Throwback Review: Kobolds Ate My Baby!

First published by 9th Level Games, Kobolds Ate My Baby! is a comedy RPG about playing kobolds, which is already a great start. Not noble heroes, not mighty wizards, not brooding antiheroes. Just miserable little kobolds trying to survive the whims of King Torg (ALL HAIL KING TORG!) while bungling their way through one doomed mission after another. The title tells you almost everything you need to know. This is not a game about triumph, but about panic, hunger, betrayal, and tiny furry idiots making everything worse.

Kobolds Ate My Baby! actually understands how to turn the joke into play. The kobolds are weak, selfish, impulsive, and deeply expendable. The world does not care about them. Their king barely cares about them. Their fellow kobolds definitely do not care about them. The whole thing is set up to create exactly the kind of chaos the title promises.

This is a game where the table energy matters as much as the rules. Maybe more. You are supposed to argue. You are supposed to panic. You are supposed to make bad decisions with total confidence. You are supposed to scream “ALL HAIL KING TORG!” like an absolute maniac. It is not subtle, and thank goodness for that. Kobolds Ate My Baby! knows that sometimes the best session is not the one with the deepest story or the most elegant worldbuilding. Sometimes the best session is the one where everyone is laughing because the mission went wrong in the dumbest way possible.

Mechanically, the game keeps things light and fast, which is exactly what it should do. This is not a game that wants players buried in complexity. It wants the action moving. It wants players taking chances. It wants failure to be funny instead of frustrating. The rules are there to keep the train on the tracks just long enough for it to derail in an entertaining way. That may sound like faint praise, but it isn’t. Designing a game that feels loose without feeling pointless is harder than it looks. Kobolds Ate My Baby! manages it because it understands its own lane. It is not trying to be your forever campaign game. It is not trying to be the most important system on your shelf. It is trying to give you a memorable, ridiculous evening, and it is very, very good at that.

What makes the game stick in people’s memories, though, is not just that it is funny. It is that it feels honest. There is no pretense here. No attempt to dress itself up as something grander or more serious than it is. It is a comedy game about doomed kobolds, and it commits to that premise with total confidence. There is something kind of admirable about that. Plenty of games want to show you how clever they are. Kobolds Ate My Baby! just wants you to have a good time wrecking everything.

I’ve run KAMB many times, including while on deployment back in 2007. There have been many editions released over the years, including the most recent 2024 Orange Book, which I own, but haven’t gotten to play yet.

Looking back now, it also feels like a great snapshot of a certain era of tabletop gaming. An era when weird little games could build cult followings just by being fun, quotable, and a little unhinged. It has that convention-game energy, that late-night-game-store energy, that “we should absolutely not be trusted with this premise” energy. And that gives it a charm that still holds up.

Kobolds Ate My Baby! is not a classic because it changed the shape of the hobby, it is a classic because it knew exactly what it was doing and did it well. It is stupid in the best way, loud in the best way, and surprisingly durable for a game built around tiny creatures having a terrible day.

ALL HAIL KING TORG.