How to Play Dead Reckoning

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I’ve suffered a minor... injury ... since we last  spoke. It’s embarrassing. i don’t want to talk   about it. So AEG, who sponsored this video, sent  along this prototype copy of Dead Reckoning, an   open sandbox deck-building, pirate game, with the  unique card-crafting system you might recognize   from the designer John D. Clair’s earlier effort,  Mystic Vale. If you’d like to see how setup goes,   skip to the end of the video. Otherwise, stick  around and let me show you how to play!   You and your friends each command a ship  in an old-timey period when every day was   brought to you by the letter “ARR.” You’ll sail  the seas discovering islands, taking them over,   building stuff on them, gaining cargo, stashing  gold, and upgrading your ship. Your crew cards   are transparent envelopes that you can customize  with different abilities that you gain at sea.   You’ll also level up one of your crew members each  round to make them more and more mighty. But is   there fighting? Of course there’s fighting! You’ll  be dropping cubes into this ship-shaped cube tower   to duke it out with merchants, enemy buildings,  and player-controlled pirates. There are all kinds   of different achievements to earn and strategies  to explore. At the end of the game, you rack up   coins for every cool thing you did, and whoever  has the biggest booty (significant look) wins!   Here are your starting digs: you’ve got a ship  at port, equipped with two sails and a cannon.   It can carry 7 units of cargo and/or coins - 3  here, and 4 here. You’ve got a treasure chest   filled with 15 coins, and a deck of starting crew  cards, with everyone cutting their gold teeth   at level 1. This remote harbour tile is  the same as the harbour spot in your ship   colour - it’s just portable so you don’t  have to keep reaching across the table.   You start with a certain amount of cargo in your  harbour depending on your spot in turn order.   The ocean map is a 4x3 array of tiles. These  ones start flipped over, and each tile gets a   randomly drawn advancement or encounter on it. You’re gonna be sailing around doing cool stuff,   and trying to knock off these various  achievements. The first player to finish   4 achievements triggers the end of the  game. Everyone else gets one last turn,   and then you rake in gold for a bunch of different  things to get your final score. I think that if   we go over these achievements, you may not  fully understand everything i’m talking about,   but it’ll give you a great idea of what goes on  in the game, and maybe you’ll get a vague sense of   what to shoot for. (point at camera) Hhhhey! ACHIEVEMENTS   You’ll earn this one for exploring x  different ocean tiles, where x depends   on the number of players in the game. To get the Master Merchant achievement, you   have to cash in 12 barrels of cargo in one go. You can become a Capitalist by stuffing 30 coins   in your chest. The coins in your chest stay secret  throughout the game, but you gotta let everyone   know you’re filthy rich and show your coins  to take this achievement once you reach 30.   The Builder achievement goes to any player who  owns 5 or more buildings at one moment in time.   If you lose control of an island with a  building on it dropping you below 5 buildings,   you still keep the achievement. Get the Expert Sailors achievement by   upgrading three of your crew cards to level 4. The Elite Vessel achievement means you’ve   gussied up your ship with 4 upgrade tiles. If you get 6 or more permanent cubes on various   islands, you can claim the Settler achievement. To become the Terror of the Sea, you have to sink   another player’s ship. And you earn the Legendary   achievement for winning 4 battles against  anything other than a building.   So grab any four of those  achievements to trigger endgame.   But the triggerer is not necessarily the winner,  as we’ll see later when we talk about scoring.   YER TURN Your turn is split into two phases: doing stuff,   and cleaning up. When you’re doing stuff, you’ve  got a bunch of stuff you can do, and you can do   that stuff in any order, as often as you want to  or can afford to. Here’s what that stuff is:   You can load, unload, or rejig your cargo and  coins. There are a few different places where   you can stash your goods: cargo and coins can  go on your ship, cargo can go on your dock,   and coins can go in your treasure chest. You can  also move cargo and coins to or from islands that   you control, but it’s a little riskier to  do that, because pirates. These icons with   the little anchor mean you get cargo or a coin  on your dock, these ones mean that stuff goes   on your ship, these ones mean the stuff goes on  an island, and these ones mean the stuff can go   anywhere. Then if you see the same icons  with a slash through them, that means you   LOSE the stuff from those locations. So when you’re docked at the harbour,   you can unload any number of cargo barrels from  your ship to your dock tile, and vice versa,   if you can fit it. You can offload coins  from your ship to your treasure chest.   