Gambler's Chest Expansion Review – Encounters and The Bone Eaters

Spoilers for:

• Bone Eaters

• Marrowism

As we have finished looking at Marrowism I am now going to take a look at the Bone Eaters; however, the structure of this review is going to be a breakdown and review of the Encounter system in isolation, followed by a spoiler review specifically into the Bone Eaters themselves. So this means if you are curious about the Encounter system in general but don't want any of the actual Bone Eater elements spoiled (beyond what is already included in the rules portion of the rulebook), you can read the first half of this review and get a good idea about what the system is like in the Gambler's Chest Expansion (GCE) and what it will be like with future expansions. Then, if you've already played against the Bone Eaters, or don't mind spoiler discussion in advance because it is something that improves your enjoyment of the content when you do encounter it; you can dig into the second half and the specifics about those big lads and lasses.

What are Encounters?

In recent times I've taken to describing the Hunt Phase as being an analogue to the “dungeon exploration” portion of the dungeon crawler. It is a series of points, events and exploration that is simplified down to a single linear route through the “dungeon”. With this analogy one can consider the Encounters filling the role of “wandering monsters.” Wandering monsters in dungeon crawlers are extra monsters, that represent patrols or returning expeditions of monsters that provide extra surprise, suspense and difficulty to the experience. Some dungeons could be full of wandering monster encounters, while other ones may have only a few sporadic ones, or none at all. It's something that adds a lot of emergent storytelling to the particular dungeon crawl at the cost of making the entire experience longer.

Within Kingdom Death the thematic concept of the Encounters are additional creatures out there that are hunting the survivors through the darkness, they present a limited number of scaling difficulty opponents that might turn up during a hunt. This makes them different from Nemesis monsters because they are unpredictable, the longer the hunt is the more likely you'll encounter them, but there are no certainties.

The Encounter Mechanics

Encounter Monsters come with the following elements for each group:

• Encounter hunt event cards

• Initiative cards

• Opportunity deck (small)

• Counter deck (small)

• Critical wound deck (small)

• Encounter Showdown story event

• Reference card

• Encounter board

• Encounter monster miniatures

• Life dice

Encounter monsters are first introduced through a Story Event; this is something that I don't think we talk about enough. Story Events are one of the super interesting parts of the game where monsters are concerned, not only do they gate the monsters away on the timeline to ensure inexperienced players do not go after higher level monsters that they are not prepared for, but they also provide a first tease of a particular monster's flavour and style. A well done Story Event can set the mood incredibly well.

After their introduction, one of the basic hunt event cards is archived and replaced with the lowest level encounter card for the monsters. These encounter cards have a lantern year marked on them, which indicates the earliest lantern year you can possibly encounter these monsters, this means that you shouldn't encounter the higher level versions before you have good enough gear to handle them somewhat. Here's the first Bone Eaters encounter card, it doesn't spoil any mechanics beyond the general ones of how the encounter works.

When this card is drawn on the hunt, as long as the lantern year is equal or higher than the number printed in the centre of the card then you will have the encounter showdown (I still haven't figured out why this card has LY 2 on it when the Encounter doesn't get added until LY3, I'm assuming it is a misprint left from an earlier playtest version). The encounter requires setting up the special encounter board, getting the specific terrain, terrain cards, miniatures and various encounter cards. I like this example image from the GCE as it shows everything really clearly.

The Encounter Showdown page will have additional details, such as extra trait cards and how many encounter monsters are present.

The ideal situation is to be able to keep this encounter board set up permanently while playing with encounters in the Basic Hunt Deck because otherwise the set up and tear down can take a bit of time. However, I have found that the risk/cost involved in that is the board sits there doing nothing at all for most hunts, so I am close to abandoning that practice in exchange for getting more table space. Buuuuuut, if I do that then I still have to clear a space when this happens because now I am using the plastic board I can't stick this encounter one on top of it without causing damage.

The Monster Phase

On the monster phase, all the encounter monsters will act in a randomly determined order set by their deck of initiative cards. These are large art cards that depict each of the individual monster miniatures. The selected monster will perform its basic action, and once that is completed the next monster will go.

