Full Campaign Playthough: A Review of Set A Watch: Doomed Run

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.

Set A Watch: a cooperative fighting game: protect the campfire!

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

IMG_3907 (1)

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:

Each Warden offers a special good effect at the start of the Realm
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:

Keep the coins from accumulating too much
Cycle Side Quests in and out quickly so you see more of them
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.

Groundhog Day Meets Murder? A Review of The Revenant Society

Screenshot from 2024-04-21 13-15-26

I picked up The Revenant Society from Kickstarter from March 2023, just about a year ago (it is late April 2024 at the time of this writing): see link here. This game seemed to be the unholy fusion of both a board game and a Role Playing Game (RPG). It has a core rules book, but also many supporting cards and tokens: see below.

What you see above is the pledge level The Revenant Society: Deluxe Box Set (for $75). There was also the option to just get just the core book in physical form ($40) or electronic PDF ($20). Anyone who has been following my blog for a while knows I prefer the physical copies, so I got the Deluxe Box Set (the exact one in the picture above).

What is The Revenant Society? The basic premise is that you have been murdered, but you are given a chance to come back as an undead creature to solve your murder! It many ways, it’s like Groundhog Day (the movie), as you repeat the same day over and over, hoping to find clues to lead you to your murderer! If you fail to solve your mystery after four days, you are stuck in the loop of your last day forever!

What a great premise! I was immediately drawn in and backed this.

The PDF delivered in late March 2024 (I have the PDF labelled as March 29th) from Drive Thru RPG. It has my name and my order number smeared on a number of pages, so don’t ask me to share this with you!

The physical copy of the box delivered in mid April 2024 (about April 16th).

This review is going to take a weird arc: we ended up playing the PDF version of the game in our first session, and then the physical version of the game in our second session! So, we’ll discuss how each sessions went: electronic PDF version vs physical version!

RPG or Board Game?

Is this more of an RPG or more of a board game? The little minis (above) and the cards (below) that come with the game offer some suggestion this has more than a little board game DNA.

After reading the rules and playing a few times, I can tell you this is 95% an RPG and 5% a board game! The boards that you use are “nice” for helping you keep track of events in the game, and the cards and tokens are useful like a board game, but at the end of the day, this is really an RPG!

The biggest clue that this is an RPG is that one player has to be the Dungeon Master (or DM) or Game Master (or GM): they are called the Fate Weaver! The Fate Weaver has to run the game for the other players, just like a GM would. A further clue is that this system is based on an RPG system called the Apocalypse: a lot of modern RPGs are “Powered by the Apocalypse“! So, this is really an RPG with just a touch of board game elements to keep track of a few things.

If you find yourself interested in this, be aware! This is really an RPG where one player (The Fate Weaver) will have to invest a lot of time learning and setting-up an adventure for this friends: this is not really a board game.

Session 0: Getting Ready

So, I ended up being the Fate Weaver and picking an adventure to run: this means I had to do a lot of reading and set-up to get ready! The core Revenant Society rulebook comes with six scenarios, and another expansion PDF (that comes with the deluxe version) another four scenarios. The game is set in either Paris France 1910s or New York City USA 1920s: about half the scenarios are in Paris (see map below), and the other half in New York.

Since the deluxe version hadn’t arrived yet, I made due with using the PDF version. This means I had to print out a lot of stuff to hand out to my players! See below all the stuff I have to print out!

Probably half the stuff I printed you didn’t need: some of it I wasn’t sure, so I printed it, and the other half you can just show the players some pages from the rulebook on your PDF. But you still need to print a awful lot of stuff! Luckily, this is ALL IN THE PDF RULEBOOK!! You just have to print the appropriate pages (near the end of the book).

Over the course of about four days, I read the rulebook a couple of times (it’s like 284 pages, but most of that page count is scenarios at the back of the book/print-outs); I tried to figure out what I needed to print.

I ended up using a paper cutter (see above) to help with some of that.

After reading the rules, re-reading the rules, choosing a scenario, and printing everything I needed, I felt ready to run the game.

Session 1: Paris Scenario: The Petals of Belladona

Like most RPGS, each player needs to create a character to run through the scenario. There are six basic archetypes in the game (one is “The Glamorous”: see above): each player chooses one and expounds on that basic framework to create a more personalized character.

So, my friends and I met for the first session. I had planned to “just” create the characters and explain the game! I “expected” that to last 2 hours, but it went very quickly! We got the characters created and got the the gist of the game in 45 minutes. So, GULP! We just jumped right in!

I think the reason it went so well was because I had spent a lot of time preparing, so I didn’t have to lookup too much stuff as we played! Don’t get me wrong: I still had to make up a lot of stuff as we played … which is typical: most Dungeon Master/Game Master have to be creative and make up stuff to respond to their players.

In the end, we made it through Loop 1 (where we uncovered a lot of the story) and ended with a dramatic reveal! This was all by the seat of my pants, but I think it went well.

Even though we had cheesy cut-out components, it actually worked pretty well. Again, it was probably because I over-prepared so I think I knew everything we would need.

We liked the game enough to want to play again! So, we looked at our schedules and decided to try again in two weeks!

Meanwhile …

While we were waiting to meet again, the physical copy came in the mail!

Instead of cheesy cut-outs, we now have real tokens! Real cards! Real boards! Real dice! And dry-erase boards to boot!

Probably the most exciting piece was the physical copy of the core book! See above and below!

I took a picture with a can of Coke to show how thick the book actually was! It’s a big boy!

In fact, I was worried about stripping the binding, so I made sure to open it and slowly open parts of the book so the binding would get some equal wear and tear as I opened it. We used to do this to all our AD&D books growing up … it keeps the binding fit!

So rather than a sheet of memories (used to generate content) like above from the PDF …

We get a full deck of cards from the physical edition! See above.

Instead of cheesy cut-outs (like above) …

We get plastic minis!

On the left, you see all the things I printed from the PDF … and on the right, you see the physical components.

A bit of a surprise was the character sheets in the deluxe version are dry-erase!

The deluxe version even comes with dry-erase pens!

The map is much nicer too. See the map of Paris above.

Besides the book, probably the nicest component was the Fate Weaver screen!

So, basically, everything now has “deluxe” pieces: the next time we play, we’ll move to the new pieces!

Session 2: Playing Loop 2 With The Deluxe Components

So, in our second Loop of the game, we embraced all the deluxe components. We decided quickly that the dry-erase boards are terrible for writing lots of text (upper left uses pencil-and-paper), but good for writing simple adjustments and damage (upper right uses dry-erase board).

We also put some ultra-fine dry erase pens on standby, but we didn’t need them (because we didn’t write any text on the dry-erase boards, just simple marks). See above as I have the Fate Weaver Screen and the big old Revenant Society core book in front of me.

I ended up putting some markers in the book to remind myself where certain sections were: I found out very quickly that this beautiful book DOES NOT have an index!

Sara ended up using a notebook to take notes through the adventure: she was never tempted to use the dry-erase boards. I will say that the map looks a lot better (see above) and the Fate Loop board is much easier to use with the dry-erase boards.

In the end, we had fun playing. I think we took the game a little less seriously in the second game …

We ended up bringing a very saucy NPC named “Skully” into the mystery … see Teresa cradle Skully in her arm. (They had to wrap Skully in something to shut him up … Skully liked to talk a little too much!)

We went ahead and finished our story that night, completing the second Loop and solving the mystery of the deaths!

We had fun.

Probably the place where the Deluxe Component shone most brightly was the One-Shot Loop dry-erase board with the little Watchers: that seemed to work the best of all the deluxe components. See above.

Well-Crafted Murder Mystery?

After getting through the game, I realized this was not what I expected: the game labels itself with the byline ‘Solve the mystery of your own death in this role playing game‘ (see the cover above). What I thought this meant was that The Revenant Society would provide several well-crafted mysteries for the players to solve. No no no no no no. That’s not at ALL what this game was! This a game where the players make-up-what-they-want about their character and most of the story and the Fate Weaver simply “responds” and tries to push the game in certain directions.

For example, take a look at the clue above: this is something the Fate Weaver is required to physically pass to the player at some point during the game. But this is not a clue about this mystery, this is the player making-up whatever-the-heck-they-want to answer the question!

Another example: at the beginning of every Loop, there are “questions” the Fate Weaver asks the players! (See above) And the players answer whatever-the-heck-they-want!

If you were expecting something like Detective: City of Angels, or Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective (or many games on our Top 10 Cooperative Detective Games) with well-crafted mysteries, thoughtful clues, and meaningful timelines, that IS NOT what The Revenant Society is! This is a game about the Fate Weaver and the players collaboratively making up whatever-the-heck-they-want. (Well, the timelines are actually fairly well-defined, so I take that part back).

I’ll be honest, I am very disappointed in what The Revenant Society is: I admit that I prefer my mysteries to be well-crafted and thoughtful! I was hoping to be a GM that slowly guided the players to the final solution, by dropping clues and hints as they played. What I got was a game where players do whatever-the-heck-they-want, and I, as the Fate Weaver have to somehow rectify that with the world and mystery they inhabit.

