Fen's 2025 - 5 and 6 Player Variant Rules | Kingdom Death: Monster (Patreon)

It has been nearly eight years to this day since I first published the 5 and 6 player rules I had settled on for playing with the larger groups that were common back when I lived in the UK. I've always wanted to revisit them, but struggled to find any way that I could refine them further while still keeping them as clean as possible (and using in game materials).

When the Gambler's Chest arrived on my doorstep, I was excited because now we had an official way to play with 5 players, the game could be played with four of my friends/family taking normal survivors and I would run the scout!

However, after playing with the scout (see my reviews via the tag on this post), I concluded that this would not be the right fit for the more casual and roleplaying orientated focus that our group sessions rotated around. The Scout rules in the Gambler's Chest force a hyper conservative playstyle with little room for risk taking or goofing off. With everything on the line every showdown I had to dial in, min/max my decisions and ensure I was over prepared for every monster. It wasn't fun and I didn't want to inflict that on my more casual gaming friends.

However, a lot of what the Scouts brought to the game I felt was really amazing, especially the Scout Discovery systems and I felt disappointed that I wouldn't get to play with those materials because they were bound up into a version of Scouts that I didn't enjoy. That sat in the back of my head for a while until I decided to try the Scout out without the "all or nothing" way that the system works in the Gambler's Chest.

These rules are born from the desire to revisit my old rules and make the scouts something I could personally enjoy, a place where I could continue to engage with the extra lore that the Scout Discoveries and Events bring in.

Note 1: This will be released free for all on Friday 12th September 2025, I am simply releasing this a week early to my patrons as a thank you for their support.

Note 2: In order to fully enjoy these rules you need to own a copy of the Gambler's Chest Expansion (GCE)/

To begin with I'm going to briefly go through the reasoning behind this set of rules. I do not much care for the official 5-6 Player variant that comes in the base game rulebook. For reference here they are:

5 - 6 Players

When you depart, you may take 5 or 6 survivors instead of the normal 4.

Use the following rules when you do.

Monsters gain +2 damage and + 1 speed tokens at the start of the showdown.

Monsters have the Life trait: place 2+ the monster's level wounds on it. Once this card is archived, you can wound the monster normally. If a monster already has this trait, add 2+ monster level wounds to it. Full rules for Life are in the Monster section.

Gain no additional rewards from defeating monsters.

The issue here is that increasing the monster's speed and damage does not work well for scaling against additional survivors. Speed increases the overall threat level of an attack in a random fashion, additional survivor hit locations are going to get damaged and there's an increased chance of a multi-hit on the same hit location.

Damage on the other hand doesn't increase the randomness, but it does increase the depth of the threat. It takes less hits for the monster to get through a hit location and start inflicting severe injuries/death.

The real crux of it all though is that additional speed and damage together has a multiplicative impact on the threat level of a monster, the increased damage is being applied more often per attack card. What that means is survivors die a lot faster, early on in the campaign they can die from single hits. The basic action of the L1 White Lion is transformed into 3 speed, 2+ accuracy, 3 damage. Against a typical Lantern Year 1 survivor that's going to be on average 2 or 3 immediate severe injuries per attack. It is brutal and for the average board gamer, not fun.

However, adding in additional survivors does make the game easier, there does need to be a penalty for having them if you want to maintain some sort of balance. Originally I sought to do this by limiting the amount of actions that the survivor group had, but I think now the Scout rules offer an alternative way to handle things.

In the zip file attached to this post you'll find three pdfs, these will allow you to play with 5 and 6 players without too much rules overhead or additional printing/cutting/crafts. I have worked hard to try and keep these as close as possible to the official rules and use as much of that as possible. We'll go through them individually now.

The first thing is the new Outskirts card, you will need to print one copy of this and it replaces the official GCE Outskirts. This is mostly the same as that card, but the original text covering how gear is lost has been replaced. Instead the rules give you the option to field 1 or 2 additional scouts and they have their survival limit reduced by half (rounded down).

The biggest boons that the Scout brings to the team is their unique scout gear and the extra survival actions. As mentioned above in the preamble, I really like the scout gear, so that is something I've kept exactly as printed. Note that if you are playing with 6 players there is no increase in the rate you can gain Hollow Stones at. This is intentional.

