Set A Watch: Doomed Run (see above) took over my life and my game table (see below) for 10 days in late April 2024.

For those of you who don’t know, Set A Watch: Doomed Run is a campaign game set in the Set A Watch universe from Rock Manor games.   If you don’t know what Set A Watch is, check out our reviews of the three standalone games: Set A Watch (see link here), Set A Watch: Swords of the Coin (see link here), and Set A Watch: Forbidden Isles  (see link here).  The summary: Set A Watch is a cooperative dice-placement game set in a fantasy universe.  Four characters work together to travel home, fighting monsters along the way.

The original Kickstarter that introduced us to the Set A Watch universe was way back in September of 2018: See above.

The most recent Kickstarter (above) introduced us to two products: the standalone expansion Set A Watch: Forbidden Isles and the campaign version of this game called Set A Watch: Doomed Run.  We reviewed Set A Watch: Forbidden Isles about a month ago (see our review here).

After a very long (but fun) 10 days, we were able to play through all of the entire campaign of Set A Watch: Doomed Run.  Let’s take a look below!

Unboxing

Set A Watch: Doomed Run is a pretty big box: see Coke can above for scale. The box is definitely taller than the soda can!

Right when you open the box, there’s a little pamphlet telling you how to organize everything: we’ll come back this later …

In the top section of the box is the game board, the rulebook, the board, some extra characters, and a Foreteller: Doomed Run advertisement.  Foreteller is an app that will use professional actors to read parts of the story to you … but you must buy it separately!

The original Set A Watch game(s) are self-contained with fairly small boxes where the board is the wrap-around board: see above.  

The box here for Doomed Run is huge, so there’s no wrap-around board! The board just comes in the box: see below.  But basically, the board is the same: it’s the dice placement board where the player who “stays back” chooses his actions.

Most of the box is surprisingly empty:

“Wait, how much did I just pay for an almost empty box???”  Well, there’s two answers to that question …

First, there’s some content hidden under the top plastic divider!

This is a campaign game!  Each stage of the campaign has extra cards packed into the appropriate Realm envelope: see above.

There’s some new locations, some new creatures, some new Unhallowed, some new ability cards, a few new summons, some new dice, and some dividers: see above!  There’s more than you think in here … and at the same time, there’s not.  What do we mean by that?

The Elephant In The Room

The elephant in the room is that you need to own all three standalone games Set A Watch, Set A Watch: Swords of the Coin, and Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles (and the Outriders small expansion) in order to play Doomed Run!  See above. That’s right, you have to love this game enough to have bought all the content available!

The Doomed Run campaign pulls content from every single expansion over the course of the campaign!! See above: I have each expansion separated out so I can pull the appropriate cards.

For example: take a look at the rulebook above! It describes all the cards you need for Realm 1 (the first act of the campaign).  The cards needed for Realm 1 are taken from the four expansions AND the Doomed Run box!

That’s why the Doomed Run box is so empty! They want you to store ALL OF YOUR EXPANSIONS in it!!  Again, we will discuss this more later …

Rulebook

The Doomed Run rulebook is good.

I think the Doomed Run rulebook may get the best score on The Chair Test we’ve seen in some time!  It’s an A!!! It fits perfectly on the chair next to me, the rulebook stays open, the font is big enough to read, and it’s a good font!   It would probably get an A+ on the Chair Test if there were a few more pictures and it had a slightly bigger font!

The components page is well-marked: it does suffer from a lot of the cards being the envelopes, so you can’t pull all the cards out and “correlate them”! But the label at the top of the page clearly says “..some components listed here are separated and stored within the Realm envelopes in the box….”  At least they show what the components look like!

The Set-Up spans 4 pages (!), but it does show a nice picture you can use.  Part of the extra pages are needed because … this is a campaign game!  This is significantly harder to set-up Doomed Run than the plain vanilla version of Set A Watch.

There’s discussions about winning and losing and saving the game …

Some save sheets:

But the most important thing is that the rulebook has the list of the cards needed for each of the 7 Realms (each Realm is an act of the campaign): See an example of Realm 7 list below. Note that each Realm has some flavor text on the left, with the cards needed on the right.

