“I’m surprised you backed this Kickstarter” was the comment Jonathan left me on a shared Instagram photo to Facebook.

Jonathan then went on to ask what was different about this edition.

The easiest and most obvious answer is that it is all three editions of the game, Valley of the Kings, Valley of the Kings: Afterlife and Valley of the Kings: Last Rites in a single box.

The image below (extracted from the Kickstarter page) shows some of the other differences.

The size of the game has also increased! Before each version of the game in these nice portable, throw in a side pocket of a bag, boxes. Now the game comes in a much larger, regular size game box. The cards in the game have also gone up in size from a magic the gathering sized card to a tarot card size. The pictures below give you a more accurate comparison of the size differences.

There is also this cool pharaoh first player marker. Plus I’m not sure if this will be in the retail edition but in the Kickstarter edition there were enough clear sleeves to sleeve all the cards, and have a few spares left over if needed.

As the photo above there is more than enough space in the box to store all the sleeved cards.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that the art has been upgraded as well. Well upgraded in my opinion. The style is completely different. And I like it.

Having the player’s and rules guides is a nice touch. The player’s guide focuses on how to mix and match the versions together, with some suggested sets to use. Those suggestions were created by the designer and some bgg folks. It also has the rules for the pharaoh cards (player abilities), solo game play, and a card supplement explaining the cards. And naturally the rule book covers how to play the game.

So why did I back the kickstart of a game I already had? Well I did only have the base game, and wanted the other two versions. So this was a really nice way to get them, along with the little additional extras not in the other versions. Yes it looses that portability aspect that was a big advantage of the game. But that completionist part of me (that seems to be in every gamer) would have wanted those extra bits as well. And they were never going to be available in the original smaller versions.

Now I just need to get this to the table and enjoy this really nice deckbuilder.