This by itself would be rather basic, so when a monster rolls a perfect hit they get to draw and resolve an opportunity card. These cards have a bunch of unique effects that vary in the level of punishment dished out, including mood cards that will stay in play and buff all the encounter monsters (for those of you living in a Harvester free environment the Whisker Harp is a grand option, otherwise some whips can help if the encounter monster toughness hasn't outscaled the whips you have available.)

Once all of the monsters have acted we're onto survivor turns, these work in the same fashion as during normal showdowns except for how you wound the monster. Hits do not draw hit locations, instead you skip straight to the wounding roll vs. toughness. If you do roll a critical wound during the wounding roll you'll get to draw a critical wound card and apply the effect. This in essence means that encounter monsters have black hit location cards with only the critical wound section on them.

When the monsters are wounded you will track each individual monster's health separately, their health varies from 1 to 6 and is tracked with tiny little D6s. This is another homage to Warhammer Quest (1995), which uses them to track individual monster health also. Here's a picture of them from my copy of the game alongside a normal GW D6 for scale.

These dice are far too small to utilise unless you have tiny fingers, and trying to fit them onto the space positioned on the monster base is just too awkward and fiddly. We've alternated between keeping the dice next to the monsters in the same space or using a stack of health tokens underneath them the way that Too Many Bones uses them (I even have some spare health chips from that game we use). It looks odd, but it is far faster and smoother. I think the thing I most wanted though would have been a click based dial or ring the way that Mage Knight/Heroclix utilises them or if that was too much having life trackers on the encounter board would work really well also.

There are also Counter cards, which are drawn by the monsters when encounter specific triggers are met, there is no generic Counter Card drawing mechanism, they appear to be monster specific triggers. So I can't really discuss them further here.

The encounter showdown ends the same as a full showdown; with defeat via annihilation of all the survivors or victory with the death of all the encounter monsters. Defeat will result in the end of the Hunt phase and passes straight to the next lantern year. Victory will give rewards (including Hunt XP and weapon proficiency gains if they are listed in the rewards which is really meaningful), remove the current level of the encounter monster card (replacing it with a higher level version if there is one, if not then there are no more of those monsters out there stalking the party) and then the survivors get to “Deliberate”. Because the survivors will be carrying all tokens, damage and similar across to the main showdown and may be worn down, they have a choice. They can go home and suffer the starvation penalty, continue on to fight the intended target monster or go for a lower level version of the same monster species. Either of the latter two results do not cut the hunt phase short, even if the monster has been reduced in level it will still be located at the same spot it was before starting the encounter.

Summary and Thoughts

So that in essence is all of the encounter phase in a nutshell; it is in all honestly quite a swingy experience; you can't tell when the monsters will turn up, they could arrive right at the very first opportunity their encounter level card offers, they could not turn up all campaign or as was the case in my first GCE campaign, the level 1 version could not turn up until far too late. Resulting in a situation where it took longer to set up the encounter than it did to play it.

That in itself is the main issue with encounters and something that pulses through every aspect of it; this is an incredibly variable system which is a detriment to itself. While the monsters have been designed to not turn up too early, they can turn up too late (the L1 versions have still not turned up in the campaign I'm currently playing and they are going to be slammed into the dumpster when they do turn up now). Likewise, when fighting during the showdown itself the experience, even if they are at the right level for the right year, can be super variable. Perfect hits from the monsters triggering multiple Opportunity Cards can decimate survivors out of nowhere, while critical wounds can tear the monsters apart rapidly. It seems that only Counter Cards offer much in the way of player agency in because they have a specific trigger that you are aware of.

This places a lot of weight on the shoulders of each individual encounter design themselves; if the Counter/Critical/Opportunity cards are out of whack then the monsters can be too simple or too difficult. Add onto that the aforementioned issue of no guaranteed encounter lantern year or automatic levelling as the campaign progresses forwards and these monsters may just become a free source of benefits.

Personally I would have preferred the encounter hunt cards to automatically level up, and the players gain the specific (non-hunt XP/Weapon Proficiency) rewards of all 'skipped' encounters; so if you beat the level 3 encounter monsters without facing the level 2 version you'd get that as well. That would at least remove the dumpster fights where the monsters turn up and do not have a chance in heck.

