Woe Grimmory Beta Content Review | Kingdom Death: Monster

Grimmory's blighted vision remained a bleached field of painful light populated by shadows moving across his aching retinas. In search of a remedy he hunted the beast that might restore a time before stinging blindness.

Contents

• 1 x Woe Grimmory photo resin miniature + Base

• Large Matte Art Print

• Character Art Card

• 2 x Beta gear cards (Woe Hachigane, Woe Kusarigama)

• 3 x Living glossary cards (Clobber, Flinch, Foresight)

Note: This content uses Phoenix resources

Grimmory returns for another release (anyone remember his brother Reapokratis at this point?) Moving him from a side character into one that someone on Team Death is really keen on getting more versions of him. I'm very neutral on Grimmory, I can see value in a version for alternative campaigns but also I think there are other interesting characters I'd like to see a gear release for such as Stonewrecker ahead of another Grimmory.

When I first saw this release I thought that it was going to be another People of the Sun specific release due to the Japanese inspired weaponry and move from Gorment to some lightweight alternative. So colour me somewhat surprised when it turned out that was not the case, instead it's another Phoenix based suit of gear.

The Miniature

To state the obvious, this is very much not a miniature you could use on the table without a lot of care. We've got so many points of potential breakage here across all the feathers, chains and the weapon itself. But looking past that there are some elements to this I think are really interesting. To start with his armor, this is at least partially Phoenix inspired, the feet have a design that's very much like the original Phoenix Greaves, but many other places deviate away from that. We have large feathers adorned in a number of places and across the chest area are three small bird skulls that almost exactly match the ones that clasp the Red Witch Initiate cloaks. There are also prominent Stone Face elements to this design, with them appearing on the pauldrons and groin area. The wrists have spiral snail-like decorations which are shown to be green in the card artwork, I'm not entirely sure what real world design they are emulating or what element of Kingdom Death's world they may come from, so if you have an idea on either please do let me know in the comments.

The Kusarigama design here is an interesting experiment, previously we would have a weapon like this hanging rather than being captured in motion. The left hand one gives us exactly that, but the right hand has the Kusarigama's fundo being spun, and it forming this screaming face as a part of its pattern. It's a very neat aesthetic and makes this model a candidate for dioramas; however the overall composition is a little off because Grimmory's gaze is fixes at the ground, suggesting that he's spinning this idly without any real target. I'm not personally sold on any of this, but I do really like the blade design displayed in his left hand.

Speaking of the Ground, Grimmory has a fully sculpted base with multiple semi-formed bird heads reaching out of it. They have some similarities with the illustration of Phoenix Chicks we have seen on the scout card, though they are lacking the long whiskers that the young Phoenixes feature (side note: it seems that young phoenixes have poor temporal control and tend to accidentally age themselves, or they start off very old until they grow up enough to control their own aging). I appreciate miniatures having sculpted bases in this game due to normal basing materials looking wrong on the play board, this one unfortunately has some overhanging elements which really cements it as something I would not want to use in game.

Overall I like the worldbuilding of this miniature, but I cannot see myself assembling or using it to represent any potential user, it's too impractical.

The Gameplay

We have two pieces of gear here, and as the note at the start of this states, they are both specifically Phoenix based crafting options with no generic alternatives. I'm not a heavy Phoenix user in this game as I find both the Dragon King and Sunstalker showdowns to be more engaging and exciting while still offering an appropriate level of challenge. So for myself that is a mark against these, but in general it's good that they are tied to a monster you will always own due to it coming in the base game box.

Woe Hachigane

Crafting Cost: 1x Iron, 1x Small Feathers, 1x Cloth

The hachigane is an armored version of the hachimaki which is a headband with protective plating worn to protect the forehead. I believe one of its most famous uses in recent pop culture is in the Naruto series, but I have also seen it in many other places such as in the video game Kenshi. The Woe Hachigane is the version that offers the least protection, I've seen other versions that provide additional protective plates going up the front of the head as far as the crown. For my tastes it is these latter kind that I feel offer good protection and I was surprised to see this version has 3 Armor points, based on the artwork I expected just one armor point.

This unique headgear has outfit in combination with the feather and metal keywords; meaning we can use it with Phoenix, Dragon, Lantern, Death King and Bullfrogdog Armor for a start. Outfit is an incredibly flexible ability and metal is a very common keyword, so those two in combination is always solid.

Our sole other ability of note is the additional activation that we get if we have foresight (top of the AI or HL deck is revealed), so we do need to combo this with some form of deck scouting. The passive forms (Wisdom Potion, Frogdoggles) are probably better here, but it depends on your party and campaign composition. The additional activation indicates that it cannot be used to attack, which means we can't activate the top left ability of a weapon, but it does not stop us from using Block/Deflect, stance switching (more on that in the Kusarigama section below) or activating Blood Paint, because while that causes attacks, the activation on Blood Paint itself is not an attack. Technicalities in board games are fun.