These spots on your ship can hold cargo and/or  coins, and the limit is written here. Later,   you can upgrade your ship to carry more stuff. If there’s a jerk pirate at an island you control,   you can’t load and unload there. You’ll have  to defeat that pirate first before you can   access the island. And if there are multiple jerk  pirates, you’ll have to defeat all of them!   You can always move the stuff around on your  ship at any time, even when it’s not your turn,   and even when you’re about to be attacked  - so you can just dump your booty into the   ocean before a fight and let it float away  back to the general supply. Once the battle   starts though, you can’t touch your stuff -  you have to wait til the fight is over.   You’ll have drawn a hand of cards, and you play  as many of them out in front of you as you like   at any point during your turn. On your turn,  you can use the abilities on your cards now   or later during your turn, or you can just  let a crew member sit there. We’ll see why   you might do that in a second. And we’ll take  a closer look at what the cards do shortly.   You can also set your sails. This is the only  action that you can take only once on your turn,   because sails are the finite movement points  that you’ll use to travel around the map,   and once they’re gone, that means the wind  has died down, and you won’t get them back   until your next turn - even if you play  a card that has more sails on it.   You count up the sail icons you have on your ship  and your cards, and move the token to that number.   So that’s how many movement points you get. Your  ship has two sail icons to start, but the catch   is that if you’ve got any coins or cargo blocking  up either of these two sections, you can’t hoist   those sails, so you don’t get those movement  points. BUT, if you’re docked at the harbour or   at an island you control with no enemy pirates  around, you can technically offload all your   stuff, hoist your sails, and then load it all back  on. So the shorthand for this is that you get to   hoist these ship sails whether they’re blocked or  not, as long as you’re at harbour or at an island   you control that isn’t infested with pirates. If you’re at an island you don’t control,   you could always unload your stuff there in  order to hoist more sails, but you can’t load   that stuff back onto your ship, since it’s not  your island. Alternatively, you could rearrange   your stuff to free up a sail... or dump it in  the ocean, if you really need sails this turn.   Your ship can move orthogonally around the map,  but never diagonally. It costs one sail point per   tile to move. Every dock is just one movement  point away from any of the first row of tiles,   so this player can move down here  with a single movement point.   If you stop on an undiscovered tile, you have to  flip that tile over. There’s a numbered box of   enhancement and encounter cards for each of the  four rows - take one out of the box and stick   it on the new island. You can move through  an undiscovered tile to a discovered one...   but you can only discover one tile on your  turn, so if you’ve flipped a tile and you   still have movement points, you can’t sail onto  an undiscovered tile and end your turn there.   Whenever you discover a tile, remember to put  one of your cubes on the Navigator achievement.   Once you place x cubes depending on player  count, you can put your marker there   and claim the achievement. You’re allowed to move through   or stop on tiles with other players’ ships on  them, because they’re peaceful merchants and it’s   all cool. But some players are in pirate mode,  which means they’re jerks. You can move through   a tile with one or more players who are in pirate  mode, but if you stop there, you’ll start a fight.   If more than one pirate is there, you’ll  start a fight with absolutely everybody.   If you’re on a tile that has an advancement or  encounter card there, you can buy or resolve it.   You can acquire up to two of these advancements  on your turn. The cost is here, so with this one,   you gotta pay 4 barrels of cargo from your  ship. You take the card and put it next to   you on the table for now. Encounters are a tiny  bit different, because they give you a choice:   you can buy them just like advancement cards,  or you can flip them over and resolve them.   All of the encounter cards in  the base game are merchant ships.   When you flip the card, you’ll usually end up  fighting the ship, and different things happen   depending on whether you win or lose. I’ll  cover combat rules shortly, so sit tight!   