I love Set A Watch! The Set A Watch system is a cooperative dice-placement/selection system for 1-4 players and plays pretty quickly in 60 minutes. The original Set A Watch came out in 2019 (see our original review here) from a Kickstarter: see the box cover below.

We loved the original Set A Watch so much it made the Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2019 and our Top 10 Cooperative Dice Games! This is a cooperative game we could bring to game groups … and both lighter and harder gamers seemed to like it! See box above.

Then, the Set A Watch people (Rock Manor Games) had another Kickstarter for Set A Watch: Swords of the Coin. See above. It arrived at my house in 2021 and was in my Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2021! Set A Watch: Swords of the Coin is a standalone expansion which you can combine with the original Set A Watch or play by itself! It makes the game slighly more complex (but with slightly more options) by offering a coin system that allows you to buy items! See below.

Now, what we’re talking about is the latest in this line! Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles is the latest standalone expansion in the Set A Watch world! This was on Kickstarter and our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024! It arrived at my house very early April 2024 and I was so excited!

This Kickstarter actually had two things it delivered: the standalone Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles and Set A Watch: Doomed Run.  We hope to talk about Doomed Run in a few weeks: it’s a big campaign!

Let’s see what comes in the Deluxe Edition of Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles!

Unboxing and Gameplay

Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles is a pretty small game box: see Coke can above for reference.

There’s a surprising amount of stuff that fits in the box, considering how small it is!

To be clear, the cover/magnetic clasp of the box is part of the board used in the game.

This is first and foremost a cooperative dice placement/action selection game: the dice take center stage in this game   The dice are well-labelled and easy to read (especially compared to the first edition where the dice weren’t quite as nice).

There must always be four characters in play: the players select four from the six above.

Each character gets 3 dice: which ones?  These are clearly notated on the top of the character! Note that the Golem gets the 3 12-sided dice (see above and below).

Each character also starts with 3 of the 5 ability cards in play (with 1 starting disabled).  During the game, players can swap out their abilities for different ones.

Like we said, there must always be 4 characters in play!  See above as each character has their dice and abilities (with the extra abilities in the wings).

This game has an interesting decision to be made every turn: one player must stay back and watch the fire while the rest of the group ventures out to fight the baddies!  Each character must stay back twice, as indicated by the little camp tokens above (1 for first time, 2 for second time).

So, one character will do “campfire duty”, stoking the fire, checking the maps and a variety of actions: basically the board serves as the dice placement portion in the campfire phase (see below).

The rest of the characters go out and fight the line of creatures!

The dice can be used for their value to straight-up defeat a monster, or a dice can be placed on an ability to invoke it.  See as the Sorceress uses a d8 for Rekindle ability above.

Note you can only see a few of the monsters in line: it depends on the level of the fire.

After you (hopefully) defeat all the monsters in line, you travel to the next location!

To win, you need to make it to the final location!  There are 9 locations in total, where the very last location has everyone fighting the final line of monsters!

Rulebook

The rulebook is pretty good.

It gets about a B on the chair test: the font is pretty good sized, and I can see it on the chair next to me, but I have to either hold it open (see above) or I have to bend it back so it stays (see below).

I don’t love having to break the spine of the rulebook to keep it open: it feels “wrong” to have manually fold so hard!

In general, this rulebook is pretty good.  They have pictures when needed for set-up and components.

And I used the back of the rulebook for the Round Overview quite a bit.

Good rulebook, but I should hope so: they’ve had three chances to perfect it!

Other Touches

There’s a lot of other nice touches in the game: like Set A Watch: Swords of the Coin, players (as a group) can accumulate coin to allow them to buy useful stuff.  Take a look at our review of Set A Watch: Swords of the Coin for more info about the coin/merchant mechanism!  It’s basically the same idea here.

The new idea in this version of the game is the Doom Tokens: they sound more complicated than they are! If you get 4 Doom Tokens, you really just put stuff into the Horde and bring out Unhallowed a little quicker.  It’s just slightly more fiddly.

Solo Play

Just like Set A Watch (the original) and Set A Watch: Swords of the Coin, in order to play solo, the solo character must play 4 characters!  See above! (So it does follow Saunders’ Law: there is a viable solo mode)

I think I was more cautious about the solo game having four characters in my earlier reviews, but after playing through this game for years, I think it is a great way to play.

Although nominally the game takes 60 minutes to play, I found myself taking 90 – 120 minutes to play solo!  Why? Because each character is complicated and has a complicated set of abilities.  So, if you enjoy thinking a lot, trying to asses the situation with no one breathing down your neck, I think this is a great solo game!  Just be aware that the solo game will probably take 1.5-2x longer to play because there’s so much context switching between characters and abilties.

I think I have really warmed up the solo mode with 4 characters here in Set A Watch. But you have to understand that I have a lot of familiarity with the game after three iterations of it!  I still think the solo mode might be too much for the novice player coming into this … especially since Forsaken Isles is probably the most complex of the three Set A Watch games.

Cooperative Play

My group played the best way to play this cooperatively: 4 players, each with one character.  Honestly, that’s by the far the best way to play this cooperatively.  Each player plays their own character!! That’s usually the funnest way !

I will say that 3 players isn’t that bad in this game because one player must always stay behind to tend the fire anyways … that makes it so the three players can all fight the monsters together, each with their own character!  It does “rotate” the characters a little more, but it’s still very doable.

And it’s not  big deal to have two players operate two characters each.  After all, the solo player has to do four characters … what’s two after that???

There’s many ways this game promotes cooperation:

• The coin is shared, so player must decide as a group what to buy from the Merchant
• This game use Player Selected Turn Order (fine grained, see discussion of PSTO here) so that players must work together to discover the best order to use their actions!  “If Teresa goes first, she can take out the baddie at the front of the line! Then I can go!”  These decisions permeate every moment of the game and keep the players talking and engaged
• Players must decide, every turn, who stays back.  The game forces everyone to stay back twice, so everyone has stay back and mind the fire: who makes the most sense?  That’s an interesting discussion every turn!

Overall, this is a fantastic cooperative game.

Which One?

There are literally three standalone sets of Set A Watch: if I am interested in the game, which one do I get?  

• If you are a newer gamer, the original Set A Watch is probably the simplest, as it doesn’t have any of the newer mechanisms (like coin/merchant or doom tokens). 
• If you are a seasoned gamer, you can’t go wrong with either Swords of the Coin or Forsaken Isles: they both have a more mechanisms in the game (both have the coin/merchant), but nothing too overwhelming.  
• The latest, Forsaken Isles, is probably the most complex of the lot (because it has the Doom tokens), but honestly, it’s not really that much more.

Honestly, you can’t go wrong with any of them.

Conclusion

I love Set A Watch, and I am glad to see this new standalone expansion Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles!  It stands alone as a great game, or you can use the monsters and/or characters in here to expand any of your previous Set A Watch games!

The dice placement mechanism is unique and simple!  It’s easy to explain and tends to suffer less from randomness as the dice can be used for their number or to activate an ability!  Which is better: the number or the ability? You choose!

Even though I have grown to love the solo mode, I understand that a 4 character solo mode can be very daunting.  Once you embrace it (and double the length of the game), this can be a very satisfying puzzle for the solo player!

But I think Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles really shines as a 4-Player cooperative game (and to a lesser extent, 2 and 3 player).  The fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order, the decisions when to stay back, and the decisions when to buy all keep the players engaged as they play.

Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles gets 8.5/10.  I love this game: I’ll play it solo anytime! And I have had great luck with this game in my game groups!  People seem to enjoy the simplicity of the dice placement here.