You might say “Well, play the way you want to then! Make up a well-crafted mystery and present that to the players!” I thought about that, but the mechanisms already in the game keep prodding the players to make-up whatever-the-heck-they-want: unless you alter the game drastically, this is a terrible framework RPG for well-crafted mysteries.

This isn’t what I wanted: I usually hate these kind of games, because they remind me of the TV Show: LOST. Things just happen with no cohesion or thought, and frequently things just don’t make sense or get resolved. I really hate shows like that: I want my shows (and my games) to be thoughtful.

Despite

Despite this NOT being a well-crafted mystery, I still had fun running it. Once I set my expectations for what this game is, I did the best I could to stay in the moment.

My friends loved the setting and the idea of a Groundhog Day meets Murder game!

I also did get some enjoyment trying to take my friends’ crazy ideas and turn them into a well-crafted mystery as much as I could! I have seen so many murder mystery shows, read so many books, played so many murder games, that I feel like I do have a chance to turn my player’s crazy actions into a well-crafted mystery. So I did enjoy it, once I got into it.

And Skully ended up being an unexpected fun NPC, even though he hit on Sara the entire night … but that’s just what Skully does.

A Comparison To Spirit of 77

My major compliant with the Revenant Society is that it really doesn’t have well-crafted mysteries: players just make up stuff as they go, and the DM/GM has to rectify what they do.

Another RPG I played that has this same “make-up-stuff-as-you-go” style is Spirit of ’77 … and I loved that style there!! See out review of Spirit of ’77 here! What’s the difference? Why do I love this in Spirit of ’77 and hate this is The Revenant Society? At the end of the day, the purpose of Spirit of ’77 is to make each other laugh! So, anything that takes the game in a weird direction is welcome! To me, the purpose of The Revenant Society is to solve a mystery (and it even says that on the cover of the book), so the “make-up-stuff-as-you-go” style doesn’t lend itself to any kind of well-crafted mystery.

Maybe if you love this setting in 1910’s Paris or 1920’s New York, you don’t care as much about the well-crafted mystery as I do.

The Book

We have to stay something great about the book: it’s very beautiful production. It’s very readable! It has a lot of (it looks like) well-researched history around the two eras of interest (Paris 1910s and New York 1920s)! The font is good sized! In general, it looks fantastic and is almost a piece of art.

Physical vs. Electronic

If you are interested in this game, should you get a Physical version (the Deluxe Components or just the book) or the Electronic version (PDF)?

Those of you know who know me would expect me to say “Get the Physical Product!” And you’d be wrong.

First, let’s talk about the Deluxe version.

Using dry-erase markers is a terrible idea for any meaningful amount of text!!! We saw this waaaay back in our review of The Forests of Admiron (see link here). First of all, the deluxe game comes with fat dry-erase markers … and they are hard to read! See below.

If you really want dry-erase markers, you need ultra-fine to have any chance of them working well.

In the end, Sara’s pen and paper system worked SO MUCH better: See above. We tried it both ways (pen-and paper in Session 1 and dry-erase boards in Session 2): pen-and-paper worked so much better. You really don’t want the dry-erase boards: they are clumsy, messy, and harder to read/write.

I do admit the map looks better (see above), but everything still works fine in PDF printed version (see below).

I am really not convinced the Deluxe version is worth all the extra money, and in fact, makes the game worse with the dry-erase markers!

Should you just get the physical book then? I mean, it it gorgeous and a beautiful production. That’s up to you: left to my own devices, I would just get the PDF. Why? For one, the PDF is electronically searchable, and the physical book DOES NOT HAVE AN INDEX!! For a book with 280+ pages, I am very surprised there is no index: how do you look up stuff in the physical version??? Answer, you can’t without a lot of searching. The only way to really look stuff up quickly is electronically to search the PDF.

Another reason: A lot of the stuff I want to print out comes from the PDF only! I had trouble finding the PDF pages I wanted online … I could only print them from the PDF I owned (to be fair: if you get the Physical version, I think you also get the PDF as well).

The most important thing to print for the players in the Basic Moves! See above!! Players consult this sheet ALL THE TIME: why was it not one of the things printed in the deluxe version? I went out of my way to make sure each one of my players had a copy of the Basic Moves (they could have maybe gotten away with this by putting the Basic Moves on the outside of the Fate Weaver screen, but the Fate Weaver screen has no useful info on the outside).

In the end, you the Fate Weaver still has to print the clues from the scenario (see the Hopeful clue #1), so what’s printing a few more sheets?

In the end, the pen-and-paper approach worked best, with my searchable PDF being preferable to the physical copy of the book (which has no index???). And my laptop also served as a Fate Weaver screen as well: see above. Overall, I strongly preferred the electronic PDF version of this: the dry-erase player boards of the deluxe version just didn’t work that well. I needed to print quite a bit from the PDF anyways, so even though the deluxe version has some nice components, it wasn’t worth the extra money.

Conclusion

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Would I get The Revenant Society again? Even though I did enjoy my plays of this once I set my expectations, it wasn’t really what I wanted … but I would still play again. I wanted a murder mystery game with well-crafted mysteries: that’s not what this is. If you like the idea of playing in this thematic world with your friends, I think you can have a great time: we actually had a great time after setting our expectations!! If the game does sound interesting to you, I strongly suggest you get just the PDF version of the game: you find yourself having to print stuff from the PDF anyways, so you might as well print everything you need at once. We found the dry-erase boards experience from the Deluxe version lesser than a pen-and-paper experience, so even with all the cool stuff from the Deluxe version, it just didn’t seem worth it.

I did enjoy trying to turn the crazy ideas of my players into a well-crafted mystery as much as I could. But the game mechanisms in The Revenant Society don’t really lend itself to any thoughtful crafting: said mechanisms are too ingrained as a “make-stuff-up-you-go” style. This game is just antithetical to any thoughtful mystery crafting . I enjoyed my plays of The Revenant Society, I might even GM a few more games, but I wouldn’t pick it up again.

Maybe you would enjoy living in this world and having fun collaboratively putting together a mystery: decide for yourself! Just be aware, this is not a game with well-crafted mysteries.

A Review of Robinson Crusoe Collector’s Edition: from the Perspective of the First Edition

Can you say a game is one of your favorite games of all time if you haven’t played it in five years?

Is it even worse if you have all the expansions and have never even opened them? See the shrink wrap still on my expansions above and below!

Although some might answer differently, I am going to answer with a resounding .. YES! Robinson Crusoe can still be one of my favorite games of all time even though I have all these unopened expansions and I haven’t played it in a while! It reminds me of a favorite musical album I haven’t heard in years: when I hear it again, it just evokes all the feelings of joy and happiness … even if I haven’t heard it in a while. I still love it! When I play Robinson Crusoe after five years, I still love it!

Robinson Crusoe Collector’s Edition was on Gamefound a VERY LONG TIME AGO … and it finally delivered to me in February 2024. I backed the campaign on March 24, 2021, so it took three years for this to deliver!!! I know a lot of people who were very very upset with Ignacy (the designer and publisher) over this lateness. I guess I wasn’t as upset as others, but I also had to wait five years for Sentinels of Earth Prime to deliver, so three years feels like a breeze!

This is a deluxe version/expansion for the game. If you have the original first edition game (which I do), this is just an deluxified expansion for the game. Now, the Gamefound claims that this expansion works with the first edition of the game (which I have). And it …. mostly does. We’ll discuss that more later.

The expansion box adds some great minis, as well as some deluxified components.

However, since this was a Gamefound event, they also offered a lot more stuff to expand the game. See above! We’ll take a look at a little of this below.

Unboxing of the The Big Box

A big box arrived outside my door February 2024. What’s this?

Still not sure even after opening it … is that a playmat?

Oh ya! It’s Robinson Crusoe Collector’s Edition! Holy Cow! I forgot that I also ordered the playmat as an extra! This is literally THE BIGGEST playmat I now currently own! It takes up more than half the table and is huge … see the pencil and Coke can for perspective.

Inside are also a lot of deluxe additions and expansions to the game. Note: these components do NOT come by default with the Collector’s Edition! They are stretch goals and just generic add-ons from the original Gamefound event.

I also got upgraded components for the food, wood, and other resources.

There’s some very nice wood dice to replace the plastic dice in the game.

There’s some more cards??? What are these??? See above.

There’s some more minis to expand the already crazy minis we’ll see in second.

And a few other expansions. To be clear, the Coke and the pencil are there for perspective, they dot no come with the game!

It might be easy to get lost with all this content (I did), but there’s a nice booklet in the box that explains what everything is!

Those cards we didn’t know what they were .. they are described in detail.

In general, everything is described, in some detail! This is something this deluxe edition got right: within the book, they make sure to describe everything that comes in the box … even the Gamefound expansions! It’s too easy to let that stuff lag and say “just look at the Gamefound site” … nope! This explains everything that comes with the game!

One final thing I want to mention: I got the Book of Adventures. This is one of the nicest spiral bound notebooks I have ever seen. It essentially collects together all (?) adventures and scenarios we’ve seen for Robinson Crusoe over the year into one volume. This is gorgeous.

