Realm Armaments - Gear Grid and Tracker Review (Patreon)

Disclaimer: I was gifted a set of the gear grids and trackers at no charge for the purposes of this review. I have not received any additional sponsorship, but Kadris Realm is a patron.

Realm Armaments recently sent me a set of their Gear Grid and Stat Trackers for Kingdom Death and I've spent several weeks now using them in our games in order to be able to give them a good, fair review.

These are the exact versions I have been sent. They suffered a small amount of damage in the shipping, where parts of the black grid was knocked loose, they glued in just fine and you can't tell where it happened at all now, but I did feedback some suggestions on how to pack things a bit better. 

 Gear Grids: 

These gear grids come in four variations of the design, either for sleeved or unsleeved cards and with optional holes on the back to allow for easier removal of gear cards. I can say that I would highly recommend going with the version that has holes, especially if your gear cards are not sleeved, it can be hard to remove the gear cards without damaging the edges on them without the holes and I certainly wish that I had them on these.

The fit on the gear cards is snug without being too tight, and the pattern design on the grids is very fitting for kingdom death, you can have them in a range of colours, from classic black to clear acrylic. The colours of the acrylic are muted and fit well with the style of Kingdom Death as a whole - one of my personal irritations with custom content/homebrew stuff is when people try and stick too much of their own flair or too much art into something. Kingdom Death is a game with sparse art that helps feed the imagination rather than supplant it. Some recent homebrew releases have been stuffed to the gills with art and I find that it detracts from the experience a huge amount. Less is more and these gear grids follow that. Honestly they look great, especially when used to hold my patterned small reference cards, but also they frame the gear cards really well and enhance the boutique feel of the game.

The construction of them is solid, with multiple levels of acrylic cut precisely and the pieces feel good to hold. They have been a huge hit with my players and are greatly preferred over the original options we were using. However, personally I wish they came in the defined colours for the survivors (orange, light green, light blue, brown) as I consider those to be the "official" colours for each player. This is absolutely a personal preference though, the colours we have here are fantastic, especially the slightly muted tones.

On the negatives, I would have preferred a larger grid with space on the left hand side for Fist and Tooth to sit next to the bottom left and above it a slot for the armor set bonus card to fit in. However, this isn't something many of the current custom grids out there offer, maybe this will be a possible future addition to the line?

We like the grids a great deal and they have replaced my previous solution completely.

Stat Trackers

These trackers offer coverage for survival, insanity, armor and injury levels via dials and pegs. The insanity and survival trackers use two dials to allow you to cover from 0 to 99 while the armor dials go from 00 to 14.

Now the armor doesn't cover the highest level of armor you can reach on every location, you can get up 18 at the moment (Green Armor + Calcified Greaves & Carapace) and that's without considering other bonus armor points you can generate via outside means, but the main concern here is that they're not that future proofed for what may come with generation 2. Something up to 20 or 30 would have been a safer number to run to (if a lot harder to construct). 

This means they're good for the moment, but they might not be ideal in the future when you're playing with the late game armor sets. We'll have to see what happens with expansions like the Screaming God, Silver City, Ivory Dragon and so on. 

It is worth noting that these dials are the highest numerical option out of all the dial trackers I have seen (with the exception of those that just have slots for D10s) - so this nitpick is something that applies to all trackers.

Before we move onto the good stuff, I'm going to provide my main issue with the trackers, and it's exactly the opposite of the praise I gave the gear grid. To my eye, the tracker's art style jars with the thematic style of Kingdom Death as a whole. Now I can see the potential legal issues involved with just using the KD:M location symbols for the slots, however the symbols used here are so far away from the style of Kingdom Death that it's hard for me to get over.

The other members of my groups however are fine with it, and I do appreciate how clear and obvious each different location is. So there are no problems with the actual function. Just the style for me doesn't gel with other things in the game.

Tracking the heavy and light injuries has been well done also, you simply slot a small peg into the appropriate hole next to the H and L. There is one readability problem here however, the order is reversed from how they are suffered, really the Light should be on the left and the Heavy on the right. This would then match the severity degree to the standard western reading style. Additionally I feel that the Heavy box should have had an extra marking around it (say a white box) to remind that it causes a knockdown when filled. These are relatively minor overall and you'll get used to those quirks over time.

On the physicality front the landscape format for the dials is really good, space is always at a premium on a board game table with KD:M present, but it's a lot easier to fit these into the space because of the layout. The dials are smooth, and only a couple of them were hard to turn initially (they've loosened up over time). We were also supplied with extra pegs to fit into the dial holes in case of lose/breakage - which is an excellent piece of customer service!

Summary:

These items have been a huge hit with my players, the reduction in stat tracking during the showdown, especially later on when there are a lot of things to keep an eye on, is a huge benefit. There are areas where I would alter/improve things - some of which are personal (colours) and some of which I think would be really mechanically beneficial (armor limits, cleaning up the H/L injury boxes, adding the extra slots to the grid for F&T + Armor Set Bonus). 

I love the stat trackers most of all, they've reduced the amount of bookkeeping during a showdown a huge amount and saved the survivor sheets from becoming an unreadable mess filled with erasing. 

So, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that for the price, these items are worth it and they will enhance your experience a great deal. Kingdom Death is a boutique game and you should have the gear grids and stat trackers to match. Get classy.

You can also chat with Kadris Realm on my discord if you want further details and options!

Link to the Gear Grids: 

https://www.etsy.com/listing/660961473/kingdom-death-acrylic-gear-grid 

Link to the Insanity/Armor/Survival trackers:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/607666846/kingdom-death-armour-insanity-survival