There is a no index (boo), but there is a Glossary (yay: see above).

The rulebook ends with a record of how you did in each Realm!

Overall, this rulebook was pretty good: A solid A on the Chair Test, good components, good set-up, readable font, and fair number of pictures. 

My only complaints are more rules themselves: they could have been a little better!  For example, I know that I read that Mythic Items don’t get discarded between realms, but I went absolutely spare trying to find the rule!  You’d think it would be listed under Mythic Items section, yes? Or under the Set-Up?  Only in Ending A Realm, a sentence says “Any Adventures not selected as the Warden must discard all their non-Mythic items”.   I would have tried to be clearer! It’s okay to repeat yourself to make rules clearer! I would have:

• (a) said this in a positive way: “Adventurers keep all Mythic Items between Realms, but return all non-Mythic items to the Items deck“
• (b) reiterated this rule in the Mythic Items section
• (c) made space on the Doomed Run historical record as a place to record each character’s Mythic Items (as they have space for all the Warden’s items).    To be fair, the Mythic Items are listed on the Save Sheet  Expeditions page, but it’s not clear that you keep them … and in fact, I never used the Save Sheet Expeditions page! I played through each Realm in one sitting, so I never used them!
• (d) put this in a FAQ (see below)

As the campaign went on, there were several times when we had questions:  a FAQ (that we’ve seen in the previous Set A Watch rulebooks) might have been nice.  

So, the rulebook could have used a little more work.  A FAQ and a few reiterations would have been helpful.  So, the rulebook was good … it could have been great.

New Idea: Side Quests

There’s now Side Quests: at the start of every Expedition, players choose of one of 3 Side Quests to take!  See above for three samples Side Quests!  Basically, player take one, trash one, and put the third away.  Now, these Side Quests aren’t little adventures that take time away from the game: they are just cards with a cost and a reward!  The cost is pretty varied, but the reward is almost always either (a) a new Character to add to the party (b) a Mythic Item.

For example: if you want to get the Healing Staff (above) for the Cleric (so worth it!), you have to exhaust 3 ability cards!  This is another place where the rulebook doesn’t do a good job explaining!  Do you pay the cost immediately?  Do you pay it as you play?  Do you get the reward immediately after you pay the cost?  Or do you get the reward at the end?  This was poorly specified in the rulebook.  We played so that we “generally” payed the cost at the start of the Expedition and got the Reward at the end;  it was unclear.

Still, the Side Quest idea was cool: it made the players talk and strategize about the directions of the party: what do they want to focus on?  The new characters are important, as they shape the direction of your campaign: you need diversity for new Wardens!  You also really need new characters for sheer numbers: your characters can die the campaign, so you need to always have four characters available or you immediately lose!

New Idea: Wardens

At the start of every Realm (after the first), the players can choose one character to become a Warden and watch the Kingdom!  There are two major benefits to choosing a character to be a Warden: 

1. Each Warden offers a special good effect at the start of the Realm
2. A Warden keeps all of his items (both Mythic and non-Mythic) between Realms, whereas most characters can only keep the Mythic items (the non-Mythics go back to the item deck).  (See what I did there?  I repeated information to make it clearer).

For example, the Cleric (above), when he becomes a Warden makes it so the characters start with all abilities refreshed!  (Usually, each player starts the Realm with one ability exhausted). 

You can see on the Record above that the Cleric got the Healing Staff (so good!), as well as two other items.  In my campaign, the Cleric was the Warden for Realm 2, which allowed the players to start fully healed!  See below.

The only problem is that the character who is currently stands as a Warden CANNOT PLAY the current Realm!  They can play later Realms (and come back with all their stuff), and indeed, the Cleric came back in my final Realm (spoiler alert!).

The Warden idea was really nice: it forced players to have a new character sit out every Realm and add a new character in!  New characters were slowly cycled in and out over the whole campaign!  It kept the campaign fresh!!! Over the coarse of 7 Realms, I got to play 4 + (7-1) = 10 characters! I’d keep three of the same characters as I moved from Realm to Realm (for consistency, since I had just played them and wanted to keep their play style active in  my cache), but I would add a new character in at every Realm!  