This is just all the extra stuff from the Gamefound event! See above. But, what actually comes in the box: Robinson Crusoe Collector’s Edition?

Unboxing of Robinson Crusoe: Collector’s Edition

The actual box is pretty large! This is the box you can buy in stores …

It’s taller than my can of Coke!

At the top is the Introductory Campaign Guide!

This guide looks amazing, but it gets only a C on the Chair Test: Why? Because it hopelessly flops over the edges of the chair next to me… see below.

Underneath that is the content guide we saw earlier …

Under that is some cardboard pieces: the volcano and some tokens.

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But what everyone wants to see are the minis!!

These are the sundrop minis … that I paid way too much for. But they look cool.

Most of the minis replace the two worker placement tokens.

Underneath the minis are some space.

The players boards in the box replace the original player boards: they are 3 level boards and look fantastic!

The rest of the box is pretty empty … it holds a few mini expansions and cards.

Basically, this box is supposed to replace and hold all of your original Robinson Crusoe content.

You can see everything in (and not in) the box above! This is a really nice expansion.

The Case of the Missing Monkey

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Those of you paying attention might notice the missing mini in the upper right of the mini box. Did I lose a mini when I unpacked it? Did the publisher forget a mini?

Turns out the missing mini is a Monkey … that I had to specially order. I didn’t just get it. Supposedly, they publisher will offer the mini on the website after the fulfillment is done.

See this Board Game Geek thread here about the Case of the Missing Monkey!

First Edition

To be clear, I have the original first edition of Robinson Crusoe which came out in October 2012. See above and below: it’s not exactly the best organized. But I played the heck out of this solo over the years!

The rulebook for the first edition worked for me, but a lot of people complained about it .. they also wanted to upgrade the game as well. So, the second edition of Robinson Crusoe came out: it had a much better rulebook as well as numbered the cards on certain decks and other things.

Now, I backed the Collector’s Edition because the publisher said “it does support the first edition!” And they are mostly right. The real issues come up when playing the Introductory Campaign; These issues are three-fold:

The cards in the original First Edition are NOT numbered: a lot of the set-up instructions refer to cards numbered xxx-yyy. Luckily, they also list all the cards, so this isn’t a deal breaker.
Some cards are missing. A few cards that the tutorial refers to are simply not in the first edition.
Some cards are relabelled. The Cure is labelled something else … the card is there but has a different name in the First Edition.

We’ll address each of these in more detail when we discuss the tutorial, but other than that, the Collector’s Edition did work with the First Edition. To be fair, none of these issues made the game unplayable, but you do have to be flexible.

The Introductory Campaign

The most interesting thing to come in the Collector’s Edition (besides the minis) is the Introductory Campaign Scenario Book. This is basically a 4-scenario long campaign that slowly brings you into all the rules of this big complex game called Robinson Crusoe! It’s basically a very guided tutorial to get people playing.

The campaign starts very simple, showing off some of the base rules. Every new scenario in the campaign builds on the previous rules until the last game is a “full” game of Robinson Crusoe!

Over the course of March 2024, I played through one scenario a week (solo) until the end of March 2024.

Scenario 1: Warm Welcome To Tamatoa

Scenario 1: Warm Welcome to Tamatoa from the campaign doesn’t use the main map. It uses the actual campaign book: see above and below.

This particular scenario is a very very abbreviated version of the rules. I figured since I was an experienced player that I’d walk right through this: nope! it’s actually a nice little puzzle. I had to play it twice to win!

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You’ll also note that I forgot to use the minis for the workers in my first game: I used the original wood disks. I know, how did I miss that???

In my second game (after losing the first), I did use the minis. Look how nice they look!

This is a real nice way to ease people into the Robinson Crusoe game. This first scenario was a fun little puzzle.

My only real complaint was the that I had to go looking for cards #1-#3 for the Event Deck .. but remember that the First Edition doesn’t have the Event deck cards numbered! Luckily, the card names were listed so I could just hunt for the right cards: Vertigo, Fight, Memories of the Cruise.

But in general, this first scenario is a great way to get people into Robinson Cruose.

Scenario 2: Which Way The Wind Blows?

My second game didn’t start off great. Why? You build the Event Deck with cards #5-#8 (Loss of Hope, Bear, Body on the Beach, and Despondency) … and there is no Despondency card in the First Edition!!! See this Board Game Geek thread for more details.

In the end, I just picked a random card from the Event Deck (Fight) and moved forward.

You’ll note, of course, that I put a sticky note in my scenario book describing the issue (so I don’t have the “rediscover this issue” in the future).

After getting through this rather aggravating issue, I was able to play the second Scenario: Which Way the Wind Blows without any further issue.

The second scenario also uses the map in the scenario book and just builds on the rules from Scenario 1. It worked well, despite sometimes having to page through both the rules for Scenario 1 and 2 (as the rules from Scenario 2 build on the rules for Scenario 1).

Scenario 3: Looking For Answers

Unfortunately, we also ran into set-up issues for Scenario 3: Looking for Answers. The Medicine Invention card is called Cure in the first edition … so it’s there, but if you don’t see that right away, you could be looking around for quite some time! Also, there are no Poisonous Spores card: I just used Poison. Again, I noted the issues on stickies so I could replay this again without issue.

Again, because the cards aren’t numbered, I had to go searching for Mystery Cards …

And Adventure cards. Luckily, everything was labelled but remember … there are no numbers on the cards in first Edition!!

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It’s here at Scenario 3 when then full map comes out! That’s right, the game starts to really flesh out and start to feel like a true Robinson Crusoe game: Inventions are out, Risky Actions are out, and Mystery cards are out!

I ended up keep the instructions on the right, with the full mat on the right.

The game really starts coming alive in this Scenario as you are exploring and look for Treasure Chests!

Scenario 4: Lords Of Fog

Finally, by Scenario 4: Lord of Fog, you are playing the full game! There’s no special set-up of the cards (thank Goodness!) so no issues from the First Edition come up!

In game 4, you add hunting mechanics and the weather dice back into the game. By this point, you are fully invested in this adventure and want to see it through!

It’s a bit of table hog at this point, as I need to have the mat and rules and original box on the box (for components).

I will also say that this game really tested me: I should have lost.

My last round needed two build actions to win … “I have this in the bag…” until the Strong Winds Event came out! “What??? I can’t build because I don’t have enough actions???? I’m screwed!!”

I needed to get some characters on Brew to win, but I also needed to build some things!

In the end, I figured out a very clever way to get what I needed! It was such a trying moment to feel I had come all that way just to lose because of Strong Winds!

I think this is just a testament to how strong this game is: there’s so much choice you can usually do something interesting and useful in response to bad news.

What a blast!

Set-Up

By far, the worst thing about the Introductory Scenario was the set-up: between First Edition problems and just so many components and books, I was struggling to keep everything in reach and organized as I set everything up.

The reason this took me a month to play was that each Scenario really took it’s time to set-up and tear-down. I mean, I guess Robinson Crusoe has always had that problem to a certain extent, but it seemed more pronounced this time.

Other than that issue, I think this Introductory Campaign is a great way to get people into Robinson Crusoe! I am … or I used to be … an experienced Robinson Crusoe player, and I had fun playing the abbreviated versions of the game.

Conclusion

Do you really need the Collector’s Edition of Robinson Crusoe? Nah, not really.

There is so much content out there for Robinson Crusoe that you probably would want to get first: both Mystery Tales and Voyage of the Beagle have tons of stuff for you to do.

But if you love the ideas of amazing minis (especially as your worker pieces) and a really well-designed intro, then maybe this is for you! I feel like the introductory scenario(s) got me to fall in love with Robinson Crusoe again.

It’s hard to recommend the full Collector’s Edition (which has the base game and minis and intro) because it’s a lot of money, especially if you don’t know if you like the game! But if you know you like the game and want to jump into this world, it’s a very cool place to start!

If you are like me (with the First Edition) and like the game, there is a way to get the “minimal” Collector’s Edition which just has the new stuff. Although First Edition has its own problems, I am still happy I got this. It’s breathed new life into my Robinson Crusoe and reminded me how much I like the game … and isn’t that the purpose of an expansion?

Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles Review

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.

Play An Episode of House! A Review of NYC: Emergency Room (A Medical Mystery)!

Welcome back to Cooperative Surprise Month! This month has seen a surprisingly good cooperative game set in 700 BC called Sammu-Ramat, a “lost” review of Chainsomnia, and a light-and-fun cooperative game called Hissy Fit with the surprisingly weird theme of taking cats to the vet! This week, we take a look at another game with a surprisingly weird theme: NYC: Emergency Room!

NYC: Emergency Room is billed as “A Cooperative Medical Mystery Game” for 1-4 players, Ages 14+. That lower bound of age may seem low or high, depending on who you are, as there are discussions you would want “mature” adults discussing (birth control, the human reproductive system, death, pain, diarrhea). So, be aware that this medical mystery game requires an adult attitude!

NYC was a game I picked up at Target a few weeks ago (early February): I was on the fence about it. On one hand, I love murder mystery games (see our Top 10 Cooperative Detective Games) and escape room games. On the other hand, I generally don’t like medically themed games (too depresssing). Should I pick it up?