The cards get juicier and more powerful the  farther out to sea you sail. If you buy an   advancement card, the tile stays card-less until  the end of your turn, because that section of   sea has nothing more to teach you... for now. And the final bit of stuff you can do on your turn   is to activate an ability on a card  you’ve played out in front of you.   Some cards give you extra sails, and some get  you cargo. Most of the other symbols tie into   game mechanics we haven’t discovered yet,  so i’ll mention those as we go. At any rate,   you can put a cube on a played card to  remember that you’ve used its action.   The green vertical line means AND/OR - you get  what’s on either side of the line, one or both,   in any order you like. The red diagonal slash  is strictly OR - you have to pick one thing.   After you’re done doing all your  stuff, you perform a cleanup phase.   Because if there’s one thing i know about  pirates, it’s that they’re very tidy.   CLEANUP First, replace any missing cards by drawing   cards from the corresponding row boxes. Whenever  you deal out a merchant card, make sure it’s   face-up, because the other side is a secret. Then, you can hoist the jolly roger on your ship   to go into pirate mode. You might do this  if you’re trying to protect an island you   just conquered, or to keep another pirate  from accessing coins and cargo on his or   her own island. Or maybe you’re just doing it  to be a jerk. That’s legit. It’s a pirate game.   If you’re at the harbour, you’re not allowed to be  in pirate mode. They don’t put up with any pirate   shenanigans at harbour. If you’re still in pirate  mode from a previous turn and you don’t want to   be, you can ditch the jolly roger at this point  and go back to being an unassuming merchant.   If you have any movement points  from sails that you haven’t spent,   the wind dies down and you lose them all. If you gained any advancement cards this turn,   you can tuck them into any of the cards that you  played out in front of you to teach those crew   members new skills - but you can’t sleeve them  into crew cards that are still in your hand,   or cards in your discard pile. You can sleeve  the same played card with multiple advancements   if you want to. If the card you want to sleeve  isn’t out in front of you, you can hold the   advancement in reserve until the crew member  you’re looking for shows up in a later draw,   and you can sleeve it at the end of that turn, if  you play the crew card. But you’re only allowed to   keep one advancement card in limbo like this. Pirates are very organized learners,   so the advancement cards will have one or  more actions or icons on either the top row,   the middle row, or the bottom row, and  this little icon helps you see at a glance   which row a particular advancement fits.  Pirates aren’t great multi-taskers,   so you can’t sleeve an advancement into a crew  card that already has something in that row.   The crew members you played on your turn are  now sleepy, so throw all those played crew cards   into your discard pile, and draw 4 new cards up to  your hand limit of 6 cards, whichever comes first.   Some of the cards you played in your turn  may let you draw more than 4 cards at this   point - it’s one extra card draw for each of  these symbols you activate before discarding   your previous turn’s cards. But that increased  draw count doesn’t crank up your hand limit.   Controlling certain islands does actually increase  your hand limit, so keep your eye on those.   If your deck owes you cards,  but the draw pile is empty,   shuffle your discards. Because you’re  sleeving your cards, and some cards may   feel thicker than others, to avoid cheating  your draw by feels, you can ask another   player to cut your deck during a shuffle to  keep you honest. Honest like a pirate.   As you play, your pirates gain experience. At  any point before your next turn, you get to pick   one of the crew cards you just drew and level it  up. To crank a level 1 card up to a level 2 card,   you rotate it. To go to level 3, you flip it,  and then rotate it again to go to level 4.   Remember to mark the Expert Sailors achievement  if you boost a third card to level 4.   The ability tree for each card type  is on this handy little player guide.   You may want to wait to level up a card - say,  if someone attacks you before your next turn,   maybe you want to level up a crew member who gives  you more cannons. But if play comes around to you   and you still haven’t leveled up any of your  crew, do that before you start your turn.   ISLAND CONTROL There’s a whole area control game going on   with these islands. If your ship is at an island  and you activate one of these symbols on a card,   you can put one of your cubes on the island on  one of these spaces, to stake your claim.   