It is a rare occasion where I get to review the content of APG Store releases before they are released into the store, but Gen Con is one of the times where that does happen. Thanks to timberwolfl I've been able to see the content when it was sold at the convention and play with proxied versions to get a good feel for the stuff before it comes out on the store. I wish I could do this with more of the releases in order to help people decide if a given product is going to fit their current KDM gaming needs, but that is not the case. Also, as I don't have access to the miniatures, nor do I have pictures of what they are I can't comment on that part of the boxed set in respect to how straightforward/complex they are to assemble and how they fit in with the rest of Kingdom Death's world aesthetic. If I wanted to do that I'd have to wait until after the release arrived in my hands which is most likely going to be deep into the dying days of September. So I'll just be covering the game content here and I'll try to remember to quip pictures of the miniatures in the future along with some brief thoughts.

There are a total of three white box releases I'll be covering over this week and next week, Survivors of Death 3 contains the highest amount of game content/cards so that is what I concentrated on playing with with this week and I'll cover the Legendary Character - Hollow plus the already released Indomitable Survivor – Ballistic Brayonete Belvedere that came out while I was on holiday next week.

Survivors of Death 3 is the release that brings us the four musical survivors of Harmony, Melody, Lyra and the long suffering Sage from the Screaming God Expansion vignette into the world fully.

The exclusion of the miniatures from that box set was one of only a tiny amount of negative criticisms I have about the Screaming God release (the others being the almost non-existence of the Illuminated Figures in the game mechanics and there being just one Indomitable Resource Pattern gear card and zero Seed Pattern gear cards). When the absence of these miniatures was noted, it was explained that there it was due to a lack of space in the deck and if there was enough interest we'd get a release for this quartet and that has happened.

I've talked/written about it in my reviews of The Screaming God, but what I wanted for the release that these four came in to include some additional Indomitable and Seed Pattern gear cards in addition to more generic stuff that is more generic in application. This would make the box set both fixing a series of omissions from an otherwise excellent expansion while also providing a little bit of generic stuff for other use.

Unfortunately, there is no Screaming God specific Indomitable or Pattern Gear in this box, which has given me the sinking feeling that we're getting two or three Seed Pattern survivor boxes and three to five Indomitable Pattern boxes for Screaming God gear. I hope I am not right about that, but given that APG had a chance here to put all of that into this box and didn't, it now seems more likely this “worst” case (for us the consumers) is going to happen. Especially when we look at the trend set by the other recent quarry monster release, the Frogdog.

That's a huge shame if it is how the rounding out and completion of the missing Screaming God elements does happen, because it'll be very expensive to pick up between 3 to 8 extra boxes for game cards that I think should have been an automatic inclusion in each new release. Team Death decided that Seed and Indomitable Patterns were going to be a part of the game, they should be supporting that decision, not handing it out in a bunch of extra releases the way that has happened with the Frogdog and the King. (The Frogdog situation in particular for Indomitable Resources has been quite galling).

That however is the end of my soapbox rant about the Pattern situation in this game's current release schedule, for the rest of this review I'm going to get into the content we did get released in this box and give it as an honest and fair assessment as I can manage.

First of all, this is a musically oriented box set, that means everything has the shadow of this hunt event looming over it.

I've been through in detail why this basic hunt event harms the game's play environment before, and Survivors of Death 3 is another box set that lives in the shadow of this party pooper, as such any time you see the word noisy being used as part of the cards here, the true answer is they are bad if we're considering optimal play because they get you killed. I'm going to (mostly) ignore that issue however, because I want to believe in a world where the Musicphobe Worm isn't causing a large part of the game's rich texture and mechanics to be removed.

An unfortunate fact of this is, the strictly correct answer when playing Kingdom Death: Monster is to never use anything that is noisy outside of nemesis showdowns because a 1% chance of automatic death with no way to avoid it per basic hunt event is an unacceptable risk and starting a showdown missing a survivor is really bad (especially if you're playing 4 player, that absolutely sucks for the person it happens to. It's bad game design).