Reducing the total amount of survival a Scout can have does a few things, first of all it makes the hunt phase much more treacherous and threatening, which I think does a good job of highlighting the scouting part of their duties. They have less survival because their packs are heavy and they have to remain separate from the main group while they surveil the surroundings.

Mechanically this also means every single survival action the scout undertakes is a precious thing, you can dodge, dash, encourage and surge a lot less than the normal survivors. Combine that with the limited number of slots that a scout gains and you have a lot of risk. Scouts are not very maneuverable until they get boots to help increase their movement, if you plant one in the wrong spot they're not going to be able to get out of the way of the monster, combine that with their low number of gear slots and limited survival for dodges and it can be a rough time.

Another quick note about the only rule not listed on the Outskirts card, you are limited to the number of scout gear cards that come in the box, no duplicates. So if you are playing with 6 scouts you are going to need to collaborate with your fellow scout. (Also if the group wants, players can rotate who controls the scout(s) each showdown, it doesn't have to be the same players each time).

The second update is to the Scout Gear Grid. Here is the new version for use in this variant, you will need to print 1 copy of this for player(s) 5 and 6.

The Dreaded Pack has remained mostly the same in respect to its properties. It is heavy, smelly and slows the Scout down. It also has the rules for scaling the monster's health points. You might even notice that the health of the monster is using a similar system to the official 5-6 player rules, except it also scales the health further if you have two scouts. There is no Logistics of Death anymore because if you wanted to play 5 or 6 players with two scouts using the official rules they're in the GCE already. Instead we have that buffer of life points which makes the fight longer, especially if the scout can't or doesn't pitch in.

You'll notice that there are no additional resources gained for the 5th player/scout, but the 6th player/scout does bring in a few extra based on the monster level. Resources get stretched very thinly when you have 6 players, so having two extra resources helps a lot.

Rules Note: You will use two Dreaded Packs in the Prologue Fight (they get a cloth and founding stone as usual), those two survivors found the packs on their backs when they first awakened and instinctively felt a kinship with them.

Rules Note 2: It's very easy to scale the player count between 4 and 6 if you have these rules, though it is important that you remember to craft gear for the scout(s) even when they are not around, they'll thank you for it!

Additional Notes/Thoughts

I do think that these rules make the game a bit easier, however scaling up the number of units on the "many" side of a One vs. Many battle will always do that. I haven't scaled the monster up outside of health due to the reasons I mentioned above, instead we've scaled the power of the additional units down by removing 5 gear slots, 2 points of movement and over 50% of their survival. It has balanced quite nicely in testing so far.

Optional House Rule: If you want to make things more difficult when you have 6 players, give every monster +1 speed, that will scale the difficulty up quite a bit, though the impact will be lessened once you have good evasion on your front line.

6 Slot Alternative

Before we finish I have one additional alternative Scout Gear grid to share. This absolutely makes the game easier, but I've made it mostly for myself. You see I love the scouts, but I don't enjoy how they tend to force me into making them Marrowism survivors with a Second Stomach in order to really feel happy with them. So I created this alternative gear grid and because it has brought me joy I'm sharing it here with you all also. Again this will need to be 1 copy per extra player.

The changes here are the addition of the two extra gear slots, they are limited in what you can put in them. If something doesn't have the Tool, Lantern or Scout keyword then it cannot go in them. Of course this makes the scouts stronger because they have more places for gear (even if the extra gear is more limited in where it can go, but I did this for my enjoyment because I want to carry more Scout Tablets.

The additional penalty for this is removing the Scouts ability to Dash during the Monster's Turn which is more impactful than you may first think. It has balanced things well for me and it's also felt very thematic that the Scout is now so overburdened that they are even slower.

Final Thoughts

While the original 5-6 Player Rules will remain up (here) for players who do not have the Gambler's Chest, going ahead this is what I'll use as/when we reach higher player count games. I hope you enjoy this new version, it's taken a while to get it into shape, but it's managed to stick close to the original KDM 5+ Player rules (I hope) and manages to maintain that reduced mobility for the extra players while also depowering them further with the smaller gear grids.

I hope you enjoy them, and please do let me know if you think I should return to hampering the number of actions/activations that the extra players get!