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!

I won’t go into too much depth on the contents of the Flower Knight expansion, since you can watch my video for that!  It is one of the smaller expansions, the primary component being the the Flower Knight itself.  It also included a few other plastic pieces to represent the various gear that you can craft via resources acquired by fighting and defeating the Knight, including some nice helmets mimicking its owl-like visage, some neat little rapiers/foils, and even a little cello!  Otherwise, it contains all the cards and rules to use the Knight in new campaigns, as well as current ones.  The printing for everything is very nice, alive with color and illustrations.  I would note that the rulebook is printed on a semi-glossy paper that acquires fingerprints incredibly easily, ones that cannot be rubbed off, a minor criticism for an otherwise excellent box.

The Flower Knight assembled in all its glory, including a plethora of vines and a butterfly! 

If you here, you are likely here to hear about the model, so I will not keep you on edge.  The Flower Knight is excellent.  The cast and sprue cut points are very good, rivaling those seen in the boxed game itself.  While the base game’s models were quite nice, some had rather shallow shallow detail and, more annoyingly, did not always fit together well, often leaving unsightly gaps.  None of these were issues for the Flower Knight.  The detail is crisp and the seamlines are in easy to reach areas, allowing the clean-up process to be quite short.  And while I did use green stuff to fill in a few gaps, they were all minor, ones that could have easily been ignored, without detracting from the model as a whole.  If all of the expansions are this well crafted, they will be a joy to work with.  Now I just need to get the campaign going again; the expansion adds a new event introducing the Knight during the next Lantern Year…

I mentioned earlier that I got a copy of the Black Knight, one of Kingdom Death’s newest resin collector's series miniatures.  When the model was released, I figured it would make a good additon to our slowly increasing collection of resin Knights, including the Storm and Gold Smoke Knights.  I also did an unboxing video of the Black Knight; it is a very simple kit, containing a few art cards (and a numbered certificate), and the resin model itself.  The model has very few pieces; the sword is separate, as well as his one leg, and there are also a few small detail pieces for his shoulderpads and helmet.  Otherwise, the rest of the model is just a single large piece of solid resin.  I was amazed at how nicely this body piece was cast.  Aside from some minor moldlines and bubbles along the bottom of the cape, the cast as almost perfect.  The other pieces were not quite as nice, but were still easy to clean up with some trimming and green stuff.  The Kingdom Death resin is more brittle than Forge World resin, but it did not prevent me from using a heatgun to straighten out his sword and slightly reposition his foot.  All told, the Black Knight was very quick to assemble.

The Black Knight is quite an interesting model, with a very bulky and imposing torso, yet very slender legs.

The Black Knight is huge, towering above the Flower Knight.

The Flower Knight proved an excellent way to get me excited about starting up the Kingdom Death campaign again.  All the colorful intriguing components and the quick assembly of the model were very much welcome.  Now maybe I will try to assemble that Phoenix model that I have been putting off, ha ha (all those little hands…)...  On second thought, I have more shiny new expansions to explore.  The Slenderman expansion is darkly enticing. Regardless, expect to see some more Kingdom Death content on the blog in the near future!

- Eric Wier