Taking a look at Set a Watch: Swords of the Coin

[Music] foreign hey everybody welcome back to the dungeon dive Daniel here I hope you're doing well and if you're not I hope you are soon okay today we are going to take a quick look at set a watch Swords of the coin set a watch Swords of the coin is a standalone follow-up slash expansion to the original set of Watch I have only played the swords of the coin version so I am not sure how different it is to the original basically this game is about a group of really unfortunate Heroes and this a group of four Heroes you're always going to play with four Heroes no matter how many uh players are involved I am playing as the heretic the artificer the Bounty Hunter and the Barbarian additionally there is a monk character I know I'm not playing the monk that's odd huh and a witch character but these four heroes are working together to escort a caravan of merchants to a final destination and each night the band is attacked by a battle line of monsters this is like like every single night these heroes are absolutely overwhelmed with monsters trying to fight them and the heroes have to hold off the monsters while one hero is tending to the camp you are having to balance which Heroes you are sending out what hero is tending to the camp which hero is healing and which heroes are out fighting trying not to exhaust all of their various Powers because if all of the powers on the heroes who are fighting if all those Powers get exhausted then the game has been lost all the heroes on watch are unable to defend against the onslaught of monsters so the game is a combination dice game card game and Resource Management game at the beginning of each one of the phases you're going to take all of the dice that your Heroes use and each of the different Heroes uses a different kind of dice for instance the heretic uses D6 the artificer also uses D6 the Barbarian uses d12s and the Bounty Hunter uses d8s and so you're going to take all of those Dice and you are going to roll them and then put them out on the hero carts so once all of your dice have been laid out then you're going to select one of your Heroes to tend to the camp overnight on the course of their Journey they're going to be spending eight Nights from the first location to the last location and each of the heroes has to tend the camp twice during that Journey when a hero attends the camp they will automatically unexhaust or heal one of their power cards and then there is a number of different things that they can do depending on sometimes what they rolled or what they needed to do at the camp in order to help during the night one of the main things they want to do is they want to tend the fire because the fire is like this big bonfire in the middle of the camp and depending on how lit or how active the fire is how big the fire is that dictates how many enemies in the battle line you can see right now my fire level is at seven so I can see two of the enemies and then if that came up I would reveal like I did here these first two enemies the rest of the enemies in this line here are in are shrouded in darkness and depending on the location that you are camping at that tells you how many enemies in that line you are going to have to defeat during that night they can also take the following actions they can chop firewood to increase the number of uh the power of the fire they can scout ahead which allows them to look at the monsters in the in the unrevealed monster deck and position them in a certain way they can uh spin a dye to heal and to heal it uh you will turn over one of your exhausted Power Cards back to its ready side you can equip and that will allow you to swap out one of your power cards with another you can check the map and checking the map will allow you to draw one of the unused map tiles or map cards and compare it to one of the map cards in your active deck and if you like this one better than that one you can swap the two some of the map cards are respites and those are good cards those are cards where uh usually something bad is not going to happen and you have a better chance of something good happening so you do want to try to swap those out as often as you can so the reason why I think this game is a little challenging for me as a single player as a solo player as a solo game is because of how much information there is to keep track of with all four Heroes and this is also though where a lot of the excitement and a lot of the really fun uh a lot of the fun comes from because each one of the heroes has a deck of five unique cards and these represent the hero's Powers the hero can uh sometimes they can spin dice in order to trigger one of these Powers they can exhaust it to trigger one of these powers and sometimes they are passive which that will allow you to always use that power if the conditions are appropriate but all of these powers are really unique and powerful and you will want to use all of them whenever you have a choice to swap one out for another it's always a really crucial uh decision to make and that is one of the things about this game that I think is so good and probably a a real Boon to Modern game players who really like a um just an abundance of difficult choices this game is overflowing with difficult choices of how you will use your powers how you will use your dice which character which party member you're going to send to Camp each night which ones you're going to send out to attack the monsters and all kinds of things which um weapons and items you're going to buy from the merchant who's going to be able to equip those there are just a ton of things to do in this game and that's one of the best things about it but for me as a solo player it's just it's a lot of information because when you're dealing with four here rows and each one of those Heroes has five special powers that's 20 unique special powers that you have to keep track of and like I said most of the time they're all good and you want to use all of them so in this game let's say I would sin well my Barbarian rolled really well and uh she's all healed up so let's say maybe I want to send her out my hunter has not been to camp yet I have sent my my heretic has been to camp once and my artificer has been to camp once so I'm gonna go ahead and send my hunter to camp and you're gonna put this uh Camp token on the hunter at the one position and then when they finally take their second night at Camp they will flip that over to the two so now my hunter is in Camp and he's not going to participate in the watch this night but he is going to uh he's going to tend to the fire he is going to uh help maybe Scout some new locations and that kind of thing so you can spend your dice I can spend any dice here to chop firewood so maybe I want to chop firewood and add two to my Camp uh maybe I want to check the map and uh go there as at a four and I can draw this card here and I can draw this card so uh this card I drew from the unused deck is a respite and um I can actually swap it out with this card here which is a bad card this card would force me to face eight creatures and lower my uh Fire by four this card here I only have to face six creatures and I can raise my fire by one I can increase my fire so I'm gonna put that back on top of the deck and I'm gonna put this at the bottom here and then I can also heal and if you spin it in exactly a 6 there you can heal and then you can heal a an exhausted card