Then I remembered how the TV show House was originally billed as a a medical mysteries show. If you don’t know the TV show House, it is basically Sherlock Holmes as a doctor solving strange mysteries, but in the medical field (Get it? “House” & “Holmes” … “Wilson” & “Watson”). The show, while pretty dark, is quite interesting!

In the end, that’s why I picked up the game: “a fun medical mystery like House”. Or at least, that was my hope!

Unboxing

NYC: Emergency Room is a pretty standard sized box. See the Coke Can and #2 pencil for perspective.

The game is really just a bunch of envelopes! All the components are in one of six envelopes.

Four of the envelopes are cases for four different patients. Each one of these is a different case.

There is one envelope that has components every game needs: that’s the Code/Research/Rules envelope. See above.

The first patient, though, is not one of the four envelopes… there’s a tutorial that walks you through your first case: Nurse Judy recognizes you are just starting out, and tries to help you through the process!

It’s kinda cool is that every envelope tells you exactly what’s inside (see above)! I can totally see passing this game onto other people after I am done, so it’s good to make sure each case has everything you need to do it!

Considering this is a game from Target, the quality is actually pretty good for everything (see above for some contents of the first envelope). It’s surprisingly good how good these components are!

Rulebook

There is a rulebook, but you don’t even start with it. You start with Nurse Judy’s tutorial pamphlet. It walks you through your first game, and honestly, it does a fantastic job.

By the time I got through the Tutorial, I don’t think I ever looked at the rulebook! (It comes in the black Codes envelope). Seriously, I can’t complain or laud the rulebook because I never needed it. The pure joy of the Tutorial made the rulebook almost unnecessary. I may have looked it at once later for a rules clarification, but I’m not sure how much you’ll use it. Listen to Nurse Judy, and you’ll be fine!

The Tutorial

The tutorial takes you quickly through a simple case with Luana Kapule: see above.

This was very easy to set-up and a very quick game. I think I got through the Tutorial in about 20 minutes.

Seriously, this is one the best tutorials I have seen in a while. You see all the things you should do, the things you shouldn’t do, and the game walks you through the playthrough very precisely.

You know that a Tutorial is good when you don’t think you need the rulebook anymore: 20 minutes in, and I think I know the game. I call that a successful tutorial!

Gameplay

The game is all about what tests and consultations and medications to administer to a patient over a night (a timeline). You are measured by, frankly, if the patient survives the night. You have a sheet that you keep track of everything you do and what time you do it: see above.

As you run tests on your patient, you will get codes to look up in the code book: they tell you what happens: frequently, this means you draw a card from a deck of “how the patient is doing”. Note: the results of the tests do change as time marches forward! Gulp! Make sure you run that test at the right time!!

What tests do you run? Holy cow, all the things you can do or know is presented in about 5 pamphlets brimming with medical information! See above. This particular mechanic kind of reminds of Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective.

Not directly, but the sheer volume of medical information in the game reminds me of the sheer volume of materials in Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective: the maps, the phonebook, the newspapers. This is a good thing: it really feels like medical mystery! You just have to look in the right place to solve the mystery!

If you can keep the patient alive by running the right tests (remember, tests can be invasive in many ways) and finding the right thing to do (which may be medication or something else), you win!

It goes without saying, but if your patient dies, you lose!

Solo Game: Patient 1

Strictly speaking, my first solo patient was from the Tutorial: but Nurse Judy basically kept me out of trouble, so I don’t know if that counts.

Before I began, I made a copy of the timeline sheet (see above) and left room for notes on the left. I strongly recommend you do this as well! First, by making a copy, you can reuse the first case later. More importantly, I think, is that having the extra space to make notes was a big deal.

You never forget your first patient: mine was Shyla Patel.

I had to make sure I interviewed her to make sure I knew what was going on.

I was able to do the proper tests and figure out what was going wrong with her. Along the way, there were places where I could have done “something bad”, but in the end, I kept Shyla alive.

She left the Emergency Room alive and in good health. It was a good day.

Shyla never saw me looking, but my head was buried in these medical pamphlets the entire time. This is a game about research, it’s a game about following up, it’s a game about what it’s like being a doctor. (I always wonder if doctor’s do the same thing when we aren’t looking … “What the heck was that? I gotta look in my pamphlets!”)

It was incredibly engaging, but there was a lot of research, a lot of taking notes (see above) and a lot of reading. I love that stuff, but some people don’t.

Why watch an episode of the TV show House when you can just play it? I really enjoyed this game solo.

Cooperative Game

It’s Charlie’s fault I started watching the TV show “House”, so I felt it was apropos that he and Allison play this with me!

Rather than try to explain the game to them, I simply had Charlie and Allison go through the Tutorial. This was interesting: I am so used to explaining games to people, but I realized this game is just complicated enough that it makes sense to use the Tutorial again! Rather than teach the game, just play the Tutorial! It really is that good!

After they finished the Tutorial, we encountered Patient 2: Adrian Alexopolous.

The cooperative game was very much like the solo game, but now we have a group of “other doctors” we could bounce ideas off of! I like this shared responsibility: it’s a little scary to take full responsibility for a patient yourself, and this shared burden made it a little easier to endure.

The burden of taking notes, reading cards, consulting pamphlets also made the game move a little more quickly than the solo game.

Although I liked the solo game, and didn’t have any problem taking the full responsibility of a patient myself, I can see many people bouncing off this! By having a team of doctors helping each other to help the patient, I can see many people preferring the cooperative mode over the solo mode.

What I Liked

The Tutorial is fantastic. It just gets you into the game right way: it’s the best way to teach new players, even if you already know the game!

I like all the medical information available. I wish the medical pamphlets were bigger books written in a bigger font. I did a lot of reading and research with these! It felt like the world was large, something to explore, even though I was only reading medical texts.

The mysteries are interesting and engaging. And the components are great too, especially for a Target game.

What I Didn’t Like

I already said this in the What I Liked Section, but I wish the medical pamphlets were bigger with bigger fonts. In fact, a lot of these pamphlets had two or three different things in them! I wish they had been broken up a little better … I am sure this is a “it costs money to make big pamphlets” issue, but they would have made it a little easier to use.

In the end, I made copies of the charts/timeline, but it bugged me a little that there weren’t multiple copies of these little sheets: there was only one for each patient! For multiple reasons (extra space for notes, enabling this patient to be re-used), I strongly advise you to make a copy like I did above!

Conclusion

I really enjoyed NYC Emergency Room and so did my friends. As long as you don’t have trouble with the theme, mature situations, and potentially life-or-death situations, this is a great mystery game!

In fact, you could argue that the theme is very engaging because you are making “real” life-and-death situations for a person you meet in the Emergency Room! Those tense situations may be too much for some people, but if you can handle it, I think it is fantastically riveting!

Allison gives this a 8/10, Charlie says it’s a “Solid Game” (I couldn’t get a number out of him). I think I am right with Allison: this a 7.5/10 or 8/10 for me. My hesitancy comes only the theme being potentially being very divisive: “I don’t want to be a doctor right now, that sounds too stressful!“. I get it, sometimes it might not be as appealing to be a doctor in a stressful situation! Having said that, in the cooperative game, that burden is shared making the game a little more palatable.

Why watch an episode of House when you can play it? Just remember when doing patient interviews: “Everybody Lies.”

Taking Cats To The Vet: Really? This is the Theme? A Review of Hissy Fit!

Welcome back to Cooperative Surprise Month! After being surprised (in a good way) by Sammu-Ramat a few weeks ago (see our review here), and finding an old review of Chainsomnia (see our review last week), we take a look at a quirky cooperative game with a surprisingly unique theme! Let’s take a look at Hissy Fit!

Really, the theme of this game, Hissy Fit!, is taking cats to the veterinarian. I am not making this up!

Hissy Fit! is a cooperative card game for 1-4 players that plays in about 20 minutes. Hissy Fit! was on Kickstarter back in January 2023; it promised delivery in November 2023, but it didn’t deliver to me until late February 2024. So it was about 3-4 months late; that’s not a big deal in Kickstarter land.

I picked Hissy Fit! up because it looked cute, and it was cheap: it was only $20 on Kickstarter (plus shipping). Did I get my money’s worth?

Unboxing

Hissy Fit! is a small cooperative card game in smallish box: see the Coke Can for perspective above.

There are 58 cards in this game (see many above) and some supporting tokens and sheets (see below).

If you are a cat fan (which is probably why you are here), you have a myriad of choices for “what cat sticker” goes on the cat meeple: see above.

This game is cute, everything is very readable, and it’s very cute (I know, I said that already). If you like cats, you will probably like this game. If you don’t like cats … you may still like this game: keep reading!

Rulebook … I mean … Pamphlet.

The rulebook is a pamphlet. Sigh.

It folds out, and it’s quite readable, despite it’s largish footprint.

It even gets a decent grade on the Chair Test (maybe a B): it basically fits and has a good size font with a lot of good pictures and examples.

The set-up is good: it has a picture (with annotations! see above) and is very well done.

