Remastered Wave 1 Arrivals (Patreon)

Last weekend was a very rough one for me, my partner was out walking our dog Pam in the local town and an off-leash Cane Corso/Lab mix aggressively approached them. Pam is a rescue dog and suffers from a lot of fear and anxiety which was caused by her being abandoned on a beach shortly after having puppies (All the puppies ended up being rescued also and they were fine). Pam barked at the larger dog and that was enough to trigger that dog into attacking, Pam slipped through her harness and got into a fight with the dog.

While my partner was fine, Pam ended up with several puncture wounds, a lot of bruising and one severe wound that ran for around 20 cm under her skin. We had to take her to the vet for emergency treatment. While this happened I also received a call from my mother, she needed to tell me that another close member of my family was suspected of having a serious illness (currently still going through testing).

So this week I've not been able to sleep much due to needing to take care of Pam while also worrying about my close relative. Because of all that it has been hard to write, but on Wednesday (I'm writing this yesterday, Thursday) the Remastered Wave 1 expansions for KDM arrived. Well most of them did, sadly the one I was most excited about - Gatherism - was mispacked, that's being sorted out and hopefully should be with me sometime in early October. It's a bit frustrating, because I really wanted to play the next campaigns with that philosophy in the decks, but it will have to wait.

I'm in the middle of opening and organising the contents of these new expansions which has become an absolutely massive task, I barely fit the Frogdog and Black Knight inside last time, this is more stuff than that. As such all I can offer is some initial thoughts on the new expansions. This isn't reviews as such, more a case of 'what's in the boxes' along with some comments/observations. Apologies it isn't more than that.

Here are the arrivals, I didn't order Percival because I already own her, but after reviewing the contents I think I am going to have to pick that box up. Gatherism isn't here because of the mispacking accident.

The rest pictured are:

The Red Witches

The Pariah

The False Messengers

Wanderer - Death Drifter

Wanderer - Goth

Wanderer - Candy & Cola

Wanderer - Aenas

I went through them from smallest to largest, starting with the bittersweet selection of Wanderers. We'll start with the sweetest and move gradually towards the bitter.

If you were not aware, Wanderer Aenas is based on a survivor from a member of the community, I really love it when board games pay tribute to fun parts of either the community or other games that inspired them. Crabman, the Gregalope and the Dying Prospector/Portcullis are other examples of this from KDM.

In the case of Aenas, we have a survivor who had their sex swapped via the Strange Spot settlement Event card's "Belt of Gender Swap". Aenas is a very food orientated Wanderer, so at a minimum this lets you even further flavour the theme of your Gourmandism settlements. She also turns up relatively early, which I think is a much better choice for Wanderers over Luck who turns up incredibly late in a campaign. The early game is experienced by more players just due to the nature of the game and early lantern year Wanderers therefore get to the table more often and offer more value.

Next we have the Death Drifter, who is a crossover with the Hyper Light Drifter. I really enjoyed my time playing Hyper Light Drifter, though it didn't grab me long enough for me to push through and complete it. I tended to enjoy wandering around and looking at the environments more than navigating through the Metroidvania experience. Metroidvania's rarely grab me, with Blasphemous 1 + 2 being the main exception to that.

Sadly the new game set in the Hyper Light Drifter Franchise; Hyper Light Breaker, seems to not be to the same high standard as its predecessor. Breaker is a very different game, actually one that I would really love if they sorted out all the various issues. I am sure it is no surprise to anyone that I greatly enjoy roguelikes/lites and Breaker is a part of that game genre. Elden Ring Nightreign has proven to be a huge success in this household for example, but it seems that Breaker lacks so much.

Still, the Drifter isn't held back by that, it remains an excellent game even if its "successor" is suffering from a lot of issues and I am looking forward to seeing this character's story and mechanics unfold.

Wanderer Goth is based on Goth Amy from CMON's Zombicide (see here) which is a company that has landed in difficult times due to their continuous cycle of Kickstarter releases and is certainly in the more bitter portion of this wanderer selection.

Zombicide isn't something that I personally enjoyed, I prefered Rising Sun and "The Others" as my CMON games, but I think what I've seen of Goth and her mechanics is very interesting. It's also worth mentioning that Goth Amy is likely inspired by Abigail B. Sciuto from NCIS, I doubt there is any of that in Goth's story, but it is a neat connection.

Finally we have the most bitter of all, Candy & Cola were the mascots for Soda Pop Miniatures/Ninja Division, I still have my Super Dungeon Explore collection and I am absolutely one of the people who lost out when the company went under. Super Dungeon Explore: Legends died before being completed and it is a failed Kickstarter. Super Dungeon Explore's Twilight Knight crossover mini is one of the reasons I got into Kingdom Death in the first place. I've got multiple copies of the original smaller Candy & Cola miniature from the first KDM kickstarter cause I love this duo so much!

Along with Darkest Dungeon's remaining expansions never shipping the loss of everything SDE:Legends offered is one of the areas where I wish something could have been salvaged. Alas the company is gone and this crossover Wanderer box is probably the last time Candy and Cola will get any kind of release as who knows where the license for the Ninja Division franchises now lands.

From what little I've seen in the box, this wanderer pays tribute to the loss of that company hopefully it gives Candy an excellent Swan Song.

One thing I am noticing here is that there's obvious friction between the original Survivor Fighting Art/Age system and the Arc Survivor system. Each Wanderer needs to cover both versions of the game, but it seems that the non-Arc system is really barebones. It's part of how KDM has become simply too large for its own good, Arkham Horror LCG (and Marvel Champions) have run into a similar problem and they've ended up having to address it for those games by employing a similar system to Magic. Creating multiple formats. I don't think that KDM needs to do that, but I do think we'll see some kind of retirement for older expansions one day because keeping everything in print just isn't feasible for any game.

