Deathmas: Cockroach Queen | White Box | Kingdom Death: Monster Review

The guest had arrived and they felt merry and bright despite the gloomy frost that descended on the settlement. Their joints ached and their blue-tinged skin stung in the biting winds. Barely audible above the howl of the wind and the glad tidings bellowed by their guest, a papery tune emerged. They gathered, pressed together for warmth to sing the carol they each knew in their hearts without ever hearing it. On the first glow of Deathmas our best guest gave to us... The guest grew quiet, listening intently, closing its eyes and searching the back of its eyelids for a memory. With a rising hiss, its appendages began to twitch and sway along to the chorus.

This holiday season, the Cockroach Queen returns in plastic, brimming with gifts from the self-invited guest. An inexhaustible cube of gore, a chiming blade, and new tricks to use during showdowns with Atnas, the Child Eater.

Another holiday season, another Atnas related release. This time it is the previous Deathmas: Cockroach Queen Beta turned into a full plastic release. Again, this is a reminder that one should not spend money on the Beta releases (unless they bring a new weapon proficiency card or new armor set), they're full of weird ideas that don't often pay off very well and the ones which are successful will get a plastic release further down the line.

The Miniature

Cockroach Queen has always struggled a bit in regards to her usefulness as a miniature because she's a twin Lantern Dagger armor survivor wearing Lantern Armor. Lantern Armor miniatures not wielding clubs and/or shields are generally low value if you're seeking in game pieces to represent what you're using on the table.

This version of her has an advantage in that the festive clothing she is wearing can easily be reinterpreted to be something like Leather Armor and that is a better fit for a dagger user, so there is some value here especially if you're going to downplay the Christmas colour scheme or if you lean into it because you've reached the opinion that Atnas is going to be a permanent feature in your Node 2 Nemesis selection.

That written, I'm not a huge fan of this model overall, I've had the photoresin one for a year now and I am considering selling it to someone who wants to paint it because she's just taking up space in the miniature storage right now. It's fine enough, but the Atnas Christmas theme is a very jarring clash when compared to most of Kingdom Death's aesthetic. It is worth noting that the Cockroach on the base can help if you're seeking to represent a Verminism survivor.

The Gameplay

It's worth noting that the Hissing Cockroach resource that came in the Beta content (see review here) has been excised from the box, I think that's a good thing overall. It was not a very good design, in fact it's somewhat confusingly designed and was even a slight detriment to the vermin pool overall due to it replacing the first vermin draw you get.

Instead we have this new Gift system, which is an optional difficulty modifier for the Atnas fight.

The design intent is for players to have a deck of these gift cards and you go through them one card at a time, stopping when you reach a gift you want to use. Every single gift card revelled will be placed on Atnas' dashboard, thereby increasing the difficulty of the showdown. Currently we only have one Gift card, and if we're only getting a single gift card each year this system is not going to become super relevant because it's the kind of thing that needs at least 10 cards in order to really click.

Gift of Arms is the card we get here and it's a boost to the Sword Craft portion of the showdown, inflicting two Sword Craft cards to every survivor and also adding monster level speed to the Sword Craft attack cards. That's not insignificant, as it is boosting the main threat that Atnas has to harm survivors, but the way it is doing this is by increasing the variance of the fight. Atnas is an incredibly inconsistent fight to experience, if it isn't triggering Sword Crafts then the fight is very easy and smooth. If it's Sword Crafting a lot then the fight can feel really hard. I'm not a fan of this kind of design, it's fine for a monster to have occasional spikes of extreme danger, but Atnas is more like a random pendulum, it's usually swinging 'harmless' but it can go 'super dangerous' in a way that can feel quite random and unpredictable. That's not a fault of this card in specific, it's more an issue at the heart of Atnas himself. Some showdowns are flawed concepts from the start of design, Atnas is one of them.

The rewards for winning the showdown here have an interesting element; we get an “eternal” resource that modifies a weapon when it is used to craft said weapon. Here it is +1 speed in exchange for the Sentient drawback (must be insane to activate the weapon). However, the resource itself has only the Perfect and Organ resource keywords. That does limit the weapons it can be used with quite a bit, I can't cover a complete list but here are the interesting generic ones that can be crafted.

• Whistling Mace – Weapon Crafter

• Counterweighted Axe – Weapon Crafter

• Ring Whip – Blacksmith

Considering how many weapons are in the three generic locations available, having just three of them able to use this resource for crafting is a good indicator of the limitations this resource has. Of course we have monster weapons and the various seed patterns to consider, so the exact value will vary, but our 'backbone' crafting options are a bit limited (though all of these three options can be strong with the right build).

All of this means the Lungs of the Sword Saint are going to vary in how useful they are, if you don't have monsters with organ based weapons (or perfect/perfect organ) then the value of this drops a huge amount.

The other drop from this card is a rare gear dagger.