I really liked how the Warden system gave you a reason to keep cycling in new characters into the campaign!  This was a very cool mechanism to force new blood!

New Idea: Nemesis

You might also notice the Cleric has a Nemesis notated on his Warden card: the Sewer Ghoul!  See above.  What does that mean?

This means that, whenever the Cleric is one of the four characters in play (not a Warden), the Sewer Ghoul must be shuffled into the Creature deck!  In other words, it makes the game a little harder by having more creatures! The Nemesis seems to specifically targeted to the character and his powers!  For example, the Cleric has can simply Cleanse Undead to get rid of the Sewer Ghouls if they show up …

The Nemesis idea worked okay: I think they are mostly to help balance the game a little.  For example:  The Warrior Nemesis is needed to keep the big dice of the Warrior under control … see below.

The Enraged Farmer Nemesis (above) is pretty hefty! But the Warrior is a heavy-hitting character, so it helps balance out the Creatures so they are more balanced with the characters.

The Nemesis idea worked, but the idea made the game slightly more fiddly; I had to go hunting for the cards many times (“Oops! I forgot the Nemesis!“)! Since each character has a unique Nemesis, there is some looking around.

At least the Warden card tells you which game the Nemesis comes from!  The little scarab next to the Nemesis name means Doomed Run: see above.

The Nemesis idea was slightly annoying to remember to seed the Creature deck, but it did seem to work.

New Idea: Mythic Items

We’ve mentioned Mythic Items several times previously during this review: they can only be obtained as a Reward from a Side Quest: see above.

As we said, Mythic Items persist between Realms, so it’s really great to get them if you can!  Unfortunately, only the character listed on the Item can use it!  The Healing Staff? Only the Cleric can use it!  

There’s exactly one Mythic Item for each character.  But, I think Mythic Items are probably my favorite new part of the game?!?!  They felt so cool! When a character finally got their Mythic Item, they felt so cool and powerful!!

The only problem with Mythic Items: It was a bit of a crapshoot when choosing Side Quests though: Don’t you always want the Mythic Item?  Only if you had or had a chance of getting the character who can use it!  If you have already “thrown away” the Ranger, you don’t want to Side Quest for the Multiplying Arrow … no one can ever use it! (Although, every Mythic Item counts for points towards your final score).    The Side Quest mechanism really did make these Mythic Items feel precious … and when you got them!  Wowiee!!! So cool!  

Mythic Items were very thematic and fun: they were my favorite part of the game.  The Mythic Items reminded me of old games of Dungeons and Dragons when your Paladin got the +5 Holy Sword!  It felt so cool!

New Idea: Game Break

The base game of Set A Watch is about an hour of playtime: players have 9 Locations to get through, and it moves along quickly.  In Doomed Watch, however, each Realm is a little longer than the base game! Each Doomed Watch Realm has about 12-15 Locations (depending on where you are in the campaign), with later Realms being longer.  The new notion of a Game Break comes after 4 Locations!

The Game Break seemed to do a bunch of things: 

1. Keep the coins from accumulating too much
2. Cycle Side Quests in and out quickly so you see more of them
3. Keep the Creature deck “fresh”

 The Game Break is also a natural save point for the game: since the Realms are longer runs, this gives the players a natural place to save the game if needed.  The rulebook has some pages for saving (see below), or you can download some sheets from the Rock Manor website.

I never used the Save Sheet (above) because I always saved games between Realms, never at a Game Break.

To be clear: each Realm in the Doomed Watch campaign is longer than a base game of Set A Watch.  Over the course of the campaign, I saw Realms take about 2 to 3 hours.  The Game Break helps add more “save points” to the game.

Doomed Run Campaign

My Doomed Run campaign took place over 10 days.  I played about one Realm a day (skipping a few days here and because of work): the earlier Realms were about 2 hours apiece, but the later Realms became longer and longer.  I think the final Realm (Realm 7) was 3 hours of playtime.

To emphasize, that’s 2-3 hours of playtime!  The set-up and tear-down for each Realm was also pretty hefty! I think it’d take upwards of 45 minutes to set-up and 20 minutes to tear-down.  The issue is that you have to put cards back in the appropriate place!  