This rulebook is better than I expected. It teaches the rules pretty well and it’s pretty easy to read. Its major sin is that “it’s just a pamphlet”, but it surprisingly good. (There’s no index or chapters, but it doesn’t need one: this is a relatively simple game).

Gameplay

The humans need to get the cat to the vet, but of course, the cat uses all its wiles to not go! The Cat Tracker card (see above) show how much you need to do to get the cat to the vet! Basically, this is a race! You are trying to move the cat meeple from the start to the cat carrier (see above)! If players can cooperatively move the cat meeple to the end, they win! Huzzah!

There are 4 difficulties to the game, depending on how hard you want the game! There’s Kitten mode, Cat mode, Fierce Mode, and Feral mode! See two Cat Tracker cards above for Cat mode and Feral Mode!!

Feral mode (above right) is the hardest mode, as you have fewer scratches you can can endure and further to go!

Players win if they get the cat meeple to the end, but if the players ever get too many scratches (the red cube at the maximum number of scratches), they lose!

Players also lose if the cat has three hissy fits!

Every hissy fit icon on the cards will advance the hissy fit card … if you ever get three tokens on the card, the hissy fit happens!

The game has a fairly typical cooperative game arc: “bad news” cards start the round, and players play “good news” cards to help. The “bad news” cards are the Cat Cards (see above). As these cards come out, they cause continual bad stuff to happen! For example: In the white panel above is a backward paw: it causes the cat meeple to go backwards unless you get rid of that Zoomies card!

The players play Human Cards to help deal withe Cat Cards. When you play a Human Card, you choose one of the good effects (in the white strip) on the card. The rightmost effect (see above) would move the cat meeple forward three spaces! The leftmost effect would give two resources of each type of Cat Attitudes: you place cubes on the Cat Cards appropriately.

If you get enough Cat Attitude resources, you can get rid of the Cat Card! For example, when we play the Tuna Can card to stop the Zoomies (see above), we only have 2 Angry Cat resources (brown), so we can only partly stop the Zoomies: we need to play another human card with the Angry cat (brown) symbol: we use the clear cubes to note what we have already played. Unfortunately, the Zoomies stays out another turn.

Turns are pretty quick and easy: the current player draws a Cat Card and suffers its bad effects, then that current player gets to do 2 things: play a Human Card or draw a Human card! You can choose any Human Card in the display, or you can blindly draw the top. Once you are done, move left to the next player! Play continues until the cats win or the humans win!

One of the most important rules in the game is playing combos: when any player plays a card, another player can follow and play a card with the same symbol! See the example above (from the rules) with the yarn ball symbol allowing the players to play three cards!

This combo rule is critical to winning the game: it allows you to play many cards in one shot if you really need to!

Solo Game

The solo game is well-specified and very simple (thank you for following Saunders’ Law): there is only one player, but he starts the game with 5 Human Cards. The solo player simply keeps taking his turn over and over, basically rotating back to himself. Cat Card, Two Actions, Cat Card, Two Actions, repeat!

The victory and loss conditions are exactly the same: the only thing that really changes depending on the number of players is how many cards the player(s) starts with!

I was able to learn, then play the game twice in the same night as my friends came over! I lost my first solo game and won my second (on Kitten Mode). I started groking it pretty quickly.

I lost my first game because I didn’t take the rulebook/pamphlet seriously! The game is all about playing combos to win! See above as I play three Human Cards that all have the mouse icon! Yep, you gotta play combos to win!

This is a light solo game that plays in 20 minutes. It’s pretty fun. If I am waiting for someone and just want to kill 20 minutes, this would be a fun and easy game to play: it’s not too thinky, but it’s still very engaging.

Cooperative Game

The cooperative game flowed well. After I learned the game, I was able to teach everyone the game fairly quickly: part of that is because the solo game is still the main game! It’s really easy to get into it!

This game is smooth and easy to play cooperatively. There’s a lot of engagement as players realize “we need to play this combo!!!” See above as Sara and Andrew try to figure out how to combo to take out the 3 Cat Cards!

The game was still about 20-25 minutes and moved quickly. This game was easy to learn and pretty fun to play.

What I Liked

The art is adorable. And the cards are easy to read.

The game is super easy to set-up and understand.

It worked well as both a cooperative game and a solo game.

In the end, the gameplay was just so smoooooth and easy. Anyone can play this.

The combo mechanism is fantastic: it reminds of the “follow” mechanism that so enchanted us from the Plum Island Horror (see our review here). By allowing ANY player to play a Human Card that matches the current symbol, everyone can stay engaged even when it’s not their turn! This one mechanism made this fairly standard cooperative game stand out for me: it kept everyone engaged!

What I Didn’t Like

There aren’t enough Human Cards. You will see all of them in your first game! There needs to be quite a bit more for better variety.

I don’t love the cover, but I was absolutely in the minority on this. I think the art is so cute in the game (see the Ball With Bell above), but I don’t think the cover captured just how cute this game is! Again, I am in the minority: all my friends disagree with me on this.

I don’t love the pamphlet form factor. Whatever, it’s still a pretty good set of rules.

It’s not super deep. You’ll get it pretty quickly: that may limit its replayability.

Conclusion

Hissy Fit! is surprisingly fun! It’s a light game that’s easy to teach: you can teach and start playing right away! This is a quick solo and cooperative game that plays in about 20 minutes! Are you looking for a light and quick solo/cooperative game? Hissy Fit! might be right for you!

And you don’t have to love cats to like this game: the gameplay is solid, especially with the combo mechanism keeping everyone engaged as they play! The gameplay is just smooth.

I give this a solid 7.5/10 and Teresa gives this a 7/10. Andrew and Sara would give it a 7, but the small number of Human Cards reduces some of the replayability for them, so they give it a 6.5/10. I think an expansion which added a lot more Human Cards would move this to a 7/10 for them.

This small game has a sense of humor and a wacky theme, but it plays so smoothly. It’s a surprise to me how much I liked Hissy Fit! given how weird and quirky it is. Yes, I got my money’s worth for $20.

A Review of Chainsomnia

Welcome back to Cooperative Surprise Month! Last month we looked at the brand new game (Sammu-ramat) which was so surprisingly good! This week, we surprised ourselves by finding an old review which we never published! This is a review for the cooperative game Chainsomnia by Seiji Kanai! Let’s take a look!

Chainsomnia was a cooperative game I picked up from GameNerdz fairly recently (EDITOR: at the time this was written, it was June 2023 .. ahem). It was a Kickstarter game, but I didn’t know that when I ordered it from GameNerdz (I guess I missed the Kickstarter). Chainsomnia was appealing to me because it looks like a light cooperative game from the designer (Seiji Kanai) of Unicornus Knights! I think that Unicornus Knights is something of a hidden gem (see Part I and Part II of our review), as it made our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2017!

This game is about a bunch of nightmare-ridden little kids trying to get out of a castle of nightmares! It’s for 1-4 players, 40-60 minutes, and ages 14+. Let’s take a look.

Unboxing and Gameplay

This is a pretty deep box. The Coke Can actually fits inside it pretty well!

Seriously, this is a pretty deep box: mostly for the tiles.

Each character takes the role of a child trapped in the castle:

Each character has a standee and a character sheet.

Each character has some abilities (Strength, Luck, and Wisdom) which will form the the basis of a two-dice ability role.

For example, Chloe above has 3 Strength, 3 Wisdom and 3 Luck. She can also get rid of Bad Dream easily with an AP (Action Point).

AP stands for Action Point. The little chart to the left shows you how many AP you have per turn. As you get Chains in the game (Ryan above has 2 chains), it reduces the number of AP you have per turn.

The Summary Cards summarize what you can do, but basically explore, search, give, skill, move, use or take.

In order to win, the characters must cooperatively explore the Castle to find the way out: the Way Out is the last card in the tile deck. See Chloe winning the game for everyone by finding the Way Out … when there are no Bad Dreams on the board.

Like most cooperative games, there are “Bad News” cards that come out. In this case, the Bad News cards are called “Events” and come out every time you explore and discover a new Room.

Generally speaking, the Event cards are full of nightmares that clog up the rooms. You can’t enter a room with a nightmare until you take it out. How do you take it out?

Each Bad Dream is different (for example, above you have to discard an Item), but generally you have to make a skill check on 2 dice, and roll higher than your skill. If Ryan’s Strength is 5 and requires a 11+ Strength to Vanquish, then Ryan will need to roll a 6 or more (6+5 >= 11) on two dice to succeed in the Skill check.

Incidentally, skill checks are how you get Items (very useful tools): generally, each room will tell you what you need to roll to get one. In the first room (see below), if you roll a 12 or higher on any skill check, you get an item.

There are other very bad cards that modify the Event Deck (see Shriek above) but if you make it through all Event cards without finding the Way Out you lose. If you can get to the Way Out and defeat all Bad Dreams on the board you Win!

The components are quite cute, if a little minimal. The cards are not linen finished.

Rulebook

The rulebook is good, except that it doesn’t talk a lot about edge conditions. As we played the game, a bunch of questions came up (“Are Action Points dynamic? Do you immediately lose/gain an AP as a result of a chain change?”). There was a FAQ, but it didn’t answer the questions that seem to come up with us.