(As this is a paired weapon, two copies of the dagger are included, with the

This is a weapon with an incredible amount of hard pushing to try and overcome its massive noisy drawback. Make no mistake, in Harvester free situations this weapon provides a serious argument for using it. While it has the base stats of a bone dagger, Sharp is increasing that average strength over the showdown to a 6.5. That's respectable for a weapon gained in lantern year 9, less so for the second one that you'll gain in lantern year 18 (and irrelevant in lantern year 28). Given that we don't immediately gain two of these daggers, it's hard to justify using them paired because they're starting to fall off at the time you get the second one.

The two affinities are really nice though, they're the perfect orientation for a Monster-Tooth Necklace and significantly Monster Grease. Which is something that the Provoke key word and the +1 evasion token for each hit (until the start of your next act) are seeking to synergise with. In order to assess this, let us look at the average number of hits expected. We're probably in the facing of the monster with a weapon like this (due to Provoke keeping its attention on that survivor); so we probably can't consistently benefit from the Blind Spot +1 accuracy.

That means with one dagger we're scoring 1.2 hits and with two daggers that doubles to an average of 2.4. Not great, so we definitely want extra accuracy on the attacking survivor because these daggers force them into becoming a “Provoke Tank” by design. We need a hard, tough survivor with good evasion and a lot of soak because they're going to be the focus for the monster most of the showdown.

A quick aside; It's worth noting that high speed daggers are not as major issue in the hands of a Dagger specialist, they can discard an unwanted hit location to the specialisation ability. Sadly this can only be done once per attack and doesn't help much vs. First Strike and doesn't help at all vs the Trap, both of which have to be "selected" before any other hit location cards.

So, this poor hit rate in combination with the low strength means this weapon is only going to do well in the hands of a survivor with a lot of stat boosts; to be specific we want a survivor with extra accuracy, strength and evasion on top of them running a hard to crack, green affinity heavy, protective load out. That's a lot of slots and the idea of running a second dagger in such a gear grid is difficult. We're already looking at 5 slots for armor, 2 for daggers and 1 for monster grease, so we only have one slot for accuracy and/or strength increases in order to make sure this survivor is being effective. But that slot should probably instead be a shield. Nightmare.

There's no way I could manage to put together a gear grid that did everything I needed it to without support from the survivor's stats. The game just can't support a paired weapon tank unless you have block/deflect built into the armor set except for using the four slot Refined Lantern Armor and that is a club set through and through which comes in an expensive promo box.

Ultimately these daggers just didn't impress me when used, Provoke is a strong ability for sure, as is gaining temporary evasion tokens on hit. But the stress this places on the gear portion of the survivor build is really heavy and that means I need to slot a valuable survivor into this role. Add onto that how this weapon runs counter to the best way daggers play, having zero synergy with Dagger Mastery and the noisy keyword means that this weapon is going to be box fodder most of the time (Verminism Survivors are the main way this weapon will get out of the box storage, but that's not present in most campaigns).

The New Atnas Cards

Atnas follows a similar design model to the Smog Singers, a soft target with a ticking bomb that can cause a lot of damage when it detonates. These cards are called 'Sword Craft' cards and they are gained through various methods during the Atnas showdown. Without getting into the specifics here, the cards are dealt face down to survivors (though survivors with sword proficiency can peek at them for a few seconds) and they do nothing until being triggered.

Once triggered (usually by drawing the Trap card or via the Mood cards which start in the wound pile but can be recovered by Atnas during the showdown) these cards create massively damaging attacks with large AOE that are accurate, high damage and cannot be dodged (due to the trap having "All survivors are doomed" as a part of its text); there are 16 total of these cards in the Gambler's Chest, bringing the amount to 18 when these two are included.

The longer the fight goes, the more of these cards one will encounter, so increasing the upper limit of these cards does also increase the ceiling of what can happen and at the floor this makes the attacks more unpredictable if you've not been able to peak at them.

I think they're both interesting cards, using the game's physical nature to track some form of alteration to the board is always an interesting space to play with. But there is a lack of any reminder card to keep on the board, meaning that players are going to need to copy or remember the rules for what the token means.

I would briefly like to praise the naming for these two cards, asterism is where there is a grouping/pattern of stars that's not an actual constellation in itself. One example is the Big Dipper (which is a part of Ursa Major) or the wonderful Summer Triangle, which is a part of the Chinese tale of The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl (I'll link to the wikipedia summary here). Not only is it fun to see terms like this being used in the game because they provide an opportunity for curiosity to expand one's knowledge of our own world, but they also have a design that thematically somewhat follows the ethos of asterism itself.

Overall these cards are fine, they're interesting enough but they don't bring a large change to the showdown the way that the gift cards do.

Final Summary

This is a bit of a miss for me, it's adding to one of the less engaging showdowns in a way that increases the unpredictability and in exchange for that we get a resource that needs careful campaign construction to be useful plus a dagger that needs an already great survivor wielding it. If you are a part of the group that absolutely adores Atnas then there's something here for you. However, for someone like myself who still runs the Slender Man even if I don't have all the matching quarry monsters, this one represents a weak return for the money spent.

I think you can safely skip this one unless Atnas is your number 1 babe and if you do not have the Gambler's Chest Expansion this box has no game content of value for you at all.

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