Kingdom Death: Monster – Elsbeth White Box Review (Patreon)

Elsbeth was born from her mother's armpit. So the settlement always said she never knew the way. Breathlessly struggling to keep up with the others as they journeyed through the gloom.

Often her directionless senses leaves her in peril, but occasionally a glint of opportunity is found lost in the gloom alongside her.

Box Contents

• Elsbeth Plastic Miniature

• The Lost Echo Character Card

• Living Glossary Card / Install Guide

• Art Print Card

Elsbeth joins Lune (review here) in establishing that this white box version of a single miniature combined with a character card that represents them is going to be continuing forwards.

There is an additional element of frustration I feel with this release, because like Lune, this miniature is not a new release, this is the Lost Princess Generic line miniature remastered into plastic and re-released. Just like Lune there are no notable sculpting changes between the resin and plastic versions, but I was lenient in the case of Lune because that model represented a significant change from the usual anime sexpot sculpts that normally come out. Perhaps I was too kind, because while I like the Lune miniature, the game content was sparse to the point of being overpriced.

I am going to do my best to give Elsbeth's content a fair review here, but I will state up front that I think this release system of single miniature, single character card for $30 is not worth purchasing for solely the game content. Forget the FOMO, this was not worth the price unless money is no object.

The Miniature

As written above, this miniature is a plastic re-release of the resin Lost Princess sculpt, with no meaningful changes outside of the update to material. She is another female unarmored survivor to add to the ever growing pile of them (see Morgan, Zelda and Edlen for recent examples) and as such I do not see much worth for this miniature as a game piece. We have enough of these now and I would rather see releases that gave us things like Warlord Armor or Male Beast Hunter Armor sculpts. There's a bunch of older armor sets that are ripe for some narrative sculpts; how great could Elsbeth have looked decked out in Rolling Armor?

I might paint this miniature, but she is absolutely far back in the queue. In contrast if we had gotten a new unarmored male miniature that would be right at the front of my painting queue because both Zachary and Allister look tired and small compared to the new survivors.

As for the actual sculpt, I'm not too fond of the design, she's got incredibly wide hips for a pear shaped body, which could have been interesting if she didn't also have now bog standard big rack on top. I don't mind some skin on miniatures, but I really desperately want to see more models that represent other body shapes like for example the Smog Drummer.

In short, I think that Elsbeth's transition from the Generic line to the “in universe” one isn't something we needed and this miniature isn't filling any gapes in the the roster of game pieces a player might want.

The Gameplay Content

Elsbeth's game content is a Character Card for the Character innovation in the Gambler's Chest. It can be used without the Gambler's Chest, simply being given to the next survivor born, but that's not a very interesting way to apply this card.

That is because The Lost Echo card is an “impairment” impairments are negative character traits which are added to the character deck as the price paid for every five positive ones. At the moment this means that The Lost Echo will be going into a Character deck as a replacement for the existing ones. Now I have not reviewed the Character innovation system to date, but I have played extensively with it, and in order to understand the worth of The Lost Echo (because why would you add a negative to your game) it is helpful to briefly look at the impairments we get in the Gambler's Chest Expansion (GCE) along with the full deck construction rules.

Deck Construction Rules

• Minimum 24 cards

• For every 1 impairment card added, up to 5 ability cards may be added

• 1 legendary ability card

There are two philosophies for construction of this deck, the first is to jam as much in as possible and not worry about lots of cards causing lots of variance. I think this is a good fit for players who don't get the game to the table all the time. The second option is to build exactly that 25 card deck in the ratios of:

• 1 Legendary Ability

• 4 Impairments

• 20 Abilities

This is following the philosophy of deck construction for competitive style decks (such as those used in Netrunner or Magic: The Gathering); the aim here is to ensure a curated experience with the maximum chance of getting the Legendary ability. This is a good option for players who run many campaigns and want ways to curate their game experience.

There's no right way to do this, both methods are perfectly valid ways to construct the character deck (and they are not the only ways to do this). But for the rest of this review we are going to consider the second version of the deck, because it is a tighter, curated experience and that is where small changes in cards have the most impact.

Our selection in the GCE is 22 abilities, 2 legendary abilities and 7 impairments. (There is also 2 other abilities, one in Basara's white box and one in Lune's but we will not worry about those here). In order to construct our minimal size deck, we need to select 4 impairments from our eight options (7 from the GCE, plus Lost Echo). Impairments are “punishments” that represent the payment for getting the benefits of the abilities; sometimes a survivor will be born and have a weak character ability.

The sticky point here is, if the impairment is severe, what happens is that survivor is shoved into the disposable category and used as general population aka Plebs. They don't go out on hunts because they are a detriment for the settlement and not worth the investment in a game where you have limited time to improve your survivors. Of the 7 impairments in the GCE I personally class the following as 'useless' characters:

• The Lonely - No intimacy or Partnership (So no way to pass on Weapon Proficiency to next Generation)

• The Clumsy – 50% chance of not gaining weapon proficiency

• Out of Sync - -1 red, blue and green permanent affinities

• The Unlucky - -1 luck

The Hunger, The Dying, Disorderly are all interesting impairments that are negative, but do have some interesting applications. The Dying in particular is a shortcut to getting Homicidalism unlocked (not something I care about because as reviewed previously, I think Homicidalism is unbalanced in a way that makes the game less interesting to play).

The Lost Echo forces you to always be the straggler; that is a negative for sure, a Lost Echo will potentially get battered repeatedly on every hunt phase that they go on. However, someone is going to be a straggler whenever that happens and additionally knowing who it will be with certainty when departing is very beneficial. You can run a Lost Echo as a support or ranged damage dealing type, because they are generally further away from the monster and safer in the showdown phase. That extra safety means they have more soak to spend on the hunt phase than others. It absolutely is a negative, but it is one that offers some interesting play patterns in a way that the four listed above do not. The Lonely and The Clumsy screw with your Weapon Proficiency gaining and are absolute rubbish I won't use on hunts. The other two fair a bit better; The Unlucky is something that ensures a character won't be running Deadly/Luck builds and Out of Sync ruins affinity builds (It's not an absolute disaster though). However, additional impairments like The Lost Echo give more options to select from and I personally find “always be the straggler” to be mechanically more interesting than “no critical wounds for you” or “build without affinities” (that second one is close to being an interesting puzzle though, we just need gear cards that say “if you have zero red/green/blue/any affinities gain some benefit” to come into existence).

Summary

Despite being only one card, this card does improve the experience of playing with the Character innovation because it is replacing complete duds that effectively read “this character is born to die”. However, you need to already have the Gambler's Chest and also be playing often enough as a lifestyle gamer to benefit from additional texture and customisation for your repeated campaign plays. I don't think that is a large market.

Add that limited gameplay appeal onto a miniature which is yet another “female survivor in cloth” and we have a very low value boxed set. One for hardcore collectors and painters only.

As a final note here, I think that this White Box character model release system is a failure and I would like to see it updated to include 6 characters per box at a more reasonable price such as around $60 for the lot. 6 characters would allow for 1 new impairment, 4 new abilities and 1 legendary ability. That feels more like a selection worth picking up. Otherwise I want to see Character cards bundled in with other stuff the way that it was done with Basara.