Each card in the game is marked with where it comes from on the lower right of the card, mostly.  Each Realm tells you where to get the cards from: see below for Realm 2.

After the game was over, I would spend some time putting cards back where they belong during tear-down so I could find them again.

To summarize, each Realm was about 30-40 minutes of Set-Up, 2-3 hours of gameplay, and 20 minutes of teardown.  I think my final Realm was a 4 hour game: 40 minutes of set-up, 3 hours of play, and 20 minutes of tear-down.  Whew!  There was a lot of overhead in setting up and tearing down games.

But Was It Fun?

Yes! It was fun!  I love the Set A Watch system!  The newer ideas of Wardens, Side Quests, Mythic Items really helped evolve the game! There were new things to think about, new ways to strategize, and just more decisions.  I don’t think I would played through all 7 Realms unless I was having fun!  I really do like this game!  I really feel involved at every step of the game, and the strategies of choosing Side Quests, characters to play, Items to buy, who to watch the fire, when to cull the Horde, when to cull the Unhallowed, and so many other things … keep the game from just being a “roll dice and kill things” game.   

I’ve said it before: I like that dice can be used for their value AND/OR to activate character abilities!  If you have a good roll, you can straight up do great damage! But, even bad rolls can be useful when you activate abilities!

Solo And Cooperative

The majority of the Doomed Run I played solo: this means I ran four characters at the same time.  I admit, when I first encountered that “you must play four characters” for the solo game back in the original Set A Watch, I was a little turned off!  The typical problems of context switching and game elongation rear their ugly head, but I’ve since grown to love the solo game.  I love to think and contemplate, so even if the solo game takes twice as long as the multi-player cooperative game, that’s okay! I like the puzzle it presents!  What’s the best way to use the three characters on watch?  It’s so much fun to reason that out!

However, I was able to slot in two 2-Player games during the campaign!  Teresa filled in for Realm 4 (see above) and did a great job!

And Sam filled in for Realm 6!  See above.  The two-player games just mean we play 2 characters each, but we still have fun communicating and strategizing together!  In fact, I was worried Sam wouldn’t have fun with the Merchant character (see above), but he ended up having a great time!

It was VERY EASY to put new players in and out of the game!  If some player doesn’t make it one week, or someone else comes, it’s still really easy to just slot them in to the game!  Since new characters are cycling in and out all the times (partly because of the Warden idea), it’s much easier to slide new players in and out!  Honestly, that makes this an easier campaign game to get to the table!  Your group can change every week during a campaign of Doomed Run, and everyone would still have fun playing!  

So, Doomed Run is a campaign where you can play both solo and cooperatively, changing the player makeup every game!  

Theme or No Theme?

Is there a lot of theme here? Yes and no.  When you are playing a Realm, it feels very thematic! This Realm has been built to have Goblins, or Undead, or some other theme to it.  The game, when you are playing, feels very thematic as monsters come out and you have to deal with them!  

BUT … the Doomed Run campaign itself, wasn’t particularly thematic.  There’s some flavor text at the start of the Realm that sets the stage … and that’s about it.  It doesn’t feel like the Reams are particularly connected.   The Doomed Run idea is great: it’s an excuse to play all the Set A Watch content!  But did I ever feel like I was playing through an integrated campaign with twists and turns? Nah. 

The upside of the campaign being less-than-thematic means that it’s easier to bring in cycle in new players and characters (see the Solo and Cooperative section above).  It also means you don’t really need to buy the Foreteller text for this: really, it doesn’t look worth it!  The only thing it will do is read is the little blurb at the start of each Realm … which you can do in 2 minutes. And like I said, eh, it wasn’t that thematic.

When you are playing, the game is thematic and fun! But the theme and integration of the campaign is a whole isn’t really there.  If you are looking for a campaign with lots of play twists, theme, decisions, branching narrative … Doomed Run is not the game for you.  It’s still a fun game, but it’s just not particularly thematic overall.

Mixing and Matching

I really like Set A Watch: Doomed Run. But there are some things to be aware of.

First, you need to buy absolutely everything Rock Manor has made for Set A Watch to play the Doomed Run campaign: Set A Watch, Swords of the Coin, Forsaken Isles, The Outriders and Doomed Run itself!  That will be a non-starter for most people.