Different islands have different numbers  of spaces. If all the spaces are full up,   pick someone else’s cube and replace  it with your own. Whose island?   Your island! You have to treat the  actions on your cards as discrete:   so a level 3 Buccaneer lets you place  3 cubes on an island... but remember:   pirates are lousy multitaskers. So you can’t  place 1 of those cubes here, sail next door,   and place the other two here. In other words, you  can’t split up the actions on that single row.   If you want to know if you control the island,  ask yourself two questions: do i have more   cubes there than anyone else, and do i have  more cubes than there are empty spaces? So here,   no - you don’t control this island, because you  don’t have more cubes than anyone else. And here,   no - it’s not yours because you don’t have more  cubes than there are empty spaces. But if you get   another cube on there, that island is yours. Whenever you take control of an island,   you get to write a page in that island’s  history book by putting another cube here   in this permanent cube area, and no one can knock  that cube out of there for the rest of the game.   So it is written! Remember, if you get 6  permanent cubes out onto various islands,   you can claim the Settler achievement. Any time you place a cube and control switches   to you, you get another permanent  cube. So if you control this one,   but someone takes it away from you, but you take  it back, you’re back in the books, and you get   another permanent cube on it. And if you take  control of an island that has buildings on it,   the deposed rulers wreck everything as they  flee, so those buildings get destroyed.   What can you do with an island you control? Well,  if you activate a card with this symbol on it,   you can put the people to work, and make one  of your islands produce stuff. You technically   don’t have to control the island to make it  produce goods, but it’s kind of a sketch idea   to enrich an island you don’t control, or don’t  plan to control very shortly. Pirates can’t thrive   on community booty. Look for the icon down  here to see what the island generates. If   there’s an open sea tile pointing at the island,  it gets one additional coin whenever it produces.   The clear thematic justification is  that the ocean is filled with fish   that are stuffed with money like pinatas, and  they’re spitting extra coins onto your island.   So goodies show up on the island, and since you  control it, you can load cargo and coins from   there onto your ship, as long as your ship is at  that island, and there’s no enemy pirate blocking   you. If you maintain control until the end of  the game, you also score this many coins for   the island. Second and third place area control  winners get these prizes. Different islands have   different control contests and prize amounts -  the harder it is to control an island, the bigger   the reward you get for controlling it. If you activate this symbol on a card,   you can buy a building for your island - either  fort, garrison, or outpost - for various prices.   An outpost makes the island’s citizens more  productive, so it boosts an island’s production by   1 cargo and 1 coin. Since it’s very un-pirate-like  to beat up nerds, nobody can attack an outpost.   A fort packed with soldiers and guns protects the  place. It locks the island so that only you can   interact with it - that means no one can put any  cubes there, load stuff, produce, or unload stuff,   even if they have a card that says they can,  unless the card action says it overrides forts.   Forts don’t mess around with the advancement  card on that tile - anyone can still buy the   card or resolve the encounter on that tile  even if there’s a fort on the island. It’s   not a floating fort. Other players can choose  to fight your fort. More on that later.   Garrisons do the same stuff as forts.  They’re a little bit weaker in combat,   but the cool thing is that they’ll shoot  at any ships just passing by. (HEY!!)   CARD EFFECTS As long as we’re   running down what some of the card symbols do,  let’s cover off the ones we haven’t seen yet.   Cannons give you more cubes to use in  battle. Battle’s coming! i promise!   The saw lets you buy a basic upgrade for your  ship, and the saw with a hammer lets you buy an   elite upgrade. Pay the cost and put the upgrade  on your ship. You can stack the tiles if you want   or need to, like when your uncle built that new  deck on top of his old deck. Each tile is worth   endgame points to you whether it’s covered  up or not. Remember, you can earn the Elite   Vessel achievement for buying 4 upgrade tiles. This icon lets you repair damage on your ship.   5 damage tokens will sink you, so you  don’t want to let them pile up.   