All the world's a stage: A comprehensive review of the Lion Knight Expansion (Patreon)

As always, spoilers abound in this review, so if you want the short, spoiler free experience skip to the Why? Where? And Score? sections of this review at the bottom of the post.

For everyone else, let’s get this show on the road.

Who?
The Lion Knight is the second of three individuals in the world of Kingdom Death to hold this title, the first Lion Knight went utterly insane due to having his vision fixed permanently a few moments into the future and now spends his time deep inside the golden labyrinth talking to the wailing smoke. He was considered a failed creation by the Golden Entity and is not worth noting any further (for the moment, it's speculated he might appear in Kingdom Death:Labyrinth if Poots ever releases that game).

The second Lion Knight isn’t much better, travelling in advance of his theatrical retinue the Lion Knight (2nd) (hereafter refer called The Lion Knight) seeks something from the various groups of survivors he encounters, some kind of understanding or personal peace. If you choose to add him to your game he will turn up and force your settlement to take part in a series of plays where he gets to be the hero of the piece while your survivors take the part of characters in the play (including the villain).

Honestly I prefer the 1st Lion Knight over this arrogant thespian. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

What?
So what do you get in this one? Well it’s about on par with the Manhunter in content. You get the Lion Knight + his 3 advisors, these all sit on a custom base that looks great from above but awful from below. The sculpts are… Decent, the Lion Knight himself looks very good, but his advisors are not so hot in their design, the detail is a little meh at times and they don’t sit on the base very well. The whole thing, when assembled by a professional, can look amazing, but for us mere mortals the advisors look rather wonky on the base because of the slope it has.

In addition to that we get the usual AI and HL cards, plus a small amount of gear cards, Tactics cards, some innovations that link directly to the Lion Knight and the Hybrid Armor set cards. Physically the quantity and quality of everything is around the same as the Manhunter and Slenderman, its average for a small box nemesis expansion.

Since the 1.5 Update, they have also included plastic, upscaled versions of the 4 resin role survivors. However I have not received mine yet because of the frankly stupid release kickstarter schedule - so I cannot comment on them much. I did not like the resin versions but apparently the plastic versions have been retooled and rescaled, which I am looking forward to seeing.

How?
How does the Lion Knight integrate into a campaign? How does he feel to play against?

Well, I’m going to lay it out here in advance, he’s doesn’t integrate well and he does not feel good to play against. In fact, this expansion is pretty much the Spidicules of the Nemesis expansions (in fact it's worse). Our groups have agreed that we really do not want to play with the Lion Knight again, not for a long, long time. It just was not fun.

Before I move into the specifics of why this expansion fell completely flat with us, I’ll go into the strengths and weaknesses of the expansion overall.

These are the acting strengths of the great thespian:

Hybrid Armors
These are in my opinion the single best element of the entire expansion, they are so good that I am exceptionally pleased that the upcoming Gambler’s Chest contains more of them. Gear that involves cross quarry hunting is one of the best designs in the entire game and it is one of the reasons why I am so positive about Green Armor in principle.

You unlock these hybrid armors by visiting the strange caravan, paying a price and gaining stat bonuses. These days however, we’ve now just exported them from the expansion and include them in every campaign regardless. They’re perfectly well balanced even without needing to be ‘unlocked’ and they add depth to the game without making it easier.
If this expansion was a single pack of hybrid armor sets and the tactics cards (with maybe some minis to represent the armors), I’d be giving this expansion a 10/10 without a moment’s hesitation.

Strange Caravan
The Strange Caravan is a fun little addition to the game and is a great thing to go experience for players. It manages to have that sense of wonder and excitement that you can get from going to visit the fairground. Not only is it the place where you can unlock Hybrid armors, but you can also trade in old useless weapons for potential upgrades/masks and other unique effects that are not normally available and/or easy to get.

The only issue with this is how it is buried away in an endeavor activated event which means that people will forget what it does during the game and/or completely ignore the Black/White Mask innovation in the first place. Kingdom Death: Monster can result in serious information overload at times and the Strange Caravan is one of those places where I’ve seen it consistently happen.

The only way I’ve managed to fix this is by scanning and copying the Strange Caravan page onto a separate sheet so people can refer to it and understand what the event does.

However, when you understand what the Strange Caravan does and utilise it correctly, every location has something amazing to offer you.

Roles
I have a somewhat love/hate relationship with the roles. The idea of them is nothing short of fantastic, having things like this, that chance the nature of the showdown are always welcome and it adds an extra layer of tactics into the encounter. Not only are you trying to handle the Lion Knight, but you are also trying to manage the limitations and benefits of your particular role. In the L2 and L3 fights you even get scenery which interacts with your role.

This is a ton of flavor and fun, but it also has a large downside (for that see the showdown entry further down).

Also the addition of the role survivor miniatures in the new versions of the box is nice, however it is a shame that there is not one of each gender for each role. It is also awkward to swap these miniatures around when the trap is triggered.