Now that part is covered, for the rest of this I'm going to (mostly) pretend we're in a world where Hunt Event 10 doesn't exist (but I will still cover/mention where you can use these cards without risk in a normal game).

Survivors of Death 3 comes with four distinct elements which can be added to your settlement as you wish. These are Character Cards, A Strain Milestone, A Pillar Card and a new Collective Cognition 23 card with associated knowledges.

The Character Cards, Strain and Pillar card can be used with any content in the game, they have no prerequisite additional expansions. The Collective Cognition and Knowledges require owning the Gambler's Chest to use (this is another reason why there's no excuse we didn't get Screaming God Gear Patterns, we already have an expansion for an expansion in this box).

Character Cards

There is a total of four character cards in this box, one for each of the vignette survivors, these represent survivors who have had their faces carved into the stone plane and therefore turn up again and again across many different settlements in time.

"In Tune" is the card that represents Harmony and she is the Singer Armor wearing Saxe player of the quartet. In Tune is a simple ability which results in +1 Accuracy (token) for the showdown if you also have an instrument in your gear grid, or +1 Accuracy until you are knocked down if you don't have an instrument. This is a solid enough ability, +Attribute tokens are something that have a lot of synergy with Gourmand Knowledge of Digestion, so a Survivor with Digestion II with this ability can consume their token to convert it into a permanent accuracy bonus each showdown.

In addition, we can take Instruments to Nemesis showdowns and for Quarry Hunts there is the Hushing Harmonium from the Smog Singers which is a risk free Instrument due to it generating Silence rather than music. This is a card that I found to be a good fit in any Character Deck, it's a solid ability that has a reasonable power floor of +1 accuracy until you're knocked down and lose the token, plus it also has fun interactions with other things due to it generating a token. It's the accuracy ability version of the excellent Fighting Art Rhythmn Chaser.

Off-Key is the Character Card for Harmony's sister Melody. Melody is a horn blower with a lot of enthusiasm and lung capacity but very little musical ability. Her character card is appropriately an Impairment and it is a pretty bad one which requires a fair bit of effort to work around. Luck is a really powerful attribute in KDM and having a -1 Luck Token when you depart without an instrument is rough to the point of making Off-Key survivors ones that you'll leave in the settlement rather than take them out. The Hushing Harmonium once again comes through, meaning that an Off-Key survivor can come out without risk here (The Gorn has finally had its printed errata released on Melody's Gear Grid card, so it is no longer “silent”. Sad times - someone sound the Gorn for the death of the Gorn).

During the showdown the Off-Key can activate their instrument once to give themselves a +1 Luck Token and inflict a -1 Luck Token on all survivors with hearing. This is a negative that you can leverage, because there are multiple ways to create deaf survivors. It's also worth noting that a quirk of this impairment doesn't require the Off-Key survivor to be able to hear their own terrible dooting, they get the +1 Luck Token just from the using the instrument regardless of if they can hear their own cacophony or not.

Once again Gourmand settlements stay winning, as they can use Digestion II to consume that +1 Luck Token and convert it into a permanent bonus. You can even do this with non-deaf survivors in the showdown by activating the instrument right near the end of the showdown so it has the minimum negative impact on them.

This all makes for a great Impairment, it's got a large negative but also a large positive. If you can walk the line between those and figure out how to negate the bad and/or amplify the good parts then you are rewarded. This is the kind of design I think is great, places for the players to experiment and figure out how to turn the upside into something really valuable.

The Misophonic Character represents the leader of this quartet, the ever suffering Sage. I'm sure that Gnostin has no end of sympathy for Sage's plight and understands why she wears armor with earplugs built in. This impairment is one of the softest we've had in the game. You can't depart with noisy gear, if other survivors have noisy gear when you depart your survival is set to 0 and you get to ignore this impairment if you are deaf.

