The Reckoners
published by Nauvoo Games
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TL,DR Corner
- Players: 1-6
- Time (on box / actual): 75 minutes / 120 minutes
- Setup / Teardown Time: 7 min./10 min.
- Footprint: Large table
- Components: 3/5
- Fun-factor: 4/5
- Replayability: 3/5
- Style: Co-op, dice allocation, simultaneous action
- Summary: a co-op that requires some strategy and communication between the players to deal with ever-increasing threats, hampered slightly by its footprint, and slightly mired in some design choices made more for aesthetics than for game play.
I’m a sucker for co-op games. Ask anyone who knows me: I’ll play just about any co-op you put in front of me over nearly any competitive game. So it was, when Gen Con was approaching, I perused the list of games coming to the show, and saw a very shining review by Tom Vasel, about this super-non-hero game that could be played solo and up to six players, based on a book series by Brandon Sanderson. I’d never read the series, but otherwise this hit pretty much every button for me, and I decided I would take a chance on it.
On first impressions, the game itself is a beast, which might be a tad intimidating, until you notice that most of the components are bulky and there's actually very few components in the box. Thanks to the GameTrayz designed boards, everything fits mostly snugly, though there's definitely enough room for things to slip around and out of their places, especially the dice, which fit in this track-system that doesn't appear to be designed to come out of the box for use during play. This is good and bad, as I'll get into, later.
The goal of the game is defeat the Big Bad - one Epic named Steelheart, who has taken over the city of Chicago, given it a shiny steel gleam (think "Midas," but he turns inanimate things into steel), and declared himself the lord and master of this "Newcago." Unfortunately, he's immune to all damage, at the beginning of the game, and it'll be the players' job to research his weakness, make him vulnerable, and take him down, all while trying to keep his minor Epic minions from wantonly murdering the populace of normal people.
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| A City District with Epic. Steelheart is in this zone, along with three "Enforcement" units |
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| The Reckoners tray. |
Lastly, the Reckoners tray is set to the other side, with a track for Populace (which is your countdown to losing), another track for money gained (for buying Equipment), a track for Steelheart's progress finding one of your hideouts, Equipment cards available for purchase, and spaces to "lock" dice that Steelheart takes when he finds your hideout.
The rules are very simple:
Players take their phase, which consists of rolling their characters' dice, and deciding which ones to keep, Yahtzee-style (two re-rolls allowed, not including anything from equipment they gather over time), using the symbols on those dice to take actions, and then buying any equipment or gaining any rewards they might have earned from dice or defeating the minor Epics in each City District.
Using dice is simple enough. The player can take the action shown on the die (remove Enforcement, Research an Epic of the District they are in, Attack an Epic of the District they are in, gain money, "Contain" an Epic of the District they are in, or gain a Plan token for next turn). Alternatively, they can use a die to remove any Barricades from any District in the City, or to move to another District that is not Barricaded. Any Plan tokens that the players have previously earned may be spent as a "wild" to act as any of the symbols on a Basic die, so stocking them up is often a wise decision that will give you flexibility to react to situations around the city.
Once the players have defeated Epics and taken the rewards from those Epics (which might include things like giving them Research hits on Steelheart, Contain actions, money, etc.), they can then spend any money they have collectively to purchase Equipment from one of the four available in the Reckoner base tray. More Equipment cards are revealed as soon as one is purchased, so there's really no limit to the number of Equipment that can be bought per Reckoner Phase other than available money. At this time, players may also choose to spend money to unlock dice that were taken away by Steelheart finding their base during his part of the Epics Phase.
Next up is the Epic Phase, where you replace any Epics who were defeated in the Reckoners Phase, activate abilities for every Epic in the City (going clockwise around the trays, starting where Steelheart is located). Those abilities may either increase Steelheart's action tracks, kill populace, or heal / improve neighboring Epics. After that, they increase their action track level by 1 plus the number of Enforcement in their District, which makes leaving Enforcement out a dangerous proposition. Finally, Steelheart takes all the actions on his four tracks, which includes killing off populace, searching for the Reckoners base, adding Enforcement to the Districts, and adding Barricades to the Districts. A player rolls to see where Steelheart moves next. Players pick up their dice and start the next Reckoners Phase, and this is how it goes until either the Populace is reduced to zero, or the players work Steelheart's Research track and Health track to 0.