The components list had no pictures, but the Set-up was well-labelled to counteract that. In general, there were appropriate pictures and the game was explained well-enough. I even like that it had a FAQ, it just didn’t seem to address the questions we had. I’ll call the rulebook good enough.

Solo Mode

Congratulations to Chainsomnia for following Saunders’ Law and having a solo mode!

Unfortunately, the solo player must take control of 3 characters. Similarly, a 2-Player game would have each player take control of 2 characters. Basically, there must always be 3 or 4 characters in the game. This isn’t ideal for the solo because there’s always the context switch issue as you jump from character to character, playing each one separately.

Luckily for the solo mode, the context switch issue is not too problematic: each character has a pretty simple character with one “major” power. For example, if one of your characters were Ryan (see above), it’s easy to remember he’s strong (strength of 5) and can also eliminate one monster for one AP. There’s not too much to remember for each character, so context switching from character to character isn’t a big deal. Contrast this to the characters from Marvel Zombies: Heroes Resistance where each context switch becomes heavier and heavier as the characters get more and more abilities in the game (see our review here). While the extra abilities in Marvel Zombies: Heroes Resistance are cool, it makes it significantly harder to play multiple characters.

It took me two solo games to get a win. I remember losing my first game and saying, “Nope! I wanna play again! I know what to do now!” I think your strategy really depends on the characters you choose, so my second game was with the same 3 characters.

I made one major mistake in both solo games: I forgot to save my Ominous Event cards and my Auspicious event cards. In most every other cooperative game, you throw away events when you are done … Nope! Here, they are a measure oh how well you did.

When you open the secret envelope, you need those cards. I didn’t realize this until after my second game!

(Picture deleted from review to avoid spoilers)

Minor Spoiler: Basically, you measure your victory (in the event of a win) by how many Auspicious Events and Ominous Events you got. That was kind of cool: it’s a hidden and secret way to measure success, and gives you a reason to play again to try for a “better” win.

I didn’t love solo mode (mostly because of the 3 character issue), but it was fun enough to play again. It also gave me enough insight to teach to my friends.

Cooperative Mode

This game went over pretty well as a cooperative game: probably better than I expected. Since you always need at least 3 or 4 characters in play (this totally reminds me of Unicornus Knights), a 3 or 4-player game is probably ideal: that way every player gets exactly one character to operate, and it’s easier to inhabit and connect with the game if you are “that character”.

I noticed that, as we were playing, we really did consult each other a lot … and console each other a lot. “Hey, don’t worry: I can take care of that nightmare!” “Hey, don’t worry, I can get you an item!” Sara’s character’s power allowed here to give items to other people anywhere on the board … this was huge! It allowed us to power up! Even if we had a bad role, the game evoked a pathos: “It’s all right, we’ll get you out of that mess.” Maybe there’s something about being a little kid that brings out the best in people, and makes them want to help each other?

There were a lot of fun little moments playing cooperatively. I knew the game had gone well when we spent the post-game talking about all sorts of other ways we could have won/lost, been more strategic, etc. People cared enough to keep thinking about the game, even when it was over!

Repacking

What’s going on with this box? It has a huge insert, but the game doesn’t fit back into the box unless you do one of two things:

Always remove the plastic bases
OR
Pack the dice into the fingerholes!

Those of you who have played GloomHaven know the problem with constantly removing/adding the plastic bases! Basically, the bottom tears! So, I chose to leave the plastic bases on. Which means the game box WHICH IS HUGE doesn’t fit the game! I had to be clever … and put the dice in the fingerholes.

Yup, not ideal, but then the game fits. See below for pictures of how I fit the game in.

Conclusion

Chainsomnia was pretty fun. Although the rules were missing a lot of edge cases, the game was still pretty easy to teach and play. The group liked it, but didn’t love it:

Teresa, Rich: 7/10, liked it, would suggest it
Sara: 6.5/10 liked it, would happily play, maybe wouldn’t suggest it as first choice
Andrew: 6/10 Liked it well enough, would play again

The biggest issue with the game was that it felt a little “samey” after a few plays. You could mitigate that by switching up the characters to have different strategies. It was also maybe a little too lucky with so much emphasis being placed on the dice.

Chainsomnia was fun enough. We actually would not recommend this for kids: even though this game is cute, the nightmares attacking kids might not go over well with younger players. This game is more for older kids who like light cooperative games with an anime look.

EDITOR: At the time Our Top 10 Cooperative Tile-Laying/Placement games was written, Chainsomnia just barely squeaked onto the list as #10. I hate to say it, but I think Race for The Raft came along, moved to the top of the list, and pushed everything down one space (see our review here: it’s that good)! So that means Chainsomnia is #11 now …

Wait, A Cooperative Euro Wargame? A Review of Sammu-ramat The Board Game

Welcome to the Start of Cooperative Surprise Month! This month, we take a look at some of the surprises we have encountered recently in our cooperative game journeys! We start this month with a cooperative game called Sammu-ramat, which ended up being a huge surprise!

Wait, what just happened? I just spent five days straight playing Sammu-ramat! This was a cooperative game on Gamefound back in November 2021, and it finally delivered to my house just a few days ago (Wednesday, February 15th, 2024). I have been playing it non-stop since it arrived at my door!

This obsession is really weird, because I was on the fence for Sammu-ramat when it was on Gamefound. The game didn’t look “great”, but the idea of this cooperative resource-driven war game looked interesting, so I backed it.

I have to admit: I wasn’t wowed by the production. The cover isn’t great and this box was just okay. If I were to see Summu-rammat at a game store, I might pass right over it. It doesn’t look like anything special.

But at the risk of giving away my thoughts early, it would be a crime to pass up this game! Despite a lot of issues with components, production, and the rulebook, this is a very good game! I adored it and couldn’t stop playing it for five days!

Let’s take a closer look!

Unboxing and Plutorial

The first day the game came in, I unboxed it. It’s a little smaller than a Ticket To Ride style box. See the Coke can and #2 pencil for perspective (see above).

Just under the rulebook is the Summu-ramat Plutorial. What’s a Plutorial you may wonder? A playable tutorial!

The Empire Board is a way to track resources.

The “save state” pad is useful for the campaign mode: Spoiler! The game comes with many campaigns! But don’t worry, you can still easily play one-off games.

There are quite a number of punchouts. Most of the tokens are Goods tokens (yellow resources), good (green) tokens, or bad (red) tokens for the token bag,

There is a pretty nice token bag: it’s not a main mechanic in the game, but there are times throughout the game when you will put/pull tokens (good green or bad red).

There are a ton of plastic bags (for bagging the game up later), and some cards. We’ll see these cards later!

It’s important to point out that the game has a fairly extensive set of player aid cards for all players! See above.

A lot of the punchouts are also characters you can play. See above. The meeples are generally military (red bad guys, yellow good guys).

Overall, the game production looks pretty good. There are a few issues we’ll point out later.

Plutorial: Playthrough and Tutorial

This introduction shows the first few turns of a game, as it teaches you some of the core rules. The Plutorial is well-notated and clear (modulo a few sections) as it takes you through some of the major pieces of the game: combat, characters, gathering resources, the Empire Board, the player aids, the maps, Areas vs Locations, and even reading the Glossary at the end of the rulebook!

This Plutorial is absolutely essential to starting the game off on the right foot. There are a lot of rules to Sammu-ramat, and I could have very easily lost interest in the game if I didn’t have this to guide me into the game.

The game is just complex enough that just reading the rulebook might turn off a lot of people (the rulebook of 32 pages and fairly technical).

The Plutorial very clearly notates why things happen in the game, and even sets-up a little “puzzle” for you to solve (with a clear solution at the end). I think after I finished the Plutorial, I felt like I knew enough to jump into Sammu-ramat feet first. This Plutorial made me feel like I could understand enough to start playing the game … and that’s a win for a game this complex.

Rulebook

This rulebook is okay. It taught the rules, but it had a few problems.

The first was the trifold nature in the first few pages. I think this might be a clever way to have the components page always available while reading the rest of the rulebook, but it’s simply too unwieldy in real life. I applaud them trying something new: I really like the basis of the idea! I really like having the components page always available. In the end, they would have been better served having the components list of a separate sheet that wasn’t awkwardly attached to the rulebook.

The rulebook would probably get a B or B- on the Chair Test. It doesn’t quite fit on the chair next to me. In the end, it ended up on the table the entire time I played, taking up valuable table space. I really wish the form factor had been a little smaller.

The game had a nice components page, despite the form factor.

The set-up was also very well notated: see above.

In general, the rulebook was okay, but it did read like a technical manual. Without the Plutorial, this rulebook would have been much more difficult to get through.

I think the rulebook must be also a translation: there were several points where the verbs seem misconjugated (that’s usually a dead giveaway of a translation) in number and/or tense.

The fact that the rulebook had a glossary was a major plus! I just wish it had an index.

The back of the rulebook was used for something kind of useful: I wish it had been an icon summary, but at least it was something kind of useful.

Overall, this rulebook needed just a few points of clarification, a better form factor, an index, and another pass by an editor. Having said that, it was decent at presenting the rules.