On top of that, the game is getting more and more complex due not only to the newer mechanics but also due to an ever increasing number of interactions between releases. It's taking more and more time for me to explore all of these things because each release exponentially increases the number of potential synergies or friction between each new game piece.

I love that these guys all get dividers, but they're not working great when there are three different sizes of cards. We really need a "Wanderer" divider for each of the card types, and Luck needs some kind of Divider also. Dividers are still an area KDM can't get right, we're missing dividers for Encounters (Bone Eaters), Luck/Wanderer, Vignettes and probably more that I can't recall right now.

The False Messengers have been around for a very long time, in fact if you look at the plastic that comes in this box it is the same as the earlier release. Here's a picture of my 1st Kickstarter Messenger of the First Story.

This selection of Messengers was originally due to have their own scenarios that you would run, each of them inspired by their respective tribute franchises. We have:

Berserk - Guts

Chrono Trigger - Ayla

Legend of Zelda - Link

Gurren Lagann - Kamina

I've read all of Berserk as a part of understanding KDM's inspirations and of course I've played a few Legend of Zelda games, I've not watched Gurren Lagann or played Chronotrigger however. As such my knowledge of those two is a bit more limited.

I hoped that this box was going to contain some scenarios, philosophies or Wanderers for each of the messengers, instead it seems that this is a very small release where rules are concerned. It is a pillar system addition which seems to feature a settlement event, some pattern cards and disorders. I think that the combination of these light rules plus old miniature sculpts means this box set may well end up being the worst value release out of all of these.

The Pariah is one of the two big releases, this is a Node 1 Nemesis monster, so he's got some stiff competition because both the Manhunter and Butcher are incredible bosses to battle against. I suspect he will be up to the task and I'm very interested to see how this one plays out, how it interacts with the settlement, its crossovers with the Red Witches (below) and the additional revelations it has about the Inverted Mountain. I don't really know what else to write at this point except everything I've seen while sleeving cards has looked super exciting.

Finally the largest box release is the Red Witches, this is another version of the multi-foe fight, but it seems to be taking a different approach to the Smog Singers. The Singers operated as a single opponent split into three identical units and it feels more like three "fingers" of the same "hand" attacking you (if that make sense). What I'm seeing here on the other hand is three separate attackers and a lot of background to the Red Witches/White Speakers. There also seems to be interactions with the Pariah and I love cross expansion synergies.

One of the elements I'm not so sure about however are these boxes. There's not really clear instructions about how you are intended to use them. We have four slots in each box, but that's only enough for the AI, HL cards and their discard piles, there's nowhere for each Dashboard status card to go and as such I'm not sure what the exact intention with these is. Where do I put everything when there are 7+ separate "piles"? These boxes look nice, but they don't feel clean and complete for use as dashboards the way that the rules indicate they are intended for.

I was also really happy to see an old, familiar face.

I absolutely love that we have an alternative way of gaining this Fighting Art outside of the release in the Manhunter. I think this is a super cool way of using content and I hope we see more of it in the future. Not every Disorder/Terrain/Fighting Art needs to be unique to only one specific monster, it's interesting to see them reappear elsewhere.

The Plan

This period of the year has been really chaotic for boss battlers, I've had potentially 5 of them competing to arrive first, Leviathan Wild's expansion ended up being in first place and the short review for that is, it's fine if you want more Leviathan Wilds, but it doesn't push the envelope beyond giving you more options to play.

As such I've been having to keep my table relatively open and I've not been able to dig deeply into the next cycle for ATO. I did hope that Kingdoms Forlorn would arrive first so I could stop having to hide away from spoilers, but that's not even had a dispatch notice at time of writing.

Because these expansions landed first, they get the priority and what I'll be doing is playing the stories of the various Wanderers to completion a couple of times each and reviewing them first along with the False Messengers box, these are the least complex of the releases and because the Wanderers are relatively early in the settlement timeline I can run through each of them individually and really get to experience as much as possible. I'll be first completing the Optimism philosophy deep dive next week so expect to see the Wanderer reviews after that.

I'll have the Pariah/Red Witches in each of these runs also, but as I will be pausing and resetting the campaign after each Wanderer run, finishing those stories out will take a bit longer. I do however intend to have everything as explored as possible before Black Friday so I can revisit the 'Buying List' for 2025 and get that as up to date as possible.

On the video front, I nearly have the notes finished for the Flower Knight Dark Bestiary and also we're moving Justin's campaign across to my KDS table so he has room to play with others electronically. I'll also cover anything digital which gets released on the KDS as and when I can afford it.

For those of you who need to know what the games are in the background here's a picture of that. Hopefully it satisfies your curiosity.

From left to right, top to bottom: Aeon Trespass, Detective, Warhammer Quest (Including the original 1995 release and expansions), Coffee Traders, Middara Act 1, Townsfolk Tussle, Deep Regrets, Paranoia Mandatory Bonus Fun Card Game, Sleeping Gods, Tomesaga, Etherfields, High Frontier, Sidereal Confluence, Yinsh, Rising Sun, PitchCar mini, The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31, Tales from the Loop, Decorum, Wild Serengeti, The Snallygaster Situation, Stuffed Fables, Iwari, Darkes Dungeon, Specter Ops, Ankh, Batman: The Animated Series, Blood Bowl/Dungeon Bowl (one of the most useful games out there if you want to get better at KDM survivor positioning) and Xia: Legends of a Drift System.

I've talked about some of these on The Last Standee podcast and at some point I'm sure I'll cover them all. I have written reviews for Detective and Batman over on Boardgamegeek. I really love those two game series.