A Review of Character - Stone Wrecker | Kingdom Death: Monster (Patreon)

He remembers the moment he became insubstantial. There was no sensation as the monster moved through him taking the world with it. A soft mocking laughter sounded close to his ear as it passed. Color bled from his surroundings, infinite permutations reduced to grey. He remained but his significance dissipated like a fog.

1x Stone Wrecker hard plastic miniature which has effectively a sculpted base that fits on the standard flat ones.

1x Character Card

1x Living Glossary card

1x Install guide card

1x Large matte art print

The Miniature

Stone Wrecker is one of my all time favourite male miniature sculpts, the combination of his hulking mass, grim features and lurking stance along with that wonderful pillar create something that I've wanted to see in plastic for a long time. Stone Wrecker has been a part of the page banner for a long time because of how much I love it.

One of my favourite elements is that Stone Wrecker has a physique built for realistic power, he's more akin to a rugby player or an olympic wrestler than a gym bunny's bodybuilding physique. I can buy into the story that he is using that stone pillar as a weapon and the photoresin release of him is one of the few photoresins I risk on the game board because I want to use it whenever I have a survivor with the Impermanism Knowledge that bares Stone Wrecker's name and depiction. (As an aside, I like using Physionomy alongside Stone Wrecker to increase the odds of gaining the Pillar gear card, it's disappointing when that doesn't naturally happen which is common in such a terrain poor environment as Kingdom Death).

The Game Content

As a character card Stone Wrecker is very straightforward, this is likely in part because some of his “content” is already a part of Impermanism as mentioned above. I do think that it's a little bit of a shame when the release is just a single card with simple rules and a miniature, but these additional character cards, especially ones like this that are abilities, are very much just a nice extra rather than something everyone should have.

Dazed: When a monster or survivor is dazed, they gain a -1 speed token until the end of their turn. Monsters and survivors can only be dazed once per round.

Wrecker triggering on the first time you wound each round is a very solid ability for a survivor to have even if it only triggers the daze token on that 6+ (50%). While we are required to use heavy weapons for this, they are a type of weapon that tends to have a lot more strength than others. There are a lot of very good heavy weapons to choose from, including Stonewrecker's weapon of choice, the Stone Pillar.

That means across the entire showdown we can expect the monster to have a -1 Speed token for a reasonable portion of the time. Exactly what % that is will depend on the weapon's accuracy and its ability to wound/critically wound the monster. -1 Speed is nothing to sneeze at and it scales against higher level monsters well as they increase in base speed as a natural part of their level progression.

Summary

While I very much like Stone Wrecker and his associated ability card, this is far from an essential purchase because of it just having a nice miniature plus a decent Character card. While Character cards are a nice thing to have, you only set up your character deck once per campaign and you don't use all of them each time and using them outside of the GCE Character card deck is an awkward experience that is a band aid at best.

The card being an ability (or impairment) does increase the frequency of use because we have more slots for abilities when compared to legendary, but it is still low on the value for money.

As such I think you should be mostly picking this one up if like myself you plan to paint and use the miniature if you want that. It is a really nice miniature and the card is fine enough but I would not put this on the essential for all list.