The players really have to work together to keep track of the threats in the city and continue working down Steelheart, or it's amazingly easy to get overrun. Those Contain actions are used to knock down action tracks of Epics, and are essential for making sure that the Epics don't spiral out of control, but you also need to make sure Enforcement is handled, so they don't balloon Epics action tracks, etc. Overall, this makes for an involving process of cooperation between players, and it can be very satisfying to come to the sudden realization that you can take down a couple Epics simultaneously with some well-coordinated dice work.
The components are all well made. The dice are especially satisfying to roll, though their size and weight, when all players are rolling them at the same time, makes for quite the clattering. The minis are not especially exciting, but they are solidly built. The artwork is really nice, and the graphic design work overall is well done, with plenty of examples throughout the rule book, and a helpful reference on the back. There are player aids as well, if you don't want to keep the rulebook on the table, though you will need it for initial set up, as the tables that indicate starting health/research levels for Steelheart are squirreled into the first few pages.
Saving table space is a big concern with this game, however. The pictures above show a simple two-player setup (though I played it solo for that game, they recommend a 2p setup for solo). It took the better portion of our kitchen table, with extension. The extra dice, which you'll need for people to acquire dice from when they purchase certain Equipment cards, have no place to stay but in the box, or piled next to the other board pieces on the table. The tray that holds Enforcement and Barricades has to fit there, too. We barely fit four people around the table for that play-through, and I'm not sure how we'd manage to pull off a full six-player game in our available space.
The player trays present a few issues: The dice that the players roll are kept track of on their player board, but the slots on the player board don't really mean anything. In fact, the only space on the player board that really matters is the little space for keeping track of Plan tokens that are available during their turn. Every other space on the board is mechanically irrelevant. There are no limits to the number of dice you can keep in one roll... if you like all the dice you roll on your first roll, you can keep them all, but the trays at first glance make you think that there is a cap of three dice kept for each roll. Secondly, there are six slots for you to place allocated dice during the Use Dice phase, but you can (and should) gain more dice through equipment, and there is no limit to the number of dice you can choose to use.
The City Districts, as well, point to a design that revolves far more on looks than efficiency. The GameTrayz have a space for "everything" but each City District is exactly like the others, except in artwork. There is no point to them, other than to make things look better, but they sacrifice much-needed table space for that artistic choice. It feels like there might have been an attempt to make each District add some other mechanic, but it feels like they ran out of time to fine tune the balance issues that would arise from giving each District a unique mechanic. Similarly, the minor Epics have their action tracks, but those actions don't really feel thematically tied to their abilities, so the theme is very much skin-deep. You could boil the game down to a score pad that kept track of Steelheart's Research and Health levels and feel about as immersed in the goal of taking him down as you do with the big, chunky trays.
The important aspect here is that I did have fun, as did the others who played with me, and they're interested in playing again. I don't see this having as long of a replay value as other co-ops, where there is more variance, or deeper ties between theme and mechanics, to draw players back. Certainly, the design could have been made more compact, less ostentatious, and still kept some of its artistic flair, and they could have in that same design decision, brought down the price. The GameTrayz in this case are, except in one tray's design, purely extraneous, and I'd rather have seen more focus on gameplay variance than on the glamour of having these trays that take up a lot of space but add nothing in terms of utility.
If you're looking for something in the Reckoners universe, and you have the space, it's a fun, big game that definitely looks impressive on a table. I'm betting some other co-ops that have a similar feel (to me, Thanos Rising: Infinity War feels pretty similar) will hit my table more often, but mostly because of their more tightly designed, or compact nature, when I have limited space. It will be interesting to see what changes the designers make over time, if any, as I've heard some people mention that the designers wanted to start off with a very streamlined experience to start with, and were considering adding other layers over time. I hope they do so, otherwise I don't see this going much beyond its initial peaking interest.