So the system is mostly solid, but not perfect. Outside of the encounter levelling issue, which even if not fixed isn't a huge deal it works well and adds more to the hunt phase. The main cost here though is increasing the amount of time a session takes, which is absolutely something that will be a factor for some players. There's also a lot landing on the shoulders of the individual encounter monster cards; they need to provide a suitable level of threat without going too far.

So let us get into the Bone Eaters. Spoilers ahead.

The Bone Eater Review

The Bone Eaters as a “monster species” are closely tied to the survivors themselves, as you would expect given that three of the Bone Eater sculpts are based on Allister, Erza and Zachary (Lucy is sadly missing). In short, as we saw through the Marrowism philosophy, Bone Eaters are former survivors who complete their journey of bone consumption fully and then feel the call to go join the rest of their kind. It seems that once they fully embrace the lifestyle they become more statue than flesh and blood, allowing them to stand still with all the appearance of statuary for an unknown length of time. We can see from the Missing Statue introductory event that they have been around not just long enough for the survivors to mistake them for statues in a colonnade, but also long enough for spider-like vermin (or perhaps Spiderlings) to adorn them with festive cobwebs. This isn't the only time we've seen monsters stand stock still like statues, the Lion Knight (2nd) is capable of doing it also.

In appearance, the Bone Eaters take on the form of large time worn Roman and Greek statues of survivors, while the Greek/Roman statues in their time were brightly coloured with paint, that did not last the years of weathering and so we tend to have the image of a marble white Rome in our minds when it was likely far more garish and lively. When painting my own Bone Eaters I contemplated making them entirely alabaster/ivory scheme to match the artwork from the Missing Statue event (above), but I instead decided to plump for a scheme that represented an intermediate stage while also reflecting my preferred scheme for the game's landscape (which is deep red/purples and blue/greens).

When it comes to the thematics for this set of encounter monsters, I've already expressed so much appreciation for them and it continues through to the Bone Eaters. Having another example of the malleable nature of our survivor human analogues and how they can turn into other things is very cool. We've seen outside forces such as the Holy Lands or elements of People of the Sun/Stars change their nature, but this is one of the first times where it seems to be a change caused by internal factors. That's really fascinating and sweet to see, as such I'm hopeful we may see Gormundism or Verminism based survivor encounters in the distant future as the concept of survivors totally twisted into “inhuman” forms/perspectives by their own actions instead of those belonging to an outside creature is too good to just leave on the table.

The Miniatures

I cannot write about this encounter without going over the miniatures; I absolutely love these models so much, the decision to offer two different heads so players can decide if they want a sedate “statue” expression or a full blown “anime psycho” vibe is a nice touch. I've painted my set and you can see them here: (https://www.instagram.com/p/C2J8rCFtqor/). About the only criticism I have is that the Erza variant known as “Victim” has a bit of an odd nipple placement, it's not impossible for nipples to be located like that, but it does look weird here.

If you're curious about the name Victim, I use the names that came from the KDM Build site to differentiate the five Bone Eaters. They are Victim, Knife, Fingers (Finger crown), Skull and Skeleton (Links to the build page where you can see clean 360 views of each sculpt in the first few images). My personal favourites are Skeleton and Fingers, but Skull has a lot of quiet arrogance and disdain that comes across incredibly well.

The main area of complaint I have is the dice holder, it is a nice idea in theory, but as discussed above, in practice it doesn't work. Having to reach in and change the dice facing when they suffer damage is frustrating and awkward, which is why I switched to placing health chips under them like this. (Bonus Crunk and Performing Prawns hanging out in the background there).

For the record, as of writing this I'm playing a Frogdog/Black Knight based campaign and I am on level 2 Node 1/2 monsters with no sign of the Level 1 Bone Eaters (again), so once more variance is going to make a mockery of their difficulty when they do turn up.

Depending on if you count a Bone Eater base as 1 health it takes either 10 or 15 chips to cover all five bone eaters at their highest monster level and it also highlights another issue with the dice provided. The Bone Eaters do not need six sided dice to cover all their health, they only needed three sided dice. You could try and argue that the encounter dice are future proofing for other encounter monsters in the future, but that would mean in theory every encounter released in the future “requires” the Gambler's Chest Expansion to play with. Of course in practice, dice are dice and they are not the only way to track health. So I think my issue here boils down to how poor a solution these dice are for the Bone Eaters in specific. It is a cute idea for sure, but switching to the spare health chips from TMB sped up the showdown so much because removing a health chip is considerably faster and easier than picking up a dice, rotating it, and then slotting it back in.