As the best practice is to not depart with noisy gear anyway, so this doesn't do anything at all when playing an optimal zero-house rules game. The one situation that might come up then is if a Misophonic survivor gains the Coprolalia disorder (a kind of verbal tic disorder) and if that does happen we can't use the survivor until they pay a visit to the trepanning station over at the Barber Surgeon settlement location. There's not much more to say here unless we get biomes where the Shai-hulud are not present.

The fourth and final card is the one that represents Lyra, which is The Uproarious. This ability allows the survivor to spend an additional +1 survival when encouraging to give +2 strength tokens to the encouraged survivor(s) until end of the round. The normal limiting factor on this one is survivors have to be knocked down if you want to encourage them and you can only target one survivor per encourage.

There are of course numerous Encourage synergies across Kingdom Death's various mechanics though, Encourage is a core survival action that's almost omnipresent (it's a bit harder to get in People of the Sun). This makes The Uproarious Survivor a really powerful baseline to build around. We can add Fighting Arts like Leader (+1 speed token when you encourage), Knowledges like Demagogue (Survivalism) which increases the range of your encourage so it works on all non-deaf survivors, abilities such as Sour Death (See The Truth Courage Milestone) and gear like that Earl Armor (Black Knight Expansion) or Singer Armor which all provide ways to increase the impact of your encourages and/or encourage more targets. It is a really great “build around” ability and once again, because it is providing tokens, Digestion II becomes relevant, but even if it wasn't a survivor having +2 strength even for just one round is a significant impact.

These four Character Cards are all great, they are interesting, they offer places for building synergies or combos and as such they're a really welcome addition to a campaign's structure, especially in tandem with the Smog Singers and and Arc Survivor systems.

Pillar Card

Next up I'll cover the new Pillar Card of Troubadour Troupe. Pillar Cards are a future proofed element of the game that is intended to be fully released in Campaigns of Death. They are being released in advance in the same way that Seed Patterns were released, so at the moment they represent something you simply add to your campaign by choice. Eventually they'll be a part of a randomised campaign set up system, but I can't comment much more on that until I get to play with the product.

This Pillar Card is very simple, it adds the Innovation Band to the potential innovation pool and this is that card.

Band offers us two abilities, the passive one improves the already excellent Synchronized Strike Secret Fighting Art by providing a reroll on a wound attempt for the cost of 1 survival. That's a nice bonus on top of an already excellent combat tool.

The activated ability of Concert Tour is offering us +1 Movement Token for departing with 2+ Instruments. As much as I love Instruments, I'm only using this for Nemesis Showdowns when playing “strictly official” for the reasons I've already covered. It is however a great bonus, movement is one of the two most powerful attributes in the game alongside luck, and again this is providing a token so Digestion II gets another nod here.

It also places the Band Consequences into the innovation deck when it is innovated, so to complete the puzzle we'll look at those. These are a new kind of innovation in that they are two mutually exclusive cards.

As you can see from the text, once you innovate one of these two, the other once is removed from the campaign permanently. They also both offer +1 Survival Limit, which is solid for a fourth tech tier innovation (Music → Forbidden Dance → Band → Concerto/Symphony).

The place where these differ is in how they improve Synchronized Strike, Concerto providing a +1 Luck Token for the survivors that first use Synchronized Strike. The way this works is that one survivor can gain +1 luck token when they make the Synch Strike attack as long as no-one else has any luck tokens. They can do this again if a different survivor acts as their attack assist, and can repeat that until all of the other Synch Strike survivors have been the attack assist. That means one can get between +1 and +4 Luck Tokens on one survivor as long as no-one else has any. We'll come back to this in a moment after we look at Symphony.

Symphony on the other hand gives the Synchronised Strikers +1 Survival Each once per round. This can be repeated for the entire showdown. It's very simple and the wording here is a lot cleaner. It's just free survival once per round as long as you can set up for the strike.

