I'm a Barbie Girl – Kingdom Death: Monster Beta Content Review “Doll” (Patreon)

Built with fanatical care, the automata was a gift to the newborn heir of an island rich in mystical fresh water. Playing with her young charge in a strange pool, the doll suddenly started to speak foreboding prophesies that vexed the island's rulers. Thrown far into the depths of the Rust Ocean, the mechanical wonder's water-logged voice still foretells its ghastly predictions. – Doll Lore

Doll is one of two latest releases in the 'Photoresin plus small pieces of prototype content' series which has been coming out since the start of this year. This series seems to be a place where concepts and ideas can be pushed out quickly alongside miniature sculpts. There are a bunch of reasons why this might happen, part of it could be keeping the artistic talent employed by giving them pieces to create each month, part of it could be providing a place where wild and wacky ideas come to roost. Adam has certainly written as much in respect to this, claiming that it's a place where crazy thoughts can find a design home (to paraphrase).

If you were more cynical however, you might consider that this series exists as a way to monetise the portion of the audience who cares more about game content than models to paint. We don't have access to the full sales numbers for products, but one thing is sure – stuff with game content tends to sell out faster than things without (with the exception of the ludicrously rare items like the busts). I guess it depends on where you stand with the whole experience, are you optimistic about the intentions behind this, or are you more cynical?

Myself, it's part of my job to review these things, and I think that both versions of this picture hold some truth. One of the things I do know is that Kingdom Death lives and dies on producing content for its player base to consume, it's a lifestyle game, if you play this game, you may well end up playing it a lot thanks to its customisable builds working like a simpler version of deck construction for a Living Card Game. There are a lot of decisions and branching paths available for players to tread down thanks to the combination of modular expansions and randomness.

So getting more content is good, if it's put together in a well thought out and healthy manner, content such as Willow, Aya and Grimory for example demonstrate expansions in the game's design space that give players interesting elements to interact with. They give you alternative options to build towards.

Doll, unfortunately, is not one of those designs. In fact, this little mini-expansion now holds the record for the fastest I've broken every gear element in a small scale release. While it only has two gear cards and one additional rule everything about these gear cards demonstrates portions of the game where you need to tread really carefully – and that hasn't happened. Next time we'll look at Summer Cyrus, which will mark a return to praising content, but this week I'm afraid we've got to look at two of the biggest design errors we've seen to date (plus one interesting new rule).

We'll start off gentle with a look at how you gain these two items. They are 'replacement hunt event' effects, something we've seen in the past with the busted Hope Stealer, this time the event replaced is The Finale, an event that players are in explicit control of experiencing because if you choose the Barbaric Conviction then one survivor will gain the 'Thundercaller' ability:

This means that any settlement which survives long enough can choose Barbaric with the express purpose of deciding when to gain access to these two pieces of gear. It also means that any settlement that randomly experiences hunt event 100 can choose to avoid their encounter with the Cyclops Knight and gain these two items instead.

In essence we have a 'tutor' situation for these cards (named after the Magic: The Gathering card Demonic Tutor), you can guarantee access to these two pieces of gear in every campaign that lives long enough to choose their conviction. They're not rare and discovered randomly like the Hope Stealer, they are instead almost entirely deterministic. You will have to sacrifice access to the Romantic conviction if you want them without rolling through chance, which is a cost, but they are guaranteed.

The Needle Sword

The old counterweighted axe is dead, make way for the new blade! The Needle Sword is almost a fair and balanced weapon, however there are two major design oversights with this weapon. On the surface it is a (3/2+/1/Cursed/Frail) sword with an extra ability to gain +1 Perfect hit range that can be combined with Timeless Eye. The pay off for this is that its Perfect hit ability scores an automatic wound against the monster.

The intention with this weapon is that it is a relatively risky higher speed weapon with frail and low strength combined with high accuracy. That should mean this weapon is tricky to use because if you hit a super dense hit location then its gone, but also if you have low strength you may be hitting the monster without securing wounds, meaning you have to take reactions without gaining any progress towards slaying the monster.

However, as we have learnt in the past, any gear card with an automatic wounding ability has the potential to break the games combat loop because it bypasses parts of the monster's defences. A typical monster has the following barriers to protect it from being attacked:

• Weapon accuracy – you must hit first
• Hit Location Cards – you must draw a hit location card
• Trap – a Trap negates an entire attack
• Automatic Reactions – Automatic reactions harm the attacking survivor
• Toughness – you must manage to wound the monster
• Failure Reactions – if you fail, you can be punished
• Success Reactions – if you succeed in wounding, you may be punished

Critical Wounds/Deadly weapons are popular because they get to bypass the reaction and toughness portions of this process (plus often they generate bonus resources). However, if you can skip everything except for the process of hitting then you get to disable the toughness, trap and reactions.

This is what happened with the old Counterweighted Axe design in 1.5 and earlier, you would bypass the drawing of a hit location entirely and just get to score a wound. We'll get to the specifics of the Needle Sword in a moment, because it's slightly different, but before we do, here's the two fixed versions of the auto-wounding mechanic.

The 1.6 and later version of the Counterweighted Axe:

And the Acid-Tooth Daggers from the Gorm expansion:

(This is lowkey one of my favourite weapons)

In the case of the new Counterweighted Axe, you get a maximum of one automatic wound. In the case of the Acid-Tooth Daggers you can get multiple automatic successes at wound attempts, but you will still have to draw hit locations and risk hitting the trap. These are both fair and balanced versions of this weapon type, the Needle Sword doesn't play by those rules.

“On a Perfect hit, the monster suffers a wound.”