So outside of the plastic dice I have nothing but love for these miniatures.

The Encounter

I really like the lore and appearance of the Bone Eaters a lot; so it is with a heavy heart that I have to write that I'm not super impressed with their encounter showdown. I have yet to have a good, fun or engaging experience as the fights have either been one where the Bone Eaters are beaten down very quickly without achieving anything, or their dice have beaten the odds and generated a lot of Lantern 10 Opportunities for them. However, to really give them as fair a shake as possible let us look at each element of them individually.

Here are their stats at each level

And the earliest each level of these monsters can turn up are:

• Level 1: Lantern Year 2

• Level 2: Lantern Year 8

• Level 3: Lantern Year 15

• Level 4: Lantern Year 15

If we look at the toughness levels and additional damage these monsters get, the damage scales really severely but the Toughness falls behind the curve. This is because monster damage is effectively dividing up survivor armor points but survivor damage rarely scales up (mostly it relies on Devastating/Savage) and instead it is the strength vs. toughness race that survivors are involved in.

What I mean by this is; monsters do not have to roll strength vs. toughness to cause damage. They automatically “pass” all strength checks. So all you have is your armor and injury boxes to soak up damage. That means if you have 2 armor points, Damage 1 will remove all that in 2 hits, but Damage 2 will remove it in 1 hit and Damage 3 will get through it, plus have another 1 point to apply against the survivor's injury boxes. It is a big part of why monsters are such a large step upwards when you go up in levels, they can tear through armor soak a lot faster. It is why Rawhide stops being able to tank effectively when you move onto L2 Node ones, you go from being able to take 4 hits of 1 damage each before you suffer a severe injury to being only able to take 2 hits, your soak has been divided by 2.

In contrast, survivors tend to only deal 1 damage per hit (there are of course exceptions); and if they fail their wounding roll they end up dealing 0 damage and often suffering consequences from the attack via reactions. So the important part for survivors is securing that wound via good Strength or Luck. Because wounding rolls for survivors use a D10 as a part of the check monster Toughness numbers have far more range in them than survivor soak. We've seen up to 30 toughness on some monsters as well; if you're only wounding half the time and dealing one damage per wound that can end up giving the monsters "twice" the health they have on paper. In short it is really hard to figure out how many hits it will take to kill a monster, which is why things like Devastating X do so much work because they double the wounding rate. I hope that makes sense, I don't have the space here to go into examples that would break down what I mean further.

What all of this means for the Bone Eaters is they are effectively what we call “glass cannons”; if you are not familiar with this term, a glass cannon is a game archetype where the character in question has overwhelming damage, but weak defences that are easily overcome. In the Encounter this manifests itself as the Bone Eaters having really low life points and toughness numbers that the survivors are already geared to overcome (based on average weapon strengths around those lantern years). I find the life totals in particular to be quite head scratching; they start out at 2, which is actually kind of rough if they attack in LY3 and stay at that amount except for the L4 versions which get 3 life. On top of that, while movement scales absolutely fine for the small board size that is the encounter board, the evasion and luck tokens (the only other statistics that provide defence for Bone Eaters) do not turn up until L4. The stark contrast to that is the monster damage, which is divide survivor soak per location by 1, then by 2, then by 3 and then by 4. Our big compensation here is that baseline Speed stays at 2 and base accuracy is locked in at 3+.

All of that results in hunt phase monsters that exist to deal a lot of damage if you do not tear them down really quickly. And, because Encounter Monsters have individual life pools, unlike the shared life pools that the Smog Singers have, the strategy is to eliminate each individual Bone Eater as fast as possible before moving onto the next one. Sometimes the terrain can make that hard, but the Bone Eaters are not a living opponent, they do not move to make use of the terrain with purpose, if it is beneficial to them, that happened by circumstance or poor play from the players.

