Unboxing Kingdom Death:Monster

This week a highly anticipated Kickstarter game finally reached my hands, Kingdom Death: Monster. One of the original 'kickstarter success stories' the game development has been a labour of love from designer Adam Poots. The game is about 2 years later than originally expected. I never felt concerned though, Adam has been in constant communication with the backers and you can tell he wanted to make a really great game.

The game comes in an intimidatingly large box as expected, the quality is beautiful. There's a separate box for all the extra kickstarter components, with a quite amusing typo on it (maybe it's an intentional joke I don't get! Did make me chuckle though)

Opening up the box we're greeted by some secondary board components and high quality tokens ready to pop out. 

 Underneath that is the board, which is.....huge. Now this is a minor complaint but, what tables do they test these games on? This is a fairly large 6 person table and the board barely fits on it width wise, it feels like they could have made it a lot smaller. A lot of people simply won't be able to fit this game on their tables!

Below the board we get down to the real components, a veritable bounty of cards, dice and pads for survivors and settlements. The box also comes with pre cut sections ready to store all the components once they're taken out of the plastic, a lot of thought has clearly gone into this.

Here is an example of a card, the artwork is high quality throughout and the text clear and easy to read.

Here is the survivor sheet, the game comes with a hefty wad of these.

Some dice, the game mainly uses D10's with the D6 dice for hit locations, the dice have a lantern symbol for the '10' result.

And finally we reach the big boy, the rulebook. Weighing in at a whopping 224 pages! Don't be intimidated though, the rules aren't that complicated, there is a lot of space taken up by beautiful artwork and a wonderful opening story comic. The rules are well explained and there is a nice walkthrough of the 'first day' story to get everyone settled in.

Finally lets see the plastic. This box is the box that comes with the base game, the kickstarter extras box is the same size! Unlike other miniature board games like Zombicide, KD:M's miniatures come fully unassembled on sprues. At the time of writing the build section of the KD website is not up yet so it's up to players to try and assemble the miniatures, there are a few youtube guides though made by fans. The miniatures are stunning as you would expect given KD's background of boutique high quality miniatures. Although these are plastic instead of resin the detail is still wonderful, check out that wing!

Here we can see some of the assembled minis, I've used some milliput to fill in some cracks, not really needed but I am a bit of a perfectionist. The lion and antelope were very easy to assemble, the survivors were mixed, they're quite slender so you might have to warn your gaming group to not be too rough with them! The survivors come with stylish base inserts but for the monsters you can see I've started working on my own bases.

I had a game at the weekend, would anyone be interested in seeing a writeup of that?