Wheels don’t do anything on their  own, but they act as a multiplier   when paired with other effects. So for example,  this advancement puts a wheel on the card,   and gives you a cannon for every wheel  on the card. So that’s 1 cannon. But if   you add another wheel to the card later, now  you’re getting 2 cannons - 1 for each wheel.   This icon lets you attack another  player who isn’t already asking for   a fight by being in pirate mode. Some cards have battle effects,   which we’ll talk about in a sec. We’re  almost at combat! Don’t pop your eyepatch!   Finally, there’s some purple jazz on some of  the cards that give you endgame scoring bonuses,   like this one, which lets you cash in cargo  for coins at the end of the game.   FIGHTIN’   Yoho! We made it to combat! Here’s  how you fight in Dead Reckoning.   If you stop on a tile with one or  more pirates on it, you fight.   If you choose to battle a merchant card  instead of buying it, you fight.   If you want to destroy someone’s  building, you fight.   If you pick on a poor innocent ship  using yer attack icon, you fight.   And you get one crack at  fighting each ship, merchant,   or building on your turn. There’s no repeat  fighting on your turn, whether ye win or lose.   Let’s fight a merchant ship first. Flip the card,  and if there’s a fight to be had, the card will   tell you how many battle cubes the merchant ship  gets. Then, you take battle cubes for yourself   based on how many cannons you have on your  ship, and for any cannons on cards you decide   to play and activate. The cannons are one use per  turn, so if you plan on fighting multiple things,   you might want to keep a few cannons  in reserve for your next battle.   So you get cubes, and the merchant gets  cubes, and you drop those cubes into the ship   where they scatter out onto the battle board.  If a cube lands tilted, it’s considered to be   in the space it’s sorta touching. If it lands  fully outside of any recess, you re-drop it.   If a cube lands here, that’s an explosive  shot. The cube’s owner gets an extra cube,   and you drop both back into the ship. Ka-pow! Then, if you have any battle abilities on your   cards, you can activate them  now in any order you like.   These are the victory spots that decide the  battle. Whoever gets the most victories wins,   and in the case of a tie - even at 0-0  - the player whose turn it is wins.   Next, if any cubes land here, their owners gain  plunder that’s just randomly floating around in   the ocean, probably from exploding those fish  pinatas i mentioned earlier. The plunder either   goes on your ship, if you can fit it, on the  island where the battle is happening, or back into   the ocean to feed the fish. Merchant ships don’t  get any plunder, so don’t worry about them.   Then, you resolve these spots, which can  potentially damage both ships - but if you’re   fighting a merchant, only the merchant  cubes landing there will damage you.   Put these tokens on to track the damage. Merchant ships have win and loss conditions   printed on them. If you lose to a merchant  ship, follow the loss conditions and get rid   of the card. If you win, you may get to sleeve  a merchant ship card for its tasty benefits.   If you stop your movement in pirate-infested  waters, or if you use an attack symbol to   take on a peaceful ship, you begin a player vs  player battle. In the case of multiple pirates,   you have to fight every pirate on the tile, but  you decide who to point your cannons at first.   There are a few differences between a player  vs player and a player vs merchant card battle:   If the fight takes place at an island either  player controls, that player gets one extra cube   per building on the island, because that’s that  pirate’s home turf. If you attack a player at the   harbour, the harbour guard steps in to help: so  the defending player gets four extra battle cubes.   After the attacking player counts up cannons  and declares how many cubes he or she will drop,   the defending player gets to play and activate  cards from his or her hand to figure out how   many cubes to defend with. Defenders defend with  all of their cannons on their in-play cards. And   those cards stay in play until the  defender’s turn later in the round,   so if anyone else attacks that person,  those cards can be reactivated in defense.   The cannons are only one-use if you’re  attacking with them - they’re multi-use   if you’re defending against various  players before your turn comes up.   After you drop both players’ cubes,  and before resolving the battle board,   starting with the active player, you have an  opportunity to influence the results of the drop:   you go back and forth, and activate your  cards’ battle abilities. This volley only   ends after both players pass consecutively. Battle  abilities can sway the fight’s outcome. If cubes   land in these spots, both player ships get to  collect fish pinata plunder, win or lose.   