Kingdom Death: Percival

The Black Knight towers over Percival.

After being in the works for years, nearly all of the Kingdom Death Kickstarter releases have been produced, and Adam Poots is working towards introducing new things to the game. For one thing, he has started to produce plastic versions of some of the older, limited resin kits.  While many of these are seedy pin-ups, one that stood out to me was a fully armored female knight, reminiscent to the Black Knight that I assembled earlier this year.  Along with being in plastic for the first time, this knight, Percival, came with a few cards to use her in Kingdom Death: Monster.  With these things in mind, I decided to purchase the model and put it together and wanted to let you all know what I think of her!

Kingdom Death Multi-part kit challenge: Bigbossredskullz Amazon

Amazon by Bigbossredskullz 

At the end of last year, we started the Kingdom Death Multi-part Kit Challenge to see what other hobbyists could do with the wealth of plastic pieces from the Kingdom Death boxed game. We were not overly impressed with the multi-part kits, but were confident that something special could come out of them given the proper talent. So, after building a single model from the kits, we sent them away.

Kingdom Death: Assembling the Black Knight and Flower Knight

The Forest wants what it wants.

Just as I was coming to terms with (and assemble!) all of the models and rules included with Kingdom Death: Monster, its creator Adam Poots started to ship out the game’s many expansions, each including a new monster along with the cards and rules necessary for using them in your ongoing campaigns!  Honestly, the Kickstarter was so long ago that I had forgotten what expansions that I had selected, but was pleasantly surprised to receive: the Flower Knight, Slenderman, the Dragon King, and the Dung Beetle Knight.  And while I have slowly been filming unboxing videos of each of these expansions, I thought that I would do a post talking about the assembly of the Flower Knight.  And for good measure, since I had been working on it at the time, I will show you the resin Black Knight too!

Kingdom Death: Multi-part kit challenge - Model complete

Born of strife...

As 2015 came to a close, we looked at the multipart Survivor models that came with the Kingdom Death boxed game.  We were not too thrilled with the models, their proportions, the level of detail, and cast quality were just not as good as many of the other single pose Kingdom Death models.  These considerations made us uncertain what we should do with the models; it just did not seem like it was worth our time and effort to try to assemble them.  We ended up deciding to make a single model out of all the sprues and then send the rest off to another hobbyist, with the hope that they will continue to pass the models around to other hobbyists to see what they could create with the parts.  The Muli-part of Death Project was born.  In the last post, we showed you the model that we came up with.  I found some time to start painting the model last month and am pleased to show you the finished model!

Kingdom Death multi-part kits: their place alongside the other KD models and miniature gaming as a whole

In addition to creating the single-pose starting survivors and the monsters for them to battle, one of the main drives of the Kingdom Death Kickstarter was to design multi-part plastic kits for creating new survivor models. After defeating each of the different monsters in the game, your survivors are able to craft new weapons and equipment with the remains of their slain foes. To represent this in model form, they created a range of different multi-part sets with different weapon options and armor types that could be crafted in the game (Rawhide armor, Leather armor, Lantern armor, White Lion armor, Phoenix armor, Unarmored). This system was designed to allow players to continually build new models of their survivors as they progress in the campaign.

Unboxing: Kingdom Death Monster

All 22lbs of Kingdom Death, inside a custom printed shipping box.

After almost 3 years of waiting, and becoming increasing frustrated with Kindgom Death’s portrayal of women in their Pin-up side project (which admittedly has not bearing on the game itself), I had almost resolved to just sell my copy of Kingdom Death when it arrived.  Upon receiving the box, I decided to give the game a chance, figuring I would likely never get the opportunity to see the game again, due to its impressive price tag ($400 retail, substantially higher than the Kickstarter price).  After spending some time with the game, going through the contents of the box and reading through the rules, I am happy to have decided to keep the game.  Not only does it have the highest production values of any boardgame that I have ever seen, it also treats its subject matter seriously, without any of the objectifying of women present in their pin-up line of models.  I thought people would appreciate seeing some pictures of what is in the box, to get a sense of the quality and to determine if it is something you are interested in.

Kingdom Death: Plastic or resin?

Just how well do the plastic Kingdom Death models stack up to the resin ones?

Before the Kickstarter campaign made Kingdom Death a common name amongst miniature wargamers, and before there were widespread claims of it having sexist aesthetic design choices, Kingdom Death was only a small collection of models and a vision of mind-numbing horror. A few years before the Kickstarter was launched, I saw their Forsaker model, with his frightening height, segmented armour, and antlered mask, and was captivated by the baroque design, one that seemed to be mimicking Kentaro Miura's masterwork graphic novel/manga series, Berserk. When they released their King’s Hand model, I was convinced that it was strongly influenced by Berserk. With the exposed brain design on the King’s Hand’s helmet, the creepy porcelain faces, and the grasping hands, I felt that I was looking at the spiritual successor to the horrific and unknowable evil that is the character Void of the God Hand from Berserk. This strong visual connection to one of my favorite graphic novel/manga series convinced me to try to get a few Kingdom Death models. This was before they started to experiment with casting their models in plastic (one of the primary goals of the eventual Kickstarter), so all their models were in extremely limited production runs  (~450 or fewer), making many models highly collectable and inaccessible to fans (you would find yourself continually checking back to their site and/or coolminiornot hoping to find the small window when the models were available). All of these models were hand cast in white resin, and came in a little cardboard collectors box, with a numbered certificate and art print. Recently, due to the success with their Kickstarter campaign, they were able to release a selection of their models in plastic. With the release of this kit (Pinups of Death - Hard Plastic Collection), I thought it would be a great time to look at some of their models, and examine the strengths and weaknesses of their resin and plastic models.