It's also worth noting that the Bone Eater targeting is also very simple and easy to make use of because it is Closest Threat, in range followed by closest survivor and that is bog standard basic dungeon crawl monster targeting there, but somehow it is even weaker than the Warhammer Quest (WHQ) targeting because at least the WHQ monsters have a way of sometimes trapping heroes in place once they are adjacent. The Bone Eaters do not even get to go after the weakest/most vulnerable target, if someone is in a lot of trouble you can provide alternative targets for them.

Additional Traits

The Bone Eaters have 2 additional Status Traits (which honestly should have spots on their Encounter Dashboard to place them at). The first is Skull Surgeons which starts from L2 and the second is Preemptive Party that is only on the L4 version. Skull Surgeons gives the Bone Eaters bleed 1 on their attacks (with an extra Monster Level bleed for all head severe injuries). That is nothing to sneeze at when you get to L3 and L4 because gaining 3 or 4 bleed tokens is a terrifying amount when you consider that the monsters have 2 speed. Survivors are going to be leaning on defensive survival actions and passive evasion a lot here because technically a L4 Bone Eater could kill a normal survivor in a single attack at L4.

Preemptive Party on the other hand is not as scary, it triggers before the wound step of a survivor's attack and deals 1 hit at monster level damage for each adjacent Bone Eater; the hard counter to this is attacking at 3+ speed or using range. The soft counter is to reposition so only one Bone Eater can retaliate, taking advantage of the Bone Eaters 'dumb' intelligence. In fact I am surprised that this party trait doesn't turn up before Skull Surgeons because Preemptive Party is not the Trait I am concerned about when fighting these lords and ladies.

There is also a third mechanic that, while it isn't a trait, does have impact and that is during the L2 Encounter the bravest survivor is designated “The champion” and starts the showdown isolated and surrounded by four bone eaters which can be a terrible situation depending on which survivor turns out to be the one with the most courage. It is a fun little surprise the first time it happens and I like both the narrative this tells plus the mechanical wrinkle it puts into the encounter.

When a Bone Eater gains the Toned Status; you place a Black Lantern Token underneath the monster (I use a black poker chip), which indicates that using tokens to track health is a mechanic that they could have used, they are tracking something with tokens underneath.

Toned makes the bone eaters -3 movement in exchange for +3 damage for its next Basic Action. That is a terrifying number; and despite it triggering quite often, with Dash you can easily kite a toned Bone Eater unless they have boxed you in. So I think this is a pretty fair ability overall. Toned is set in the Instinct of the monsters (but Bone Eaters rarely trigger their instinct due to their secondary targeting not requiring an 'in range' survivor, just the closest). So most of the time it turns up through Counter and Opportunity Cards. Speaking of which.

Opportunity Cards

The other element that ties into why I called the Bone Eaters 'Glass Cannons' are their opportunity cards; these are triggered on Perfect Hits; a range that is always a 10 for this particular monster (I haven't seen them gain a larger Perfect Hit Range, please let me know in the comments if you have had it happen). There are 11 different cards, and I am not going to go through them all individually here, but these cards are varied in how dangerous they are. Some deal additional damage, some more bleeding and one even triggers an additional basic attack at 6 speed. Given these turn up in only 10% of hits the extremely dangerous ones feel really unbalanced, instead of getting a slight boost to the power, these cards are massive and can make 10s feel really, really unfair.

Some variance is good, this much variance is not. I'd honestly have preferred the Opportunity Cards to be overall weaker, but trigger more often by increasing the Bone Eater's Perfect Hit range at higher levels. More consistent occurrences at lower threat range tends to work better than fewer occurrences at a high danger level. The first option wears down survivors across the board, while the second one creates a flat average that is spiked with huge swings. It feels really uneven but scary to play with the second one if it doesn't trigger too much, but it feels exhausting and unfun if the second category beats the odds and delivers a lot of opportunities.  

Counter Cards

For the Bone Eaters, Counter Cards are triggered when you attack the monster from anywhere other than their blind spot. While that sounds like an easy thing to avoid, it turns out that the tight encounter board, terrain and quantity of miniatures on the board force you into some hard decisions where you have to take your punishment if you want to progress. This is the area where Kingdom Death really comes to life and excels; when the game is saying “You can move forwards, but it will cost you.” it is at its best, because that adds so much player agency into things.

