Demonslayer: The Siege of Mt. Kunlun (to give its full title) is rather uniquely a deckbuilder that was published in China a few years ago, and is just now making the jump to the United States, thanks to the folks at EOS SAMA.

The Game

Demonslayer is clearly a deckbuilder from an earlier generation. It owes the most to two early games in the genre, Dominion (2008) and Ascension (2010). Much as in Ascension, you have two types of currency: money (“clarity”) and attack. You also have two types of cards available for “purchase”: a set tableau of action cards, plus three special attack cards for each player (all either “spells” or “immortals”), and a random tableau of monsters (“heart-eaters”) — which comes out in waves of nine monsters, each of which includes eight acolytes and one tougher boss (“overlord”). As you might guess, money buys action cards, while attack kills monsters.

On his turn a player gets one buy (a purchase from the action cards, which will eventually improve his deck) and one kill (a discard of one of the monster cards, which generates victory points). He can also turn victory points into new artifact cards and can even press-his-luck to get a good conversion on his victory points (or else lose everything he tried to spend). Finally, a player can use the special powers of his cards.

The game continues until 7(!) waves of monsters have been killed. That’s 7×9 = 63 total kills! Then players count up their victory points from monsters killed and artifacts won.

The Good

Demonslayer is a pretty standard deckbuilder, with a few elements which I found to be interesting twists on the genre.

Waves Are an Interesting Mechanic. The most interesting element of Demonslayer is its monster-appearance mechanism: a wave of nine monsters appears, then the players have to fight through some or most of the acolytes before they’re able to take on the boss. It’s an interesting variation from the totally randomized monster-appearance games like Ascension or Thunderstone (2009). It not only creates a very different flow for the game, and finally it’s nicely thematic.

Monster-fighting deckbuilders tend to clog — which is something I regularly see in both Ascension and Thunderstone — but Demonslayer’s mechanic also changes that up: the game starts to clog, but then when someone defeats the boss, the monster purchase area suddenly becomes accessible again, for a short time.

Nice Advancement with Artifacts. The game has some problems with progression, which I’m going to talk about shortly. However the artifact mechanic (which apparently was part of the first expansion in the original Chinese release of this game) allows a player to dramatically improve his lot: a player earns victory points from killing monsters, and then turns those points into artifacts (worth the same number of victory points if they didn’t press-your-luck), and the artifacts eventually come into play as new cards — with most of them sticking around, giving the player permanent powers.

The artifacts allow players to build early success into permanent advantages that made them more likely to win the game. Advancement of this sort is important in deckbuilders, and this methodology is interesting, because it’s different from most.

Interesting Use of Waste Cards. Games like DC Comics Deckbuilding (2012) give players worthless cards at the start of the game, while Dominion can give players worthless cards as play progresses through curses. However, Demonslayer is one of the few games I’ve seen that gives players a choice to take bad cards into their deck: some monsters generate “miasma”, so players have to decide whether it’s worth it to kill them. And unlike the DC waste cards (which has no effect) or the Dominion waste cards (which are just -1 victory point), these Demonslayer waste cards can have very serious negative effects.

It’s an interesting negative resource that I’d like to see more of. In fact, I’m going to talk about another use of waste in another recent deckbuilder, Trains (2013), in four weeks.

Nice to See Some Icons. I’ve many times complained about deckbuilders not using icons, despite the fact that most of them are built around special powers that are repeated across many cards. Demonslayer bucks that trend with icons that simply mark some of the most frequently appearing powers such as a filter (“serenity”) power, an extra-buy (“fortune”) power, and an extra-kill (“rampage) power.

Strong Theming. The theming of the game is quite strong, with lots of Asian martial arts and Asian horror coming through; it’s probably the main point of interest for the game.

The Bad

Unfortunately, I felt like Demonslayer’s problems outweighed its advantages, and so my “Bad” list is considerably longer. I haven’t listed all of the annoyances, but I felt like there were some core issues with the game’s design.

Not Very Original. Though the victory-point artifacts and the monster-wave mechanic are both innovative, in general Demonslayer seems quite similar to early deckbuilders like Dominion and Ascension (and perhaps Thunderstone). Games could get away with this as late as 2010 or so, but now it’s obvious that they’re a bit out of date.

Simplistic Play. The play is also quite simplistic. In general, cards either provide money, provide attack, or let you draw more cards. Players can build a deck that excels in any of these indivual areas, but it never feels like they can do anything particularly interesting.