All of the spots on the battle board  resolve according to whose cube lands there,   except these damage spots: if your cube lands  there, the other player takes the damage.   If a player loses the fight, his or  her ship gets one damage token on it.   If that player was in pirate mode, the ship  gets stripped of its jolly roger, which means   you can interact with the island again. If you  didn’t defeat every pirate on the tile, the   island is blockaded, and you can’t access it. If the player who wins the fight doesn’t already   have the Legendary achievement, he or she gains a  cube in that spot. Four wins against anything that   isn’t a building gains you that achievement. Ok - so what if you fight a building? As long as   the island isn’t protected by one or more pirates,  you can fight either a fort or a garrison. A fort   gets 5 cubes, while the weaker garrison gets  2. Outposts can’t be attacked. All the rules   are the same, except that only the attacker can  use battle abilities, and nobody gets any fish   pinata plunder if the cubes land on those spaces.  If you win, you knock out the building you fought.   If you lose, your ship takes a damage token. Five or more damage tokens sink a ship.   If you take five or more tokens during a battle,  finish the battle and then sink. If you take your   fifth token outside of battle - say, by being  shot by a garrison - you sink immediately.   You lose 5 coins from your ship.  If you don’t have 5 on your ship,   you lose the coins from your treasure chest  instead. Your ship gets warped back to harbour,   you ditch all the damage tokens, your sails get  deflated to zero, and everybody laughs at you.   If you have any coins left on your ship, they go  straight into your chest. If another player caused   you to sink, the coins you lose go directly to  that player’s treasure chest... and that player   earns the Terror of the Sea achievement. Cubes are limited... if you ever run out of   them during a battle, you have to  pluck them from your islands.   ENDGAME Once a player earns a   fourth achievement, that triggers the end of the  game. That player finishes up his or her turn,   and then everyone else gets one more turn. Players who are finished their final turn still   get to draw cards for a new hand, and they still  get to upgrade 1 of their crew cards this round,   because they might still be attacked by  the players who haven’t finished yet.   Players who go out in combat games tend to be  sitting ducks for the active players to pick on,   but Dead Reckoning has a solution for that:  if you want to knock out island cubes owned   by a player who’s out of the game, you have  to pay two cubes for every 1 you replace.   And a player who’s out of the game gets two  extra battle cubes to fight with if attacked.   SCORING After the last   player has taken a final turn, you count up  the gold you earned from all kinds of places.   First, you get the coin value  next to your achievement markers.   Partial progress on achievements like  The Explorer earn you nothing.   Then, count up your coins in your chest, on  your ship... and on islands you control.   You get 1 coin for every building  on an island you control.   Every 2 advancements you bought get you 1  coin, whether they’re sleeved or not.   Each basic ship upgrade tile you built gets you a  coin, and each advanced tile gets you two coins,   even if the tile is covered up by another one. If you have cards with any purple metascoring   bonuses, count those up. Then, award coins according to the   island control contests. If two players tie, they  each get the prize for the next level down - so a   tie for third place gets you nothing. The  weird part is that empty spaces count as   another player, presumably because someone already  controlled the island before the game began - so   here, the empties take first, and the  blue player takes second place.   If there’s a tie at the end of the game, it’s  decided by fightin’: all tied players count   up all the cannons on their ship and their cards,  and drop that many cubes into the cube tower.   Nobody gets to use any battle abilities on cards,  but the exploding shot spaces still count. Battle   strength wins it, and if you’re still tied, keep  dropping until one pirate comes out on top.
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Channel: Nights Around a Table
Views: 14,345
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: pirate, board game, boardgame, tutorial, instructional, kickstarter, how to play, watch it played, John D. Clair, Ian O'Toole, AEG, Alderac Entertainment Group, let's play, preview, ships, rum, buccaneer, privateer, jolly roger, Pirates of the Caribbean, Merchants & Marauders
Id: Twrp1lnc2_8
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 31min 13sec (1873 seconds)
Published: Fri Jan 08 2021
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