It’s hard to reset the campaign!  The Doomed Watch does NOT tell you what’s in each envelope! I think each envelope should have had a manifest, or at least labelled them!   

Bizzarely, the Side Quests were labelled appropriately! I could immediately tell the Poison Recipe Side Quest belonged back in envelope for Realm 7 because of the R7!!

Luckily, I was taking pictures (for this review) as I went, so I was able to piece what was in the envelopes, but the cards were not labelled!   It have been nice if the lower right of the card said DR1, for Doomed Run Realm, and DR2 for Doomed Run Realm 2, etc  … (just like they did for the Side Quests!!)  As you play, make sure you take pictures of what’s in the envelopes!

Although the Creatures, Unhallowed, and Locations are marked with which game they come from, it’s not clear some times!  There was no legend in the Doomed Run rulebook which explained all the symbols!  The flower symbol (on the Locations) above means Doomed Run, but which deck?  I don’t know!!

Even worse, the Items cards are completely unlabelled! I want to be able to separate all my decks out when I am done, but I can’t resort the items!  So, for my entire game, I only used the items from the Swords of the Coin deck!!! At least then, I knew which deck they went back to when I was done!  

The ability cards are unlabelled as well, but it’s not as big a deal as you can always figure out which box (or envelope … if you take pictures) the cards came from, as each Set A Watch lists the characters that come with it.

This seems like a big deal: I wish that Rock Manor had labelled the cards better.  It made it very difficult to reset your game.  I did it, but the pictures I took helped me.  If you decide to take the plunge, make sure you take pictures of what’s in each envelope!

Storage

The first thing in the pamphlet is the recommended storage: they want you to unpack all of your Set A Watch games and combine them in the Doomed Run box! Nope nope nope nope nope.

I want to keep my games separate!  The base game is so easy to pull out and play!  If you, all of a sudden, mix everything in one box, it muddies the experience!  When Set A Watch should be a quick game to set-up, play, and tear-down, putting everything in the Doomed Watch will make this so much harder to bring to the table.  The base game is small and approachable.  The Doomed Run box is daunting. If I ever want my friends to play Set A Watch again … the games have to stay separated!!

In the end, I opened up and placed all the Set A Watch games on my table, visually separated so I could easily correlate which games held which content!  See above!! I hated the idea of combining all my games into one box (especially since cards like the Items are unseparable and unlabelled)!  So, I played with one half of my table taken up.  It worked for me, but you may not have the space to try this solution.

It turns out you can have your cake and eat it too … you can actually store all 3 Set A Watch boxes (and the Outriders expansion) in the Doomed Run box without separating the games out! See above!  Basically, the games slotted into the big bay on the left (see above).

So, I can store all my Set A Watch together, but not have the terrible terrible consequences of combining everything!  That’s a win in my book. 

My recommendation: do not separate the games out.

Conclusion

It’s hard to recommend Set A Watch: Doomed Run.  You have to buy four expansions and the Doomed Run box to even play this!  Yet, over 10 days in April 2024, I had a blast playing through this campaign!  It’s rare that I get so excited that I want to play a campaign this long, but I love the Set A Watch cooperative dice-placement system so much that I couldn’t stop playing!

This campaign is unique because you can easily combine solo and cooperative play through out the campaign!  The Warden system encourages cycling characters in and out, which makes it easy to cycle in new players as well!   Although this cycling is a great feature, it partly comes from the overall campaign being fairly athematic: it’s easy to cycle in new players and characters partly because there is no theme connecting the acts of the campaign.  Be aware: Doomed Run isn’t a deep, thoughtful campaign with lots of twists and turns!  Doomed Run is really just an excuse to play through all the content of this game system.

If you find yourself intrigued by this campaign, pick up any of the Set A Watch base games and make sure you like it! If you find yourself wanting more, you can always get more expansions … and if, like me, you find yourself loving the Set A Watch gameplay, maybe the Doomed Run campaign makes sense to get. You just gotta get all the content!!

Doomed Run made my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024!  And I am happy that I got it!  It will probably make my Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2024 this year! I had a blast playing it this year, and I expect I will play through it again in the future.