As such, I am immediately placed into a more favourable position when critiquing the counter cards compared to the Opportunity ones. I am given a hard choice here as a player, progress towards winning the showdown, but there will be consequences and punishment. On top of that, the counter cards are less variable in their danger level, there's a lot of becoming toned and then punishing survivors for attacking toned targets. Thereby adding more decision space into an attack, if you can't reach the blind spot is it better to go for the attack or instead wait and try to kite/soak the Toned attack?

On top of all that, this counter design helps lean further into making the Bone Eaters feel like the aforementioned Glass Cannons, in fact it is the best part of it entirely. I really like the Counter Card trigger design, I like that future Counter Cards may trigger in different ways and I like just about every single one of these counter cards, they do an excellent job of providing an alternative to Hit Location Cards.

Critical Wound Cards

The Critical Wound cards are another really interesting and fascinating portion of this encounter, they always disable the Counter card, which makes sense. But also they trend towards dealing an additional wound (not always though, which given how small their life totals are is important). In fact sometimes the additional wound requires another survivor to be adjacent to the Bone Eater in order to score that additional wound. That's both a really cool piece of teamwork and also it has sweet interaction with one of the Critical Wounds where the Bone Eater damages all adjacent miniatures (Bone Eaters and Survivors both).

Again the Critical Wounds are offering a potential price, it is only 'potential' instead of (almost) guaranteed in the case of Counters and I like that design. I like Critical Wounds that provide both a benefit and a cost at the same time a great deal, Critical Wounds are so powerful that having them toned down this way here feels good, feels right. As such I have nothing but positive feelings about the Critical Wound system here and I think this template of reward and mild punishment/cost being baked together is a great one to use for other Encounter Monsters.

Rewards

The standard Victory includes Rewards, +1 Hunt XP and +1 Weapon Proficiency; both of which are very welcome (and I really appreciate the Hunt XP not being increased for higher levels, the balance is right here). The Rewards of course vary per level and they are:

• Level 1 – 1x Perfect Bone

• Level 2 – 1x Shawl of Determination

• Level 3 – 1x Royal Decorations & Marrow Hunger

• Level 4 – 1x Bone Charm

Something to note here is the Bone Eaters encourage players to leaving an empty slot (or disposable gear card) in a gear grid when the L2+ are in the Basic Hunt deck; that is another good player decision point. The Perfect Bone if hit early gives us access to a bunch of interesting options; I won't dwell on them here, but it is a strong and thematic reward; but the other three levels will get a bit more of a look as they involve Gear Cards.

Before we do get into them, I want to quickly note that these items are all things that Marrowism Survivors want to gain and utilise, Marrowism survivors have an affinity for bone gear (unsurprisingly) and these items were clearly designed in tandem with the Marrowism philosophy, so much so that I honestly think the Bone Eaters are an essential encounter monster to use if you are going to play Arc Survivors and choose Cannibalism as your Death Principle (which is what you need to do to unlock the Bone Eaters). As such, I have come to the consideration that the Bone Eaters are pretty much a permanent fixture in Arc Survivor campaigns and can only be skipped on if you are choosing Graves.

Shawl of Determination

A simple item that provides a pay off for bone synergies, we've seen a few bone synergy items in the past (Bone Earrings for example) and also People of the Skull is a thing. What we get here is a ready supply of Insanity for the wearing survivor, plus two affinities (left blue, right red). This is essentially a source of affinities for some survivors, but a huge boon to bone synergy survivors, especially Immortal ones who can forgo armor in exchange for a steady trickle of “healing”.

Royal Decorations

Our Royal Decorations are something that has direct synergy with the encounter weapon reward (more on this later), but it can also be used with powerful Frail weapons like the Zanbato or Hollow Sword to great effect. I am still not 100% clear if the Royal Decorations “loses Frail” works to negate the Impermanism neurosis because we have two passive abilities in conflict. I've been playing it that Impermanism trumps over the Decorations because that makes the most sense to me.

