on various tracks.
The game has many paths to victory, and I’d argue that advancing on the main tracks (e.g. development track) and establishing trading posts are the core ways to win the game.
There is also, however, an additional board called Beneficial Deeds.
It has eight (8) tracks representing projects such as Building of the City Wall, Papal Conclave, Defeating the Plague, Founding of the Boatmen Guild, and Building of the Cathedral. Each track has 3 - 10 spaces made up of various character types (e.g. knight, monk, etc.). For example, the Papal Conclave requires three tokens: 2 monks (yellow) and 1 knight (red).
On each player board there is a Town Hall action space where you can place one or two character tokens. When activated, you move the tokens to any open space on the Beneficial Deeds board, advancing one of the tracks toward completion. Contributing a token toward the completion of a Beneficial Deed track will always give you a few coins, but only the person who places the last token on the track is awarded the main benefit (i.e. a citizen tile).
Although it may not look like it at first, this is an example of the kill steal mechanism in practice. Just as you can do all the damage to an enemy just to have someone steal the last kill shot, you can place all the tokens on the track just to have someone place one and steal the completion award.
A game of chicken
Kill stealing as a tabletop mechanism instantly adds tension to a game. We saw it in how action selection works in Ankh: Gods of Egypt (Lang, 2021). You have actions you’d like to perform (e.g. summon a new figure), but need to be careful about setting up other players to take the events.
Orléans has this same type of hard decision and tension in the Beneficial Deeds board. While it’s not a mandatory part of the game, it is a way to gain citizen tiles worth a lot of end game points. It’s important to know when to send tokens to the board and how to avoid setting someone else up to “steal the kill” and finish it.
Turn order and the first player token become extremely important due to this mechanism. A good strategy is to set up the track to be close to completion right before the first player token rotates to you. Then, as first player, you can be the first to finish the track and thus preventing a kill steal.
Kill stealing in other games
I’ve played both Ankh: Gods of Egypt and Orléans many times but only recently learned what this mechanism was called. There less than 150 games tagged Kill Steal on BGG, and I don’t have experience with most of them with the exception of Blitzkrieg!: World War Two in 20 Minutes (Mori, 2019).
There is one other kill steal game that I own: Ramen! Ramen! (Hansen, 2021). It’s a small-box game that, while it supports up to 4 players, plays best at 2 players. Players add ingredients to ramen bowls, trying to ensure they have the most variety of ingredients. Only the player that completes the bowl, however, scores it. It’s a set collection game where kill stealing is a core part of the fun.
Conclusion
Some things to think about:
Multiple names for mechanisms: I wrote about the action selection mechanism in Ankh: Gods of Egypt without thinking about it as a kill steal mechanism. If you read that article, you’ll see that I talk about how it adds tension but never called it “kill steal” because I wasn’t aware of the term at the time.
Adapting from video games: Video games can be a source of tabletop game design inspiration. For example, I’ve written about boss fight mechanisms worth stealing from video games at Exeunt Omnes.
Consider kill stealing: It’s a bad thing in video games, but it’s an instant source of tension and tough decisions in tabletop games! Orléans, Ankh: Gods of Egypt, and Ramen! Ramen! are three examples to check out.
What do you think? Do you enjoy kill stealing as a mechanism? Which games have you played where it was part of the design?
— E.P. 💀
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I love kill-stealing mechanisms. The most recent example I can think of from personal play was in Terraforming Mars. You build the heat level, but someone waits to raise it so they can reach the threshold benefit. It adds a fun layer of maximizing resource use and timing. I'm not a huge fan of TM, but that aspect is certainly interesting.
While not exactly a kill-steal, I find an adjacent mechanism in Grifters (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/168054/grifters), where you're competing for the same contract as someone else and they eke out the exact resources to claim the contract right before you can. It leads to you keeping your hand close to the chest to avoid tipping off your intentions.
I wonder if there's a correlation between enjoying kill stealing in board games and liking social deduction games. There's a similar thrill there in keeping your intentions hidden until the perfect moment.