Limited Variety. Unfortunately, players see every card every game. The same cards are always available for purchase (with a tiny bit of variety if you play different characters), and every monster is going to come up every game. Combine that with the simplistic play, and you have a game that’s not likely to hold up to much repetitive play.

Some games like Zeppelin Attack (2014) have managed to do wonders with a small deck of cards, but that’s largely been through the inclusion of lots of singleton cards and/or a randomized purchase mechanism; Demonslayer instead has lots of repeated cards and lets players see them all.

Limited Progression. A good deckbuilder has a wide array of card values so that players can buy cheap cards early on, and then, over the course of a game, they ramp up their deck to the point that they can buy expensive cards too. Demonslayer unfortunately has a much narrower array of card values, so that players can buy its gold equivalent (3 money) on the first turn if they’re lucky, and they can buy any of the action cards within a few rounds of play.

The monster killing has a similar problem: the monsters don’t get tougher in any way, so the only progression is within each wave — since players usually see easy monsters at the start of a wave, but only hard monsters at the end. While killing monsters, players can power up a little bit over the course of the game, as the rampage special ability can let them kill multiple monsters as they’ve progressed, but it still feels like there’s pretty limited momentum and growth in the game (absent those artifacts, which were probably a much-needed addition when the first expansion came out for the original game).

Limited or Degenerate Strategies. Unfortunately, problems with variety and progression  snowball into what I consider the game’s core problem: the limited strategy that the game allows. You see, the purchase of money cards is ultimately a mug’s game, because they’re not worth any points. A player should only buy as many of them as they need to start affording good monster-killing cards or good card-drawing cards, and then they want to divest themselves of all of their money to go on monster-killing sprees.

To a certain extent, this is a classic game design: it’s a game where you build up resources until the point where you decide to flip over and start collecting victory points instead. However, the limited progression within the game made the choice feel more simplistic, because the push from resources-to-victory happens very early. I also feel like this decision cuts against the design of a deckbuilding game; it turns Demonslayer into a deckbuilding game where you’re encouraged to stop building your deck maybe a third of the way in. Once you’ve got your killing machine primed, you instead want to keep things lean, so you just kill, kill, kill, while you filter any remaining money out of your deck. In other words, much of your built-up deck because worthless at that point.

I can see how some might consider this a daring, or different design for deckbuilding, but I felt like it contributed to the game’s simplistic play because it created simplistic strategies; unfortunately, it also makes the game’s mechanics work against themselves.

Players Can Get Stuck. I already mentioned that other monster-killing games like Ascension and Thunderstone give you the opportunity to get “stuck”, as people try to draw enough killing power to kill the random beasts that have appeared. That can happen in Demonslayer too, but it’s more troublesome because of the game’s core strategic path; if you’re at the point where it’s no longer worthwhile to buy things (because you’re in killing mode), then a turn when you’re stuck is a totally wasted turn, and that’s always a bummer.

A Variety of Component Issues. I don’t usually talk about components when I write these deckbuilding analyses, but this one had several issues that I felt deserved comment.

First, the rules are not good. Color text and mechanics are freely mixed together in both the rules and examples of play, and then things aren’t always explained as well as they could be. Slightly subtle rules like how the “shadow” power works for monsters and how the discard and use of cards interrelate were never clarified well.

Second, the cards have too much small text. This is a general issue for deckbuilders, and one that was partially corrected in Demonslayer by icons, but there was still a lot of text that players needed to read and couldn’t from across the table. Worse, some of the attack values were actually hard to read even when a player had a card in their hand (the “1” and “4” in particular looked much the same).

Third, the game is uncomfortably misogynistic. Each player has a group of characters led by a male sage and they go off and kill monsters that are mostly scantily clad women that includes harlots, temptresses, and succubi.

A Little Long. Finally, the game is just a bit too long. You build up your ultimate killing deck, but then you have to grind through wave after wave of monsters over a few hours. There’s no deckbuilding here, just drawing the right cards at the right time; it’s the less interesting part of the game, and the longer one. Decreasing the number of waves in the game, to perhaps five, can help a bit here.

Conclusion

Generally, I was somewhat disappointed with Demonslayer. I found the game design both stale in its similarity to older games and troublesome in how it expanded them. There were a few innovative aspects but they were pretty minor.

With that said, there are clearly folks that like the game; I have to guess they’re people who’ve played fewer deckbuilding games, and so are less bored with existing designs, or who are playing the game largely for the strong Asian theming. If you fall into one of these categories, you might still want to take a look.

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