Even if you are not using this with a Frail weapon in specific, it also helps by giving the bone keyword and Precision 1 which is: “On a Perfect hit. inflict an automatic critical wound to the first hit location you resolve.” An excellent pay off ability that can be used with a bunch of Perfect hit set up cards (Dark Eye, Timeless Eye) and it has been well balanced by only working against the first hit location resolved and requiring a Hit Location card to be drawn (thereby leaving the Trap as a possible foil).

It is always great when a piece of gear that is designed for a specific use (in this case it was designed with the Royal Scalpel in mind) has broader applications and interactions. So I really like this item card a lot.

Bone Charm

Our other big pay off for bone keyword strategies is the Bone Charm, this is a HUGE amount of damage mitigation as long as you have it activated; this gear card absolutely sings in Marrowism gear grids, but it is also great for other Bone specific builds, even to the point that it can bring Regal Armor to life sufficiently enough that its lack of affinities isn't a huge deal breaker. Skull Helm, Regal Armor parts, bone all elsewhere and we have a superb tank for a few lantern years before they leave on their silent journey to serve the Hand and the Kings.

It is worth also noting that the White Lion's Lion Skin Cloak and the White Gigalion's Lion Slayer Cape are also bone keyword damage reduction gear cards and the Cape isn't even an armor piece, it's an accessory, so you can push things even further with the damage reduction options there.

This is a very strong gear card, but given the danger that the L4 Bone Eaters potentially represent represent with their crazy potential Bleed and Damage (along with outnumbering the survivors), this is a fair and just reward.

Royal Scalpel

The Royal Scalpel is not a guaranteed drop, at the end of the showdown each Bone Eater offers a 10% chance to drop this weapon. That means over the entire campaign if you encounter every single level of the Bone Eaters, you'll get 18 attempts at getting this for around an 85% chance of successfully getting it (18 dice, at least one rolls a 10).

The Scalpel (apart from being a word constantly type as Scapel) is a solid weapon when gained early on thanks to the Sharp ability, and later on you can even try to give it more longevity by using a Polishing Lantern (it has the finesse keyword) and the Royal Decorations above are overtly designed to work with this weapon. But you are also happy to keep it in the gear grid as a way of generating a specific monster bone resource at the end of the showdown. +1 Resource isn't as valuable when you are fighting L3 monsters, but +1 Bone Resource of your choice absolutely is. There's a bunch of monsters with high value bone resources, such as the Phoenix and Gorm Skulls from the 1st Generation of monsters, the Ribcage from the Dragon King to name a few old classics. This is another example of a gear card that has multiple different uses throughout its lifespan and I am here for it.

Finally, before we get to the summary, I'd like to take a moment to praise the writing on the various types of cards that come in this encounter, they are short but very descriptive in a delightful manner. Terms like “splendidly dense” or “experimentally mashes” are playful in a way that strongly contrasts with the bleak horror of what the actions are surrounding. Whoever the writer(s) are (I suspect Anna) they have achieved a masterclass job here.

Summary

The Bone Eaters are a great first try at designing the Encounter system; however I do think their overt slanting towards being aggressive, fragile, damage dealers can make them feel really frustrating if their dice trend too much towards 10s. Fortunately an overly harmed group of survivors (without Song of the Brave) can choose to cut their losses and either go for a weaker level target (if they have the option) or go home and consider it all a wash.

I am of the opinion that a more "flat" encounter monster which provides a consistent and predictable pattern where Opportunity cards triggered more often, but were less powerful would be a better fit for the first Encounter monster design, but outside of that variance there is a lot to like about the Bone Eater design, as long as this unpredictability is not the way that all encounter monsters end up being. I will soon tire of the system if every group of hunt monsters is a bunch of dangerous pointed glass sticks that deal a load of damage if you do not break them as soon as possible.

I would like to see future encounters have a wider range of experiences, but in particular I would like to see a more grindy, slower form of opponent that runs "tanks" and "archers" in order to provide variation in the experience. For now though all we have are these guys and while I think that the Bone Eaters are a little rough around the edges, they do add to the game experience and add an awful lot to the world building.

I do find myself wishing that they did not feel so “compulsory” to me when using Arc Survivors because of how useful the rewards are for one of my favourite philosophies in Marrowism and how pleasing it is to have both the Marrowist survivors and the Bone Eaters in the same ecosystem.