Tactic Cards
Having additional tactics cards is a good thing; a 9 card Tactics Deck means that the tactics will vary from one showdown to the next. Also the Lion Knight tactics cards are the most well balanced and interesting of the tactics cards. Trip Formation for example is a fairer version of quad strike, confounding formation is both useful and funny and reviving tactics is powerful but suitably difficult to achieve during a fight.

The Lion Knight Badge, which gives the tactics is also quite solid, it’s one of the few ways of gaining extra accuracy and while it is not as good as the Flower Knight or DBK badge, it is very useful for blind survivors or archers (as bows tend to be lower in accuracy overall).

Disorders
The four new disorders which are added to the game are all interesting or fun. The one you’ll curse the most is Unlucky, which stops your survivor being able to critically wound, this can be a nightmare on the wrong survivor, but for the most part what it requires is that you change your gear load out while you are saddled with this switching to either a more supporting role or using weapons that do not revolve around crits. It is a disaster on someone who is using critical hit focused weapon masteries however.

However I also love Stage Fright, Prima Donna and Shallow Lungs as well, they’re all flavorful with reasonable effects. Prima Donna in particular always causes a chuckle and forces tactical adaption to the limitations the survivor now presents.

These are those critical weaknesses that caused Macbeth to fall.

Intermission
Ugh, this is the single most disliked aspect of the Lion Knight, if you beat the Lion Knight then get punished, at best you get saddled with a rather mediocre cursed accessory, but at worst you can lose the survivor who strikes the final blow. This has impact on Ageless Apprentice (below) and also increases the amount of random ‘rocks fall and you die’ moments that this game has. This expansion is telling you ‘let the Lion Knight win, pander to his whims’, but the benefits for doing so are awful when compared to the Manhunter. The Manhunter has a similar mechanic, where if you lose he will start taking tribute from your settlement, but it’s a better balanced mechanic that gives you more options. Intermission has caused such upset and bad feelings at our table most recently that if it wasn’t for the fact that the third time you fight the Lion Knight it doesn’t happen we would have just removed the Lion Knight from the campaign.

Intermission is one of two points in the expansion that make it an atrocious experience. Nemesis encounters should be challenges that you want to step up and take your A game for, but stuff like the design of intermission means that instead you send out 4 disposable peons and let them get punished for attending. 

This is one of those areas where Adam Poots Games shows a lack of understanding of game theory and player psychology. Something I have a degree in (true).

Showdown
I list the showdown here in my negatives because this is an example of one of those areas where the idea is great, but the execution is not. Our initial reaction to this experience was very positive, but after three timelines of dealing with the Lion Knight it’s become more and more negative. The fact is, we just don’t have a fun time during this showdown. It’s frustrating, boring and the trap – which in principle seems like a cool bit of ‘Change Places’ Mad Hatter fun – turns out to be as frustrating as it was for Alice.

Also you can game the showdown so the Lion Knight never harms anyone at all with nothing more than Surge, decent survival reserves and a cursory glance at the mechanics of the showdown. The showdown, once you understand it's HUGE glaring weakness, is nothing more than an exercise in busy work/time wasting combined with a punishment at the end.

Your mileage may end up varying on this, but when the entire group starts groaning in exasperation each time the Lion Knight turns up, it’s not a good sign. We much prefer The Hand, the Slenderman, the Butcher and the Manhunter over the Lion Knight.

Green Armor Involvement
The only reason the Lion Knight was included in the Green Armor expansion is because it is themed around the ‘knights’ (sort of). But the execution of the Lion Knight’s involvement is just garbage. For a start you have to use one of the Katars in order to build the Green Plate, which removes one of the cooler aspects of this expansion because you have to sacrifice the claws for the plate. This would have been a much, MUCH better experience if the strange caravan had been involved instead. Perhaps you needed to trade in items for a strange resource that would be used to build the plate – basically the integration could have been better.

Also the Lion Knight clashes with the Manhunter in the timeline, this is most noticeable in lantern year 16, where you get them back to back followed by another nemesis fight. It’s fatiguing to deal with, and while neither of these fights is actually challenging at this time in a settlement’s lifecycle, it’s not fun to have multiple nemesis fights in a row. The Green Armor building agenda is crushing enough as it is already, it does not need this extra layer jammed into it as well.

I think the Green Armor experience would have been a lot better if the Lion Knight's involvement in it had been considered properly, the execution we got seems nonsensical and frankly a bit lame.

I have a neutral to slightly negative opinion on the following issues, they are not good, or bad, but they have problems:

Lion Knight Replica Claws
These are in principle a good idea, however in practice they turn out to be rather garbage, the problems these weapons have are universal to all paired weapons. Paired is an awful, awful ability and therefor you end up using these claws individually and then they kind of suck. This is because the weaker of the two claws has deadly and the claw you’d like to take into the late game does not (and is very inaccurate) You can fiddle around with things and end up with a 4 speed 8+ accuracy 8 Strength survival gaining weapon (which is about the best setup you can manage with these) but they do not work as well as you’d hope because of the poor design of Paired.