Extra actions in a game like this are excellent economy and value which help push the survivor's natural action advantage (4 actions vs 1 action being the baseline). Even ones which are limited in a fashion such as this can still be put to a plethora of uses. I've only covered a few above, other examples include instruments, activating terrain and nuclear weapon activations.

Overall this is a very interesting piece of gear that has uses outside of its overt design synergy with the Woe Kusarigama companion piece and while it is thematic that this is tied to Phoenix gear as seeing the future is very much a Phoenix coded element, it is still a limitation. Also this gear card requires cloth, a resource we have in very short supply and one needs to plan carefully around because it's not going to get replaced at the moment. Not even silk resources count mechanically as cloth, it's got to be the stuff you wake up in at the start of the campaign. (Starting with 6 survivors before dropping down to 4 for the rest of the campaign is beginning to look more and more enticing even with the monster being buffed massively).

Woe Kusarigama

Crafting Cost: 1x Iron, 1x Hollow Wing Bones, 1x Founding Stone

A kusarigama (chain-sickle) is the combination of a kama (sickle) with a kusari-fundo (kusari being the chain and fundo being the iron weight). There is no evidence of this weapon being used in war due to it being impractical for allies and also losing advantage when against weapons with reach. However it was proven to be very effective for lone combatants against shorter reach weapons such as swords, the often given example of this is one Yamada Shinryukan who had many victories against swordsmen until he was trapped in a bamboo grove where he could not use the chain element of his weapon and subsequently defeated, though if I'm honest this sounds more like the plot of a manga over real life (I also struggled to find the source articles for this tale, perhaps because they are only in Japanese). In modern times the traditions of this weapon are maintained by multiple different martial schools.

At its base the Woe Kusarigama is a scythe/whip with a (2/7+/7/Reach 4) attack profile, which is right on the money for a weapon with its crafting cost, in fact both of these two gear cards have appropriate power levels for their crafting cost. In addition to that if you connect its Puzzle red and have a green + blue affinity in your gear grid (the classic Phoenix Rainbow affinity design) then you gain the ability to activate the weapon for a “stance shift” which transforms it from a Deadly 1/Savage scythe into a Clobber 10/Flinch club. This means we have two weapons in one.

The scythe version is very straightforward and powerful, it gets to leverage the combination of Deadly and Savage with Scythe proficiency (The proficiency triggers full reshuffles of the HL deck on critical wounds, which helps keep the trap away by resetting the odds). The club version provides a lot of extra strength against monsters with many super-dense hit locations (like the L2+ Crimson Crocodile) and also brings control with the Flinch mechanic that puts a “flinch token” onto the monster. Flinch rules text is not provided on any of the reference cards that come with the game but it reads as follows:

Flinch token

When a monster with a flinch token attempts to perform a reaction, cancel that reaction and discard this token. A monster cannot have more than one flinch token.

This is a very powerful form of monster control that can help later attempts at wounding monster hit locations and due to it being triggered on wounds rather more difficult feats like Perfect hits or Critical Wounds it is something one can keep up easily.

While this weapon has this inbuilt switching as a part of it, I've found that due to the design of weapon mastery being what it is, it is most effective to keep it in a single form that matches your survivors chosen weapon type. Both stances have their strengths, but it is Scythe proficiency that really gives the weapon something special (and the Scythe Mastery card only comes in the Dragon King box), the club side is something that one only leans into with specific opponents because leveraging luck/deadly tends to always be the right call unless the monster has a lot of immune to critical wound Hit Locations.

I do want to note that if any weapon in this game deserves the Unwieldy keyword it is this one, in fact I'd go as far as to say that it should have a form of Unwieldy that hits friendly survivors within its Reach 4 range. That is a thematic downside that would have resulted in interesting play styles and as such I would have been more engaged with its use. I like limitations such as that, they bring texture to the positioning game.

Final Thoughts

I was surprised that these two gear cards are not People of the Sun specific and I feel that if we see a re-release of this Grimmory variant in plastic it will be some form of Pattern based People of the Sun + Phoenix only gear. The specific designs of both gear cards are interesting and offer new things not seen before which is when beta cards are always at their best. They also both feel tamer than some of the other Beta designs we've seen and this more restrained design is the one that often seems to get an “official” white box release.

So yeah, despite decidedly not being the target audience for this (Phoenix, Japanese) I think this is something that does offer unique play, though if you missed it, it does feel like a ripe for a plastic release sometime later.