You can learn the game from the rulebook. Just be aware that you will have to hunt for rules a few times. I have played the game probably 10 times by the time you read this, and I still find myself searching the rulebooks for clarifications.

But, the rulebook worked.

What Is This Game?

At the end of the day, Sammu-ramat is a puzzle.

The Challenge Cards (see above) define the puzzle for you. The front side tell you how to set-up the puzzle: where to put Goods and Empire pieces for the players, as well as starting locations for the bad guys and “bad tokens” in the game.

The back side of the Challenge Card then tells you what to do to win, as well as the bad things that will happen as you play! To be clear, you know what some of the bad news that will happen before you play!

The game proceeds over 8 rounds (7 for solo and other adjustments for different player counts). The event cards usually are usually bad things, but occasionally helpful. Most of the game, you know what’s coming, but the events are probably the most random part of the game. (It has been my experience over about 10 games that there is usually one event that usually completely messes you up, but the rest are manageable).

The event cards effects are notated in the upper left. For example, for the event card above, the effects are localized to Phrygia (the spiky ball at the stop left), losing 2 Supplies in that area (orange cart), and drawing one token the bag (1 and arrow up from bag).

Each player assumes the role of a single advisor (putting the personal side up), and then other advisors are revealed (based on where Ishtar Gates are at the start), who will be helpful as well. Only the solo player may play Sammu-ramat directly. Note that each advisor has their own powers: one that’s always on (infinity symbol) and an action only that advisor can take (A).

Interestingly, you don’t always have to play your character on your turn: you may choose to activate a different advisor (maybe they are closer to a problem that needs solving), but usually it’s in your best interesting to activate your personal character, as they typically have an exra action per turn.

To help the players, they have Ashur card, which are all good news cards. They all have a resource prerequisite on the upper right. For example, the mule above needs 4 textiles in order to be bought. The Ashur cards are key to the game: they help you do special actions, get resources, move further, get technology and so many other things!

This game is a euro because a major theme to the game is getting Goods (resources) to power your actions. By playing a Ashur card, or activating a special action, or trading goods, or bartering, the players need to assimilate Goods! The Goods power so many important actions in the game: For example, you need 4 Goods (the Textiles) to buy the Mule (Ashur Card from above)! Sammu-ramat is a Euro because it’s all about turning Goods into other Goods for the problem at hand!

This game is a wargame because you need to make sure you stop the advancing troops that all heading to seat of power: Assyria! The red meeples (above) are the bad guy troops, or the enemies: when they appear on the map, their job is to take over Capitols along the way, but head to Kalhu! You can only stop the enemies with the military (the yellow meeples). There is no randomness to the fighting in this game: when you initiate a fight, it’s a 1:1 battle: each side loses 1 enemy/1 military until one side wins!! Before you head into a fight, you should know if you will win or not!! Military is one of the resources you buy with special actions, Goods, or Ashur cards!

This is a cooperative game: all players work together to decide on the best actions to win the puzzle!

Putting all this together: Sammu-ramat is a cooperative, euro, wargame! But it’s really a puzzle: how can you work together to solve the objective on the Challenge Card?

Solo Mode

So, the game comes with a built-in solo mode (thank you for following Saunders’ Law).

In the solo mode, the solo player takes Sammu-ramat card as their player card and flips it to the solo side.

There is about a half a page description on page 20 of the rulebook. There are a couple of changes, mostly pretty straight-forward. The one change I forgot multiple times was that Stage 4 draws 2 cards instead of 1: you will forget this rule! The only place it’s notated in the entire game is on page 20. It’s way too easy to forget this rule, and I wish there had been a way to notate that (maybe on the Sammu-Rammut solo card).

Most of the of games of Sammu-ramat I have played were solo … and they were excellent. There is so much thought and consideration that goes into every action! Everything you do matters! That’s what makes this solo game so great: you feel like your choices really do matter. It’s also great as a solo game because you can spend as much time as you want considering and reconsidering your choices. Many times, I would start out a few actions, but then realized I had to do it a different way, so I would rewind … I would only rewind in Phase 5 and redo the player actions. I don’t consider this cheating because I was only “trying” my actions to see what the effects were … I never let a rewind cross out of Phase 5 to use information I didn’t have. And that’s the great thing about the solo mode: you can just try stuff out. It’s a puzzle!

Now, there is another way to play so: pretend you are playing a two player cooperative game and operate two characters! Even though I have played most of my solo games with the official solo rules (playing Sammu-ramat), I think the two-handed solo game might be better … why? Why, you ask? Because there’s no exceptions! The official solo mode described on page 20 of the rulebook has about a third of a page of “new rules” (with the 4th stage extra card being the most persnickety). If you play two-handed solo, you are just playing the base game with no exceptional rules: the game is as it was meant to be played.

The two-handed solo definitely feels different, mostly because each character usually has about 3 actions per phase, whereas the solo player in the offficial solo game has 2 actions for three characters. Both essentially get 6 actions per turn, but there’s something more satisfying about getting to do three actions on your turn: you feel like you can “complete” things you need to do.

Two-handed solo also has to worry more about card management, as there’s more work to manage two hands of Ashur cards. So there’s that: it’s a little more maintenance. But, if you are just going to learn Sammu-ramat solo just to teach the game to others to play cooperatively, I recommend using the two-handed solo mode: it feels more like how the game will flow cooperatively.

It might also be easier to learn the solo game two-handed because that’s what the Plutorial teaches! My first game was two-handed solo to learn the game, and then I went to the official solo mode for my first campaign (as there is slightly less maintenance in the official solo mode).

It’s up to you: both solo modes work well! Two-handed solo reflects more what the game feels like cooperatively, at cost of a little more maintenance. The official solo mode has less maintenance per turn, but has enough exceptional rules to occasionally throw you for a loop.

Campaign

Although you can play just a one-off game of Sammu-ramat, there’s a lot of fun to trying one of the campaigns. Basically, the campaign is 5 games in a rows from Challenge Cards labelled A,B,C,D,E (there are multiple of each letter to give the campaign some variety).

What’s different is that you save state between games! See above as I record the state of the my game at the end of Challenge A. To start the next game, you start in “whatever state you left the game in”, and continue!

After each Challenge card is complete, you score that gives you a sense of how well you did: yes, this is a “score-based” assesment.

I didn’t do great, but I did make it to mediocrity at the end of my full campaign. I guess it’s better than being a forgotten ruler.

What’s great about the campaign is that it’s only 5 puzzles (5 challenges), but what you do matters even more, as you set yourself up for he next game! Maybe you’ll spend an extra turn to win so you can set-up something great in the next game!

I spent the entire weekend playing through the campaign as a solo player (official mode), and I had a blast.

Cooperative Play

Although most of my plays have been solo and/or the campaign, I was able to get the game to the table with game group: we got a 3 player game going and had a good time.

We did play with full Player Selected Turn Order (see below for more discussion), as Sara pointed out that it makes you feel more involved: each player chooses a character, and by allowing us to go in whatever order we want, we are more engaged and invested in our character (“I chose this character, and I can’t play it in the right order??!!?”)

Unfortunately, we did lose, but it was because we were too concerned for keeping all the Ishtar Gates, as opposed to the servicing the goals! I think the plan is to try again.

We had fun playing even though we lost! We talked, discussed what we needed to do, and executed our plans! This game could easily go sideways with an Alpha Player, if someone really knows the game. Luckily, there are so many moving systems, it does mitigate that a little.

It was a good, engaging, cooperative game. It’s clear, this game needs a good teacher though: I think going into this game without someone knowing the game is a recipe for disaster. There’s too many systems to lean this game “on-the-fly”. if you do want to play this game cooperatively, make sure someone shepherds you into the game for the best experience.

Randomness

There isn’t much randomness in this game. Combat is predictable: there’s no dice. The “bad news” that comes from the Challenge Cards is completely known to you at the start of a Challenge: you know what’s coming.

The greatest source of randomness was the Event Cards. There is no way (that I’ve seen at least) to predict what Event will come out, so you just have to deal with it. In general, the events were’t devastating, but they did cause things to be dealt with. It did seem, once per game, one event would just completely screw you! But, it always felt you could come back from it! The randomness did NOT seem debilitating by any means.

The other source of randomness was the Ashur Cards, as you didn’t know what you would get from turn to turn. But, the randomness there was usually not an issue: you could either use a Ashur card to power an ability, or you could draw extra Ashur Cards if you really needed something. In general, the Ashur cards were more of a resource that was sometimes more or less useful, but it didn’t seem too random.

All of this goes to say: I don’t think the randomness of this game is untethered. Most of the actions have known outcomes (combat, Challenge Card bad news, actions), but there’s just enough randomness to keep the game spicy (between the random Events and the much less random Ashur cards). Sammu-ramat is not a wargame with lots of dice and randomness; it is a fairly explicit puzzle.

Some House Rules To Consider

This game uses a stilted version of Player Selected Turn Order (PSTO) (see our discussion of PSTO here to learn more). On the first turn of each month, players talk and figure out which player goes first: hurray! Players select the order for the first player … but then, play rotates clockwise!! So, the players only get Player Selected Turn Order for the beginning of the turn!