Synchronized Strike is already one of the strongest tools a settlement has easy, repeatable access to and it is a large part of why I rate Drums as one of the top picks for an innovation (Symposium is #1 but Paint, Inner Lantern and Drums are all very close behind). Synch Strike is not only powerful from the very start, but it gets stronger when you have Forbidden Dance and the Heart Flute also innovated. I can't recommend using Synch Strike enough to be honest.

As for our two Band Consequences, there is not a lot of competition between these two. While Symphony is repeatable and survival actions are strong, Luck dominates this game on a level that very little comes close to. If we have future campaigns where expending survival is something that has life or death consequences that create a constant drain every round then Symphony might change in value, but at the moment you should never pick it over Concerto unless by some chance you have nothing but luck/critical wound immune monsters in the campaign.

Strain Milestone, Blind Rocker and its Cannibalistic Kin

The Strain Milestone here in this box is a little too easily engineered. When I read the unlock condition for this card I immediately built a settlement that crafted the Whisker Harp, Rawhide Drums and a couple of Smog Singer instruments and then promptly lost to the Butcher, job done, next settlement, thank you for your service Drummer, Harper, Fluter and Percussion. I do already miss you because in my heart all I want is to play this game with instruments on every survivor.

Yeah, you can unlock this very easily by constructing four instruments via the Smog Singers and then throwing the showdown against a nemesis monster by having them stand there and play their instruments until they are killed. It's not a very good unlock condition if I'm honest, easily gamed for the “achievement” because it doesn't require those survivors to die on the hunt, they just need to have a gear grid with instruments in it and then go face the reaper's scythe.

What we get is the return of the promotional vermin resource the Blind Rocker. This was originally packaged with the Beta version of the Xmas Cockroach Queen and was associated with daggers/katars rather than music. This new version is more thematically appropriate and also has a fun extra twist in that when you perform music endeavours you gain +1 survival, however each time you do this there's a 1% chance that the Blind Rocker will be eaten by the Discord Cricket. This new Strange Resource provides a new Crafting Pattern in the Resonance Headset and also prevents any future Music endeavors. If you want to get rid of a Discord Cricket then you'll have to lose 1d5 population to do so.

This entire affair seems to be a fun, gentle little poke at Discord communities that I found delightful. Someone interacting with an online community can benefit (+1 survival) but there is a chance that doing so may bring in negative attention (that 10% chance of the Discord Cricket arriving). Once that Cricket is there, it is shutting down the positive interactions and can only be removed at a cost. I've seen this pattern happen many times in different discords because in most of them I'm just a lurker who reads rather than posts and that's why I read this as a little fun parody. However it's also just really perfect if you look at the in universe effects. The Blind Rockers draw the attention of a strain aberration that devours all of the normal ones before causing problems with the settlement. It's almost a analogy of how the Vignette monsters work and I am here for it. I think all of this is great and it is absolutely an improvement over the original Blind Rocker design.

Crafting Cost: 1x Discord Cricket, 4x Black Lichen, 1x Perfect Organ, 2x Bone

Crafting Requirements: Heart Flute

This gear card, which we are limited to just one copy of, allows us to dispose of our first Discord Cricket by turning it into a gear card. This gear is fragile, meaning that Vibration Damage and other sources may cause it to get archived (that's not very musical of you headset), but Fragile is not a keyword we worry about except for not taking it against Vibration Damage monsters.

The gear card itself makes you deaf (synergies with character cards above) and also provides Tempo Tokens. These tokens are a generic tracker that activates the puzzle affinity ability. Once we reach 4+ Tempo Tokens we get double our normal activations and movements. This is really strong even if building up those tempo tokens might take a few rounds to get there due to how we need flow steps on AI cards to generate them in the first place. We can influence this a bit with AI control, but if a monster doesn't have multiple flow steps on its cards, there's no way to generate more. This is a fair limiter on what is very strong.