from any of the other characters even if they aren't on even if they aren't in the camp so I'm going to heal this pact of Doom so I'll flip that over and then the character the Bounty Hunter since he went to Camp that night he would get to heal one of his powers as well so after that's done you would reveal the number you would Place layout in a line the number of creatures from that night so that's six so I have one two three four five six um I would have to lower my my uh my fire the power of my fire by four so I'll go one two three four so that would put me below the two so I would actually only be able to reveal one fire because one of the things that the fire does is the fire helps light your surroundings and that um allows you to see more of the monsters who are attacking you you really want to keep your fire up to at least two I've completely failed here that was a bad that was a bad Camp the Bounty Hunter did not do a good job tinting the fire so my uh Warriors who are out at watch now they're gonna have a much more difficult time because they won't be able to see what's coming because every time you reveal a card you can only Attack cards that are revealed and depending on the position the monsters might do certain things so you really do need to kind of keep in mind which monsters are coming in to attack you for instance if you were to reveal this one if he was in the first position you would steal all the money from your Merchant um then if you were able to reveal this he has an ongoing power and so you have to keep track of that ongoing power uh maybe this is another ongoing power a Wandering Giant and as you can see each of the monsters also has a type and those types can trigger certain abilities depending on the type so you do also have to keep that in mind uh there's a floating mind uh this is the health of the creature that's the target you have to get to defeat the Creature if the creature is left undefeated at the end of the night then they're going to do that much damage to the heroes and for each one you have to exhaust a card but right now I only have one creature revealed and that is the Revenant the Revenant has a attack power evidence or a health of 11 so I need to defeat the creature you can do direct damage to the creature by simply assigning one of your dice that matches or let's say you had a five and a six so two Heroes could uh combine their attack in order to to take out a creature or you could assign one of your dice to maybe one of your cards to trigger that power the Barbarian herd uh powers are only triggered by exhausting her card so she's always pushing herself to the Limit because she can use her powers and her dice but you really need to keep track of of how exhausted she is and so once the uh combat starts basically what you're doing is it's kind of a little combat puzzle little uh Resource Management puzzle trying to figure out the best way to defeat the creatures as they appear in order and to to keep them in advance advantageous positions so their powers don't trigger and you you really want to try to defeat all of the creatures or if you can't defeat the creatures keep the ones alive that have the um the less attack power the smaller attack power but yeah this game is really really cool there is so much to it it packs a ton of stuff into a small box this is the box here the box also doubles as a play area everything fits really nicely into this very small box and I think the game has yeah the game just has a ton of off a ton to offer um in such a small package it doesn't take up a lot of table space but these creatures are called unhollowed and they're kind of like mini bosses and there are certain times when you are going to be told to add an unhollowed to your creature deck so you might have to deal with some of those more mini bosses uh those are kind of uh more powerful creatures with more devastating abilities and then you have creatures in your deck that you might have to fight like dragons or Giants different kinds of Golems Phantasm a human another kind of human there you also have these summon cards and these are really bad cards when they get when you draw one of these then one of the uh hollowed cards the unhollowed they they get mixed into your cars and then you also have to exhaust one of your abilities on one of your Heroes and then there are also some other unhollowed like the prince of vultures the crow Prime the wendigo The Collector a ghoulish head a sound of Doom Clockwork commander and a carnivorous tree so all kinds of different Heroes all kinds of different things and yeah this is just it's a really fun game I'm having so much fun playing it but I am really challenged to trying to keep my thoughts together on it if you can tell that this uh this video is a little scatter shot just because I'm trying to think okay there are so many different moving pieces in this game and so many different ways that the cards interact and I think that the best thing about the game is it really does make me feel like I am playing this group of four Heroes who are having to work together as a cohesive unit to survive the predicament I should have started off the review with that uh statement right there because I think that really does sum up the game a lot of times in these kinds of games I want fewer Heroes to keep track of but I don't think I would want that in this game this game does such a good job of making me feel like my heretic my artifice or my hunter my bounty hunter and my Barbarian are really struggling to get through this Trek to protect the Caravan to get them back to their final destination and I have to work as a single cohesive unit utilizing the strengths um offsetting mitigating the weaknesses of each Hero trying to uh assign each one an optimal task in some ways it does also remind me of ghost stories in a way I don't think it's quite as hard as ghost stories it's not quite as unforgiving as ghost stories there even if you roll poorly you there are ways to always do something cool ways to always do something fun the bad stuff and set a watch doesn't snowball as powerfully as overwhelmingly as the bad stuff in ghost stories does but it does have that kind of similar thing it is kind of a tower defense but you have a single Tower and that's your camp and your Heroes have to work together to make it through eight hellish Knights of this complete onslaught of enemies trying to stop you I mean the these enemies these monsters in this land really hate this particular Caravan I don't I don't know what they have against this one Caravan but man they want to see it absolutely destroyed and it is up to you to make sure that doesn't happen so all right guys well I hope you enjoyed taking a look at set of watch sorry this was a little a scatter shot but I had a a lot of just a lot of scatter shot feelings about this game I think it's really good I'm having a lot of fun with I'm glad I finally got to play it I've had it for a while and I just keep I just kept putting it off but I'm super glad that I got it to the table so all right guys well I hope you enjoyed this video we'll talk to you later bye bye

Channel: The Dungeon Dive

Views: 4,268

Keywords: dungeon crawl, dungeon dive, fantasy, gaming, science fiction, rolo rpg, solo gaming, board games, adventure games, table top RPGs, table top gaming, hobby gaming

Id: VLJJ9zvdj2Y

Length: 16min 54sec (1014 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 20 2022