Kingdom Death: Monster – Björn Beta Content Review

Despite their precautions, the survivors that craft the hide of the bitter beast spend lantern years wearing an unintentional expression of disgust on their faces. Only the hardiest survivors wear the resulting gear, breathing exclusively through their mouths.

Box Contents

• Björn photoresin miniature

• Large Matte Art Print

• Character Art Card

• Bitter Beastcloak gear card

• Blight Token living glossary card

The Miniature

When I first saw the link for this miniature, and read the name Björn, I was excited because my first thought was “another male survivor miniature, great!” Björn is typically a male name of Scandinavian origin, and I hoped we were getting a burly “bear” type of survivor. I was quite disappointed that this was not the case here.

Björn's sculpt is a very fine detailed one, with an interesting variation on some White Lion and Leather armor pieces put together alongside what appears to be a steel sword and of course the new gear card, the Bitter Beastcloak. The combination we see here doesn't represent any hybrid armor set, so it is mostly for flavour and character building. I do in particular like the lion kneepads on the sculpt and the extra detailing of fur on the loin cloth. I also appreciate the lantern design here, I am very much not a fan of the "S" lanterns that are commonly used.

However, outside of a fun haircut and nice gear design, Björn is another very generic looking female survivor which doesn't inspire me to want to use her in game. A sentiment that is reinforced by how delicate the sword and waist straps on the sculpt seem to be. Overall, this is a fine enough miniature, but it isn't a standout in the range.

The Game Content

To start here, a quick thumbs up as the Bitter Beastcloak did not have its game text blurred out on the store image, but also half a thumb withdrawn because the mechanics of the blight token were still not available for the customer in advance (and we don't even have an entry in the Living Rulebook at the time I am writing this). I've always maintained that these smaller boxes are so costly that the shop entries should give full details of the cards included, crafting costs, gear card front, special rules, everything should be presented in full. It is not only good disclosure for buyers, it also helps build excitement and interest the way that games like Magic: The Gathering use their full spoiler releases.

We get just one single piece of gear in this box, and before I get to it, I do want to express how much I like the little world building teases we get with designs like this. Given that this survivor's name is Björn, the Bitter Beastcloak has rounded ears and how it is mechanically designed, it seems that the Bitter Beast is a toxic bear that has a form of contact poison secreted by its skin. Which is a very fun concept even if we don't get to see the Bitter Beast fully realised in expansion form.

Crafting Cost: 1x hide, 1x perfect hide

This perfect resource as a part of the crafting cost is something that has become very heavily lent on in recent designs, and I am absolutely feeling fatigue at seeing it being so over exposed as a cost. Of course, Team Death have the issue that they are creating gear cards for monsters that do not exist at this time, that hampers the cost space a fair bit. But in the past, innovations and crafting locations were used to gate gear in a wide range of varied spots and while that style wasn't always perfectly balanced, it was always interesting. To mention a few examples of these beta gear cards which use perfect resources we have Badur, Pascha, Usagi, Mist, Novice, Repokratis, Sunlantern Aya, Vitanvox, Willow and Cyrus all use perfect resources (though to be fair, Badur, Repo and Cyrus all have monster specific alternative crafting costs, so it's not as bad there). It works, but it also feels like a shortcut solution that has become a bit of a default no-brainer choice for a quick design and I want beta content to feel intriguing and exciting, not just “another perfect resource” option.

Fortunately, the front side of this gear card is a unique thing that does have interesting play patterns in a space that the game hasn't much explored to date.

The Bitter Beastcloak is a body accessory that gives the monster blight tokens whenever it deals damage to your body location. Blight tokens sit on the monster until it achieves a reshuffle and at that point they work as follows:

Blight Token: A token representing the debilitating effects of a festering poison.

After a monster's hit location is shuffled, archive all of its blight tokens and roll 1d10 for each token archived. For each 6+ rolled, the monster suffers a wound.

This is a powerful ability due to it causing automatic wounds, but it has been very carefully gated to ensure that it a) has risk because you need to take damage to the body to generate the blight token, b) those tokens only convert into automatic wounds 50% of the time and c) A reshuffle has to be triggered in order for the rolls to occur.

The question then is, can you get enough value out of this piece to justify the resource cost and gear grid slot? Especially the gear grid slot as that is one of the biggest limiters on builds we have. In order to figure this out, we want to see how easily this can be triggered and what other synergies can be leveraged to assist this..