Once it is active, as long as we're not knocked down we have basically two “acts” per round, we can use a cumbersome weapon twice, we can move backwards to get in position for a monster based movement attack ability (Leap, Pounce, Charge etc). It's very strong and incredibly flexible, which is reflected by the difficulty in unlocking this in the first place and the high crafting cost + fragile and knocked down drawbacks.

Ambience Knowledges

Our final module in this box is the new CC 23 Reward Card and its linked Ambience Knowledges. If Feasting Songs is our CC 23 Reward Card (CC 23 is a new number which has not been used until this date, please let me know if I've missed a CC 23 unlock, I did check my own copies of the game and couldn't find one). This gives us a new kind of Knowledge card, the Ambience Knowledge.

To explain how these work I'll paraphrase the new rules. When an Ambience Knowledge card is gained by a survivor during the settlement phase it is shared at the forum instead of being recorded on their record sheet, as long as it is shared at the forum (which also happens if you draw it from the Knowledge deck when setting up the shared knowledge each lantern year) you can make use of its lingering effects, the same way that settlement event cards sometimes have lingering effects you can use that lantern year.

If knowledge cards are drawn by survivors outside of the settlement phase then they are discarded and a new knowledge is drawn.

These are our three new Ambience Knowledges and the simple fact is they're all interesting though how good they are varies a lot, Ardent Soundscape is probably the weakest of these because four endeavours is a lot to spend giving two survivors +1 Permanent Strength each, I think this could have been two or three endeavours and it would still not be broken. That high cost makes it more usable for settlements with plenty of Tinkers and Collective Toil, outside of that I'd need specific goals for the strength bonuses to be grabbing them. It's good, but a bit overpriced.

Dueling Soundscape is a very exciting and rich knowledge that allows us to spend four lumi from at least two different survivors to have them all take part in a musical duel of some kind (if you don't have instruments it's probably slam poetry, rap or some other form of vocal duelling). Everyone rolls and the winner gets +1 weapon proficiency. Weapon Proficiency is super desirable and something worth paying 4 lumi for, the best way to handle this is by having the two most important proficiency survivors being involved in the duel (Fist & Tooth, Shield, Spear, Bow etc etc) so you get an advancement on something you are actively working towards.

Elegant Soundscape is another Luck based boost, it's +1 luck token to all departing survivors this lantern year. That is really strong, Luck is already something that breaks monsters in half so often. We get more of it here and don't even need to pay any endeavours or lumi for it. This one might actually be a bit too strong, especially with... and say it with me...

Digestion II.

I think the power balance on these three cards is a little off, Ardent is a smidgen too expensive while Elegant is too “free”. I think that Team Death are still not quite evaluating the power level imbalance between Strength and Luck at the level they should be. If Elegant Soundscape required that Four Endeavour cost for the +1 Luck Tokens in the lantern, I would still be assessing it as being very strong, that is how powerful I think it is in comparison to the others. Regardless, if you use these responsibly, or you get a kick out of absolutely folding the game in half with shenanigans, there's a lot to like here.

Also someone tell me how that settlement depicted in the Dueling Soundscape has two Saxes. We're limited to just one per settlement. It's not fair!

Final Thoughts

While I am very disappointed this boxed set did not address the Pattern shortfall in the Screaming God, that is not a fault that can be levelled at this box directly. Survivors of Death 3 offers a wide range of fresh, exciting and engaging mechanics that add new things to the game while also being evocative and open to exploration. There's a lot of things you can potentially combine with other elements of a settlement to generate new combos and being tied to music and encouragement means this box will continue to throw out new delightful synergies with future releases as it's interacting with core mechanics from the base game.

It's just a shame that the old curmudgeon worm always has to have an influence over things like this. What do you have against Jazz Kingdom Death?

This one is an easy recommended, especially if you have the Gambler's Chest or are planning to get it soon so you can make use of those Knowledges and/or you have the Screaming God Expansion and want showcase how good the Screaming God showdown is to people who've not played the game before.