A Review of White Box Seed Pattern Survivor – Ingama | Kingdom Death: Monster (Patreon)

The broken sword sits atop the memorial of her twin. The ever-present reminder is a bilious sickness in her churning guts. Pouring maddening drink over the incandescent grief in the pit of her stomach brings momentary relief. In the moment of inspired madness, Ingama's fingers tremble, forging a new weapon of vengeance.

For best experience, use with Gambler's Chest expansion.

Warning Note: If you play with Arc Survivors only this content is possibly unusable and at a minimum requires above average luck to use. See further below in this review for full explanation.

Contents

1x Ingama with Feral Zanbato Miniature and flat base

1x Rules card

1x Feral Zanbato Seed Pattern Card

1x Feral Zanbato Gear Card

1x Ignama Art Card

The Miniature

Ingama's model very much reminds me of Guinevere and Xell's in style and attitude. She is wearing a mostly unarmored set of gear, with the White Lion Cloak and a Frenzy Drink hanging from her belt. This makes her a useful survivor if you are playing with People of the Skull as the White Lion Cloak is a solid choice for those survivors due to their bone weapon/armor gear limitation. One of the stand out elements for me here is the lantern, I very much dislike the “S” lantern design because of how awkward I find it to paint. Ingama's lantern here is far more my preference with its stark brutalist design and chunky handle.

The Feral Zanbato is an incredibly gorgeous weapon sculpt, full of details that bring it to life far more than its ancestor. All of this means miniature is nice enough to use on the board not just for the Feral Zanbato user, but it's also great if you want to represent any early game Zanbato survivor with lighter armor.

I think this is a great piece both artistically and practically.

The Gameplay

Let us start with some scrutiny of this claim that the shop page made:

“For best experience, use with Gambler's Chest expansion.”

To its credit, this is technically true because the full Seed Pattern system is fully realised in the Gambler's Chest Expansion (GCE). However, it fails to be precise with its text. The full text should read something like “For best experience, use with the Seed Pattern system from the Gambler's Chest Expansion. This will have very limited use if you are playing with Arc Survivors from the Gambler's Chest Expansion.” That's not snappy, but the simple fact is this card has a prime example of the fissure that has split Kingdom Death: Monster into two similar games that do not frictionlessly sit together. Let us get into that for a bit.

On one hand we have the original game with its Age + Fighting Art survivor progression and on the other hand we have Arc Survivors who by design almost completely obliterate Fighting Arts from the game and supplant them with Knowledges. While there is no true reason why these two systems could not coexist in some limited degree, the new progression makes it hard to get access to the fighting arts in the first place and even if you do get one the Vaultless Arc Survivor story event makes it both unlikely and risky to try and use Fighting Arts at all.

The net impact of this difficult route to gaining and keeping Fighting Arts is anything that relies on traditional Fighting Arts to do its thing, cards like the Innovation Drums, Strain Fighting Arts and Seed Patterns such as the very Feral Zanbato in this box are essentially unusable. The table in the Vaultless event that one uses to try and gain the Fighting Art gives you a 30% chance of success, but always costs you +1 Systemic Pressure no matter what. That's without even considering how hard it is to get a random fighting art in the first place when you are playing with Arc Survivors.

(At the request of my play group we allow survivors to gain the first Fighting Art they get in their lifetime as if it was a Secret Fighting Art - so +1 Systemic Pressure, and you don't roll on the tables. It has eased their frustration a lot).

This is the Crafting Recipe for the Feral Zambato:

Crafting Costs: 1x Zanbato, 2x Broken Lantern, 1x Fresh Acanthus

Crafting Requirements: Sculpture innovated, a living survivor with the Berserker Fighting Art

As we can see here without a survivor featuring the Berserker Fighting Art this seed pattern card is a dead draw that will take up space but not become actualised. This is something that one has to be keenly aware of and it very much changes the value of boxed set on a case by case basis.

I'll go over that shifting value depending on your preferred game more in the summary. We'll get to the weapon itself now.

The Feral Zanbato itself is an interesting variant of the original Zanbato, in addition to losing Frail the weapon gains and additional +1 point of Deadly to a total of 2, Barbed 4 and the Zanbato's Devastating 1 is moved from being an affinity unlock to being a passive bonus that becomes active when you are frenzied. Hence the Lion Frenzy Drink on Ingama's tactical belt.

The new affinity ability gives the wielding survivor a way to trigger Frenzy, and this is an optional element of the weapon because you can always not activate the 2 red affinity requirement. Depending on play style you might not want to do that. That means you have two “modes” you can operate this weapon in, the first is a luck based slow grand weapon which makes it a superior Zanbato, the second option is to lean into the Frenzy. With Frenzy you'll gain more speed, which makes Barbed 4 more powerful.

There are also some fun things you can do with this if you have the Imitation Berserker armor (Seed Pattern 004 - GCE) as that is an armor set which utilises the Infectious Lunacy Status Card to trigger more frenzy and also gives protection when you are Frenzied.

Ultimately this is an interesting weapon and something you're going to construct pretty much every time you have the available resources because it is an upgrade that's worth the effort and costs.

Final Thoughts

For once there is a clear set of cases that cover the situations under which you should pick this up or not.

If you just have pre-Gambler's Chest content then this is great to have access to because you'll get it via Understanding/Insight unlocks and upgrading the Zanbato is something one always wants to do (and it's a lot easier to get this upgrade done when compared to burying and digging it up to Calcify it when you have the Dung Beetle Knight - note you'll need a second Zanbato if you are intending to make a Calcified one).

However, if you do own the Gambler's Chest and play with Arc Survivors then there's such little value here that I couldn't recommend the gameplay content.

Finally, if you've picked up the Gambler's Chest and decided that Arc Survivors are not for you then this regains its value and this is probably the best spot for the Ingama box because you can then combine the Feral Zanbato with the Imitation Butcher Mask.

In short, do you see yourself playing with Fighting Arts over Knowledges most or all of the time in the future? Then pick this up.

Are you a Philosophy Player? Then this isn't for you.

Seed Pattern Survivor is available at: https://shop.kingdomdeath.com/collections/in-stock/products/seed-pattern-ingama