This means, when you score a perfect hit, you get an automatic wound in addition to scoring a hit to draw a hit location. Yes, that's right, this weapon has a new version of Devastating 1, but the extra wound is given during the 'hit' portion of the attack, not the 'wounding success' version. That in itself is pretty great, you can potentially get perfect hits on an 8-10 (with Timeless Eye), so that will make up for the weapon's low strength.

However, it also means that if you score enough hits, you can wound the monster sufficiently to kill it before you even draw a single hit location. While the design of this weapon is trying to avoid the old exploit that people would use with Timeless Eye + Bone Witch -Accuracy + Speed + Counterweighted Axe (which no longer works because of the 1.6 Axe change), it fails to address the most broken version of the strategy, which is combining massively high insanity gained via several different methods (Gorm, Butcher or Legendary Phoenix are three of them) and combining that with the Lion God gear 'Butcher's Blood' order to roll so many dice that mathematically you will kill any monster you attack before even getting to the hit location portion of the process. If you roll 1000 speed, you can expect to get between 80 and 100 perfect hit wounds, which will kill all monsters in this game (even future monsters are unlikely to have that many wounds). Butcher's Blood can be gained without even killing a Lion God successfully because it's a gear card and they are kept even if all the survivors in the showdown die.

Now yes, this is a boring way to play the game and you're not really going to do it more than maybe once for the experience, but the point is there are valid and sensible tools already available in the design to avoid this issue. APG and Adam are very VERY aware of the problems that surround automatic wounds that skip the Hit Location deck, and they took steps to stop it happening. Here however, they have just reopened the doors less than a year after releasing the Legendary Card pack where they closed them. This is just a very disappointing failure and a bit of a concern, if they are still making abusable gear like this, then how can we be confident that their future designs in the Gambler's Chest and later are going to be balanced and fun?

If you're at all wondering about how the cursed limitation limits this (or more specifically fails to limit this), we're going to discuss how that's beaten with the Mechanical Heart below, but the short version is, don't forget that Crystal Skin is an ability in Monster.

The Mechanical Heart

Dear reader, I could tell you that the Mechanical Heart on the other hand demonstrates an interesting and non-broken addition to the game's design space. That at least half of the gear content in this beta would be fair and could be engaged with in an honest fashion.

What I really do mean, is that I wish I could tell you that.

But I cannot.

The Mechanic Heart, on the surface, looks like a very intersting concept. You gain it and your armor points are locked forever at the level they were plus the bonus 9 to each hit location that the heart delivers. From then on you will only lose 1 armor point per attack maximum, and you cannot ever regain replacement armor points.

That, in itself, is an interesting concept. Gained at the right time, this can result in a survivor who won't die until they take at least the 10th hit to a hit location.

It would be a very interesting concept, trading long term renewal for durability and gradual decay.

However, I cannot tell you that this is all this piece of gear can do. Because, as I eluded to above, there is an ability in this game that lets you ignore the downside to this gear. Behold! My Crystal Skin!

This ability is gained via Mineral Gathering and if you want it, it's pretty straightforward to gain, requiring only a little bit of chance and the correct gear (it's pretty much always on my campaign's 'to do' list). Once you have it, as you can see it is passed down to the survivor's children and it is a dominant trait (as in they always inherit Crystal Skin).

It gives you a flat amount of armor points when departing at the cost of not being able to wear armor and suffering more dangerous severe injuries. In itself that's pretty interesting and allows for some incredible builds that normally can't be fielded.It also has one other benefit, you ignore cursed. This means you can take off cursed gear where normally it would be stuck onto your survivor for the rest of their lifetime.

How this interacts with the Mechanical Heart creates a really problematic situation; Crystal Skin survivors get to unequip cursed gear (if they want to) when sorting out what gear is going to be taken when departing. So, during step 8 of the settlement phase “Prepare Departing Survivors” they can unequip the Mechanical Heart and then re-equip it. Gaining the bonus +9 armor points to all locations. This means they get a minimum of 45 “super” armor points for every single showdown (I'm not sure when the crystal skin bonus is added, but I suspect it's after the armor is added because it happens at departure, looks like shields do work though), armor points that can only be removed one point at a time no matter how strong the monster is. They, in essence, become the  most durable and powerful tanks in the entire game and it is very unlikely that they will die, even retirement won't stop this, because a Crystal Survivor can have a successor. Whoops.

All of this undermines the one balanced element of this beta content, the center rule, which is an interesting concept that provides a piece of gear which has to be placed in the middle spot of the gear grid. Locking locations for certain gear is a wonderful way of creating new and interesting methods of forcing players to be creative with their builds. Limitation breeds creativity, some of my more imaginative builds came about from self imposed limits.

It is however, the only bright spot in an entire mess of a release, so while I do look forward to it maybe returning in the future, the gear it is associated with here is so completely prone to abuse and poorly designed that I really cannot recommend this beta content at all.

You can use it as intended for sure, and have a good time, but the basic truth of Doll's beta content is that both pieces of gear have at their core horrible flaws that are evident with just a slightly deeper than surface look. This is the worst of the beta content we have seen to date and it's right up there with some of the other massive design mistakes that the team have produced over the recent years (I will never forget the time that the Gigalion forced a 'draw' between it and the Vignette survivors by refusing to get close enough to kill the last one alive). At times like this one has to wonder if they have actually learned how to design for their game, or if they're just impulsively throwing things out without due care and attention to their baby.

It's fine if you don't abuse this beta content promotional material, but asking players to self-limit because you're just throwing these out without giving them enough testing that I can't break them both within two days is not on.

Leave this one in the Rust Ocean where she belongs and we'll head to the beach shore for Summer Cyrus next week!