Kingdom Death's Official Survivor Tokens: A Review (Patreon)

So, they finally arrived in the post and as it has been a long time since I've had a game content Kingdom Death Product in my hands I wanted to give these an immediate spin.

Survivor tokens are something which was thought up by the community initially and it is only fair to start there. We have seen several different version of these released over the years. Most famous of them are Klutz's survival tokens which you can find over here (http://klutz.studio/). Klutz's range includes a whole load of additional tokens on top of the seven survival tokens they offer – there is also Block, Deflect, Knocked Down, Dead and severe injury tokens. All available for the price of $15.99 plus shipping/customs.

There are also 3D printed ones which you can order through sites like Etsy; for example this set here (https://www.etsy.com/listing/663667985/survival-action-tokens-for-kingdom-death); this particular set covers dash, encourage, surge and dodge.

Last of all on our comparisons are the tokens from Board Game Hell (https://www.boardgamehell.com/) who offer stylish square tokens in a wide range of colours. They also cover the additional survival actions which are found in People of the Sun and do a set of round Triathlon of Death counters and offer sets of 'action grids' which give you a place to organise your

With the competition set up, it's time for us to look at what APG have decided to provide as their official set; this can be picked up for $20 at the online store (https://shop.kingdomdeath.com/products/survivor-tokens) and seems to be one of the items which hasn't instantly sold out.

Initially this set was printed with a rather serious error, where the back of the Erza act token had the artwork for the Percival set (why Percival, she's long, long dead – where's our Aya and/or Old Joe sets?)  Misprinted on it; APG made good on this by sending out an updated sheet that had the correct tokens. Expect years down the line that the original misprints will be worth lots of crazy amounts to the thirsty collectors who were not around at this time. However, I'm not going to sit on such a potential treasure trove when I can instead open it up and review the heck out of these little bits of cardboard. Sorry future me, but I'm not going to be one of those people who keeps the KDM stuff on the shelf in its tiny little boxes and flexes about my status as a collector (I couldn't if I wanted to, I gave up on collecting stuff when the Bust debacle happened). No sir, over here we play with our stuff (gently)!

Here they are as they arrived, the original box in shrink wrap and the replacement sheet. The box is pretty fine, it's the classy white look as opposed to the cheap brown cardboard that the expansions and non-gameplay miniatures come in. I'm actually quite a fan of the cheap cardboard because I don't mind slamming that stuff straight into the recycling. This box, I'm not so sure what I'm going to do with it because now it's opened it is of no use in respect to storing the tokens. This isn't a nice little chest like box that can be used to keep the tokens on the table/in the box when they're not used. It's a thin box that holds the token sheets tightly and that's all it's really good for. The back has a nice little preview of all the tokens that come in it. I guess if you wanted to keep your tokens in this box then you'd know what is inside.

The token sheets themselves are shrink wrapped inside the box. Honestly, this is the kind of thing that really frustrates me. We do not need plastic where we can avoid it, this product is shrink wrapped on the outside and then shrink wrapped on the inside, that's at least one too many levels of shrink wrapping and straight up a waste.

Front side of the shrink wrapped pile:

Back of the pile:

Once out of the box here are all the four sheets:

You can see clearly on the second sheet the misprinted back (left below), and that has been fixed with the replacement sheet (right) here:

And once punched here's the lot of them:

So how good are these tokens when compared to their competitors?

They are the same size as the rest of the tokens in the game and each token has its own unique piece of Lokman Lam's work in his more sketch like style; it's unfortunately not using his most fun style, which is the silly cartoon one, nor it it in his 'classical sculpture' style, instead it's here to remind us that Kingdom Death is super, hyper anime before all else.

Each individual token does have some solid, clear iconography/design work to make sure that you can quickly glance around and see what survivor has which actions in what state and the decision to make the back a greyscale version of the front works, though it is a little disappointing that the artwork isn't different and unique. Personally I would have preferred something that showed the results of the survival action on the back, this is a company that prides itself on attention to detail and premium content – so I do expect a bit more.

There are some excellent little pieces of design built into these tokens, the use of the lightning bolt and knight icons on the 'act' token and each dodge token uses broad red swipes like the White Lion's claws. The Encourage counters on the other hand are a bit of a mixed bag, the best one is Allisters; which shows him encouraging Erza – Lucy & Erza are depicted encouraging some generic survivor rather than a character (Lucy looks like she's encouraging, Erza just looks angry that someone is bleeding behind her) and Zachary's is as bland as Percivals was before him. It's just generic angry shouting rather than showing anything that's happening through the action.

The Dash art looks good, conveying a lot of motion and speed, but the Surge and Endure artwork is both heavily focused around eyes. None of them are as good as Percival's was with its focus on the brain – you will not get them mixed up, but Endure has lost most of its character that it held when we just had the Percival Endure.

The pallet on the tokens is varied enough that it is hard to get them confused, APG managed to avoid the issue of having two red-headed women depicted on Erza & Percival's tokens by ensuring that Percival's token set are way more saturated than the others. However, when you have all the tokens together Percival's increased saturation makes her tokens pop a lot more than any which come in this set.

The largest score against this set however is the failure to provide People of the Sun tokens; this set provides all the tokens you will need for People of the Lantern and People of the Stars, but as People of the Sun swaps out the Surge line for the Embolden one – this is very disappointing and also calls into question how useful these tokens will be in the future. If we do not see additional survival tokens given in Campaigns of Death to cover the missing survival actions, then we're going to have to accept that they're useful for only two campaigns and that APG have no intention of covering any of their future products with similar tokens.

It is also worth noting that these tokens will get dirty with use fairly quickly, unlike most tokens in the game they're going to be handled every single turn, sometimes being turned over twice a turn (once at the start to refresh the and once when they're used). So they are going to get worn down quite quickly.  This means if you have not invested in coin capsules in the past, you may want to do so now in order to preserve the lifespan of these tokens to more than a few campaigns. In a 30 year campaign, each dodge token for example will get turned over multiple times per lantern year. You could easily dodge anything around 150 times or more per survivor in a showdown during the entire course of the campaign – cardboard tokens will not stand up to that kind of a beating.

So, the final question remains. 

Are these worth the price tag?

Well, as everything stands at the moment, the $20 price point (plus shipping) is pretty reasonable for these items, even to the point that it competes very well with the 3rd party options. They're nice looking, the aesthetic is very close to matching everything else in the game and there are some great little touches that make up for the parts where the art is lacking. For people who have access to these via a regional warehouse (which is currently just the US market); if you are a player who likes these and will get a lot of use out of them, they're certainly worth it. For the rest of us however, shipping and import taxes/customs will effectively double the price of these and that's not very desirable. But, for a long time now, that is what the shop stuff has been like – it's been a case of, are you in the right region to get them shipped in a reasonable time and not get hit with customs? Great? If not, well you probably want to pass on this.

In the end; I don't think these are overall superior to the 3rd party options out there because of the failure to address the missing People of the Sun survival actions and also provide a sufficient amount to cover some of the more interesting survivors in the game (Old Joe, Aya, Young Rachel and similar). They are a nice start, but they do not do enough to really claim a spot in your collection for the average KDM player without some additional tokens to cover the missing actions and being available in your regional warehouse. They are oh, so close to being a smash hit though. So very close.