To start with, let us look at the affinity situation, because without those affinities active, this is +1 armor on the body, and while the body is the most commonly damaged hit location (due to being 2 slots on the hit location dice), a plain +1 armor in isolation there isn't cutting it. We need an up green half-affinity along with a second full green and either a full red or a half red facing left or right. Combing through the various armor sets, our prime affinity candidates are Crimson Crocodile; Singing; Leather; Cycloid Scale; Dragon; Screaming; Lantern and Silk Armor. That's a good range of platforms to fit this onto. Now the one in particular I'm interested in is Silk Armor, because that has ways of generating more armor points (as does Crimson), and most of all, the set bonus for Silk Armor lets you redirect a hit to a hit location of your choice. Meaning you can push the hits onto your body more often and also protect the body once the damage has stripped most of the armor points.

However, Silk Armor currently sits in an awkward spot where it is hard to craft early enough to be useful (it's kind of a slightly better than leather, armor set). So while it is a solid fit, you are going to be looking at either house rules (which many do for the Silk Turban); waiting for Campaigns of Death to (hopefully address the issue) or living with the situation as is.

Those aside, in a magical Christmas land where Silk Armor has a reasonable place in your game; I like how this plays alongside that armor set. The extra incentive/reward for redirecting is very interesting and the natural synergy that Silk Armor has here is sweet, and in addition despite having the heavy keyword this is not armor so it will work with the Silk Body Suit (conversely it will not work with the Lion Slayer Cloak in isolation, because that gear requires fur armor however you could combo that with a fur armor like Screaming or Brawler if you don't mind running 7 slots in protection options). In fact, Brawler armor is another interesting platform for this Beastcloak, but affinities are really hard to scrape together with that set. And while we are on the topic of potentials, Gorment Armor, when fully upgraded, has more points on the body as a part of its design, so it could be another place where you use this gear card due to it offering +1 potential automatic wound trigger.

The other question, one which has been a bit harder to figure out, is how many triggers will we get on average? While causing the reshuffle is relatively easy to sort out, the Trap card does that, or we could utilise Scythe specialisation or the Crest Crown if they are on the table as options. The total number of rolls is a little bit more elusive. If we use Silk + Beastcloak + Leather Shield, we have 6 armor points on the body baseline, and likely we can get to 7 with one of the two “plus armor points” activations (it is incredibly difficult to activate both +Armor Points abilities on Silk, but not impossible).

That means 9 soak before severe injuries, but monsters around that time are tending to deal ~2 damage per hit. So we can get maybe 4 tokens? Which on average translates into 2 automatic wounds as long as we get that reshuffle. I think that is a reasonable deal, certainly if I had a gear card that dealt 2 automatic wounds per showdown I would seriously consider bringing it along.

There is also another sideline plan where one can use a Satchel from the Flower Knight to carry a Fresh Acanthus and use that to heal up, but now we have so many extra steps that it feels situational to set up and make use of. At least the Satchel can be on a different support survivor, so it doesn't put more slot pressure on the Bitter tank.

I think overall I like this design of “retaliation” damage over the previous versions we have seen with the Gorm's Armor Spikes and the Amber Poleaxe from Spidicules. However, this is a piece of gear that needs a lot of support to generate its effect and in the end I think it is interesting, but not exciting the way that novel weapon types or the Fan have been in the past releases.

Summary

The Bitter Beastcloak is a viable option for tanking/brusier/offtank style survivors as long as you can get the affinities active without too much compromise in your gear slots. The fact that the green puzzle affinity points downwards helps it connect with the Leather Shield that many more tanky survivor types will be using in the mid game is helpful. The main issue is that now we are at 7 gear cards; that's 2 slots left to dedicate to other offensive and defensive options. It is that 9 gear slot limit which I keep butting against when trying to utilise this gear card effectively.

This is certainly an interesting design, but I feel as a part of an armor set in a potential Bitter Beast expansion that this card would be more viable because it could be part of a set of five cards that synergise together. Here in isolation it is competing with so many other strong and even essential gear cards that justifying the slot in addition to the Perfect Hide resource cost is tough to do.

As a closing note I am of the opinion that the Beta content is overall a series with low value for players of the game and the more cynical consumer may even draw the conclusion that this series exists in part to drive sales of the miniatures. Personally, while I do think that the beta content does help sell this series to more players, I do also think that there is a genuine desire from Team Death to put out those little snippets of potential future designs and world building.

However, I can write with confidence that if I wasn't picking these up for reviewing purposes, I would not be purchasing them myself because photoresin, while looking amazing, is not a great material for game pieces (rest in pieces my Lantern Glaive Aya) and the value of the game content in this range is rarely high enough on average to make taking a risk on “will this be a good card?” not something I'm excited about. I much prefer the overall design of the Indomitable Survivor box sets as a way to deliver small scale game content via the shop.