I do however like how they are delivered (requiring Katar mastery), it’s just that in a campaign where you are playing with the DBK, there is little to no reason to get these and lets be honest, any campaign without the DBK is a sad campaign indeed.

So. They are a cool idea, but not quite good enough for gear that you get in LY16 and they fall flat. This is mostly because the Paired rules in the game suck and their stat distribution/abilities just isn't well thought out enough.

(If you're not convinced, compare these Katars to the Tool Belt you get from the Manhunter, now THAT is a piece of gear worth the effort).

Wardrobe Expert
I have to list this fighting art here as because it has caused more upsets and problems than any other fighting art in the game, it’s such a problem that we’ve actually removed it from the deck when playing with other people. You could consider that this is a problem caused by the players rather than the fighting art itself, but the thing is, we’ve never encountered a single other Fighting Art that is so selfish and controversial as this one.

Wardrobe Expert allows you to avoid a serious injury by archiving the gear at the location where you are hit. That means you could sacrifice a piece of gear in order to save a survivor. The thing is, very few survivors are worth saving as most of the time the gear is worth more than they are. One of the current campaigns has a very selfish player who has this particular fighting art and because of the way he’s abused this fighting art he has been told that if he does it again the lost gear is not being replaced. This is because the gear that is being collected now just cannot be replaced, there’s not enough time to hunt the specific monster to replace bits of Rolling Armor and/or Gorment Armor. In addition his character was going to be the recipient of the Green Armor set, but he literally cannot be trusted with it.

Sure, this might be a problem endemic to a certain type of specific individual, but I’ve never before or since experienced such a huge issue caused by a fighting art. It has literally caused shouting matches and rifts at games and it’s just not worth it. So carefully judge what kind of people you have in your group before you decide to include Wardrobe Expert in your fighting art deck. I don’t deduct points for this entry, but I do think it’s something you need to consider carefully – you may not appreciate the results of this fighting art if you are playing with people who fail to understand that nine times out of ten gear > survivors.

Ageless Apprentice
In principle Ageless Apprentice is a great secret fighting art, but when you look at the conditions required to gain it, you realize that it’s hard to achieve and has an ability that you can’t really plan around because you have no idea if you are going to get it or not. The maximum number of times you can get Ageless Apprentice in a timeline is 1. As an example, In order to gain this fighting art after facing the level 2 Lion Knight you need to achieve the following steps. 

You have to beat the L1 Lion Knight and the survivor who deals the final blow needs to roll high enough in the intermission to gain the Hideous Disguise. They then need to survive until you face the L2 Lion Knight and score the Deathblow. They then ALSO need to not get killed by the Intermission timeline event (if you do L2 to L3, then you don’t need to worry about the intermission killing you). It is a lot of work and effort and while the secret fighting art itself is very solid, Ageless plus the unique ability to rotate 3 gear items in your gear grid. So overall it is not worth the effort involved, but it is fun when it does happen.

Why?
Honestly the only reasons I can see to use the Lion Knight at the moment are if you are forced to do so by the Green Armor expansion, or if you are essentially playing a very expansion light game. The Lion Knight relies so heavily on the core game that adding too many expansions in will mean that it becomes impossible to pursue making the hybrid armor and that is one of the most important and interesting parts of the expansion. So really I’d recommend playing the Lion Knight in concert with The Lion God, The Slender Man and the Dragon King (as a quarry), this gives you access to decent Katars throughout the game (essential for getting the Lion Knight’s replica claws), provides a quarry that is good to hunt with Katars and has two nemesis monsters who closely integrate with the three core game quarries.

I recommend the Dragon King, because hunting him gives access to the ‘in between’ level Katar that means you do not end up stuck with the Lion Beast Katars all game until you beat the L3 Lion Knight. However, I do not recommend using the Dung Beetle Knight, because the Digging Claws are so much better than the Lion Knight’s ones that it is not even close. Calcified Digging Claws, with their 1 speed, high damage and pickaxe synergies are amongst the best weapons in the game. They make the Lion Knight ones utterly redundant.

Where?
Not on the showdown board that’s for sure. The model however is gorgeous, so he’s allowed to stand centre stage in between all of the other nemesis monsters.

Score?
The more time I’ve spent with the Lion Knight the less and less I have come to like using this expansion. The Showdown in particular is not to my taste, and in truth the only parts of the expansion I really love are the Strange Caravan and Hybrid armors*. 

I’m afraid that all I can give this show is a five star review, out of ten. It’s definitely the worst of the three (non-tree) nemesis expansions released so far; being short on content, annoying and containing some unpleasant ‘gotchyas’ that are not needed.

If you want to know where I consider this in the nemesis expansion list? I would pick this up only once I already have the Manhunter, Lonely Tree and Slenderman expansions - and only, ONLY if I wanted to play Green Armor (which is when I let this expansion touch the board these days).

*FTR: without the hybrid armors I would be giving this expansion a 4/10.