This is a strange decision to limit the PSTO because the (official) solo game has full selected Player Turn Order: the solo player gets to activate three characters in whatever order he wants every turn! So, this seems a strange decision to limit the PSTO. Usually, it’s because many people aren’t used to PSTO and it can sometimes be harder to notate (see more discussion here). I suspect adding full PSTO to the cooperative game would be more fun, as it would make the players feel like they have more choice? It’s already been play-tested in the solo mode, so why not add it to the cooperative mode?

One tool the players have to help them is technology. The technology tokens are lain around the board, and players can pick them up as they explore the map. See a bunch above of technology above: the shield gives +1 defense, the mule gives +1 movement, etc.

You can see Deoices has picked up the Amphora (vase) above (with 5 Goods as well) and it’s on his character card! He can now use it! It’s got a cool ability … but it can’t be traded. Almost everything else can be traded (Ashur cards, goods) …why not technology? From a game perspective, all the technology pieces are physical things that should be able to traded (sword, vial, shield, etc), so it makes sense from that perspective that they can be traded. BUT, by not mentioning explicitly that you can trade technology, it’s clear that the rules don’t allow it. The physical nature makes me think they should be, so thematically it makes sense. In fact, you might accidentally trade if you don’t look too closely at the rules!

I would suggest two minor house rules to make the game more consistent:

Allow trading of technology as Goods and Ashur cards (so it’s more consistent with other trading rules). If you are worried about balance with this rule, you can make a trade of technology a full action rather than a free action.
Allow full Player Selected Turn Order (so it’s more consistent with the solo game)

Of course, caveat emptor: both of these rules might change playtesting and balance. The game is pretty hard as it is, so I don’t think these minor changes will do anything except make the game more fun: it’s a more consistent application of rules and gives the players more choice!

What I Loved

I loved the puzzle of this game. There were always enough options (between Ashur cards and special abilities) that I always felt I could solve the puzzle.

There’s quite a bit of variety in here on the Challenge cards! There’s always a different kind of puzzle to solve even if you master one Challenge!

The campaign is a really good way to extend the replayability of the game. I love that you can start from scratch and play a game, but it’s such an interesting puzzle to see what happens if you leave the game state between Challenges! The Campaign will be very different every time!

I love this game as a solo game. The fact that you can play solo two ways is also great, depending on what you are in the mood for.

The Plutorial (Playthough and Tutorial) really drew me into the game. I am very worried I would not have suffered through the rulebook without the Plutorial. I love that this exists, and I wish more heavy games would have very explicit set-up and playthroughs like this!

Component Issues

As much as I like this game, there were a number of physical component issues.

A very minor component issue is that the little cardboard stands fell off all the time: the cardboard bases really needed to be plastic bases.

You are supposed to put a military and a diviner on top of the Ishtar Gate, but they frequently fell off, especially when you were moving around other tokens near it (see above). The corrugated tops of the Ishtar Gates was a nice effect, but it made the tops even more precarious.

The board is reasonably sized and looks decent, but it doesn’t take good advantage of space! The is a ton of “empty space” near the top and the bottom (middle) that is never used for anything! There are two obvious things it could have been used for: One would be useful charts and info (technology descriptions for instance). A second, better use, would have to have made each area and location bigger! I can’t tell you how many times I would move or knock over tokens because there were so many in one area! See above as Canaan was just overrun and had too many tokens.

For example, at the start of the game especially, you might have 4 characters in Kahlu (see above) and they just barely fit! I would have loved to somehow made the areas and location on the board bigger to take advantage of the unused space at the top and bottom of the board. I suspect part of the issue was trying to make the area more geographically correct, which makes sense since this game a educational bent as well. Games like Pandemic: World of Warcraft, however, have solved the map issue by simply having an expanding magnifying glass view expanded “away” from the location. Take a look at the map from Pandemic: World of Warcraft below:

Notice how the boards spaces the Locations fairly consistently, even if the actual map location is pointed to by the area? I suspect the usability of the Sammu-ramat map could have been helped by some technique like this.

Related to that, sometimes you couldn’t see what Goods were produced by a Area because of the labelling as behind all the tokens! What Goods does Assyria produce? You can’t see, but it’s Textiles!

Honestly, the smaller areas/locations is my biggest problem with the game: Sammu-ramat could have played so much smoother if the areas/locations were even bigger! There’s a lot of rules to absorb in this game, and anything that helps facilitate that play experience makes it easier to absorb those rules.

Theme

So, this game has an educational bent: it immerses the players into Queen Sammu-ramat’s rule of Assyria in 9th century BC, as guided by her advisors.

Near the end of the rulebook are backstories for each of the advisors.

Also, the Historical introduction (at the very front of the rulebook) gives a quick discussion of this world.

For me, the theme does nothing. Let’s be clear: the research and historical basis in this game is to be commended! I suspect a lot of time was put into the research and history of this game: that’s very clear and impressive.

I feel like I did learn a little geography and some history from the characters of the time. In general, I probably wouldn’t have picked this up if something didn’t grab me on Gamefound originally. I am really glad I picked it up, but I think I would have preferred a re-theming:

bp2

I would have loved for this to be a Superhero game based in the DC Universe! Instead of Assyria, have the setting be the streets of Arkham! Imagine if this were a Birds of Prey series! It would still preserve the role of the women being in charge, but perhaps the DC theme would be more engaging for more people! Oracle would be Sammu-ramut, trying to orchestrate the heroes to keep the streets of Arkham under control! The advisers would be the heroes: Black Canary as Dinah (her secret identity is even Dinah in the comic books), Commissioner Gordon as Deoices, Nightwing as Wardiya, … just to name a few! Getting an Ishtar Gate would be like cleaning up a neighborhood: getting a hospital (medical), food (supplies), protection (police), and good samaritans (diviners) makes a neighborhood safe again!

birdsofprey

I’m telling you, it would be so easy to re-theme this game, and I’ll bet you Kickstarter would go crazy for this game if it were called Birds of Prey: Arkham Nights! There is a fantastic core game with the base of Sammu-ramat. I’m not trying to be disrespectful of all the amazing work here, I am just saying a theme that would perhaps be more accesible: I’d love to see a version of this emerge called Birds of Prey: Arkham Nights (A Sammu-ramat game)!

Conclusion

Despite my having no connection to the theme, there being some component quality issues, and some issues relating to clarity in the rulebook, I could see this being one of my top games of the year! Sammu-ramat is a fantastic puzzle! It somehow manages to be a cooperative euro game (gathering scarce resources) while also being a cooperative wargame (keeping bad guys under control)! The puzzles set-up by Sammu-ramat with its Challenges cards offer endless variety to keep me coming back for more!

The cooperative game is good: my friends gave it a 6.5 or 7/10: we had fun. We definitely recommend embracing full PSTO for the cooperative game. The more important thing is to make sure someone shepherds you into the cooperative game: there’s too much game to learn this “on the fly”.

As a solo game, this is either a 8.5/10 or even 9/10 for me! I think I would like this game even more if they fixed the production issues and had a retheming to Birds of Prey: Arhkham Nights: I think that would bump this to a 9.5 or even 10/10 for me. This game is that good.

The game had a very small Gamefound campaign: $12,461 crowdfunded by 235 backers. This game is fantastic and deserves a much bigger release!

A place to talk about cooperative board and card games!

Unboxing

The Elephant In The Room

Rulebook

New Idea: Side Quests

New Idea: Wardens

New Idea: Nemesis

New Idea: Mythic Items

New Idea: Game Break

Doomed Run Campaign

But Was It Fun?

Solo And Cooperative

Theme or No Theme?

Mixing and Matching

Storage

Conclusion

RPG or Board Game?

Session 0: Getting Ready

Session 1: Paris Scenario: The Petals of Belladona

Meanwhile …

Session 2: Playing Loop 2 With The Deluxe Components

Well-Crafted Murder Mystery?

Despite

A Comparison To Spirit of 77

The Book

Physical vs. Electronic

Conclusion

Unboxing of the The Big Box

Unboxing of Robinson Crusoe: Collector’s Edition

The Case of the Missing Monkey

First Edition

The Introductory Campaign

Scenario 1: Warm Welcome To Tamatoa

Scenario 2: Which Way The Wind Blows?

Scenario 3: Looking For Answers

Scenario 4: Lords Of Fog

Set-Up

Conclusion

Unboxing and Gameplay

Rulebook

Other Touches

Solo Play

Cooperative Play

Which One?

Conclusion

Unboxing

Rulebook

The Tutorial

Gameplay

Solo Game: Patient 1

Cooperative Game

What I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Conclusion

Unboxing

Rulebook … I mean … Pamphlet.

Gameplay

Solo Game

Cooperative Game

What I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Conclusion

Unboxing and Gameplay

Rulebook

Solo Mode

Cooperative Mode

Repacking

Conclusion

Unboxing and Plutorial

Plutorial: Playthrough and Tutorial

Rulebook

What Is This Game?

Solo Mode

Campaign

Cooperative Play

Randomness

Some House Rules To Consider

What I Loved

Component Issues

Theme