To Set a Watch: A Review of Set a Watch

hello everybody steven here with cardboard coalition and today i figured i would bring you a review of uh rock manor games at a glass of the box for a second again rock manor's games set a watch swords of the coin which is the um second version of their game um set a watch which we have over here the reason i have both of them now is because i'm going to kind of dabble with the first one i got them both together but i had played the first one with a friend before so the reviews mainly for the second version which is swords of the coin and the expansion which deals with both of them i did write notes this time so hopefully i'll stay on script and make this video fairly quick and fairly understandable alright so set a watch if you're either looking at the original game or you're looking at over here where we have the second version of it right is a two to four player game that takes 60 minutes plus right and it's for ages 10 plus this game in either of them you're just different groups is you're traveling around a realm and it's after the main battle if you're into rpgs and all that kind of the big fight the big dungeon crawl and you're just moving you're trying to get to the next spot so you have to set a watch so you have to have someone man the fire while other people defend because creatures are gonna come because this is a dangerous area and the mechanics of this game are dice rolling and mediation with mediation yeah mediation with cards and stuff dice mediation with cards um because you have certain cards with your character right that's the general thing you do you roll some dice you set them up you can use them for direct attack use cards to kind of change them monsters come at you you want to keep the fire lit that kind of stuff that happens with both these but let's go ahead and jump in so the reason i got the uh i went all in on the kickstarter for the swords of the coin version of set of watch and all in which came with the original they're both the deluxe versions is because i had played the original um well let's roll back actually i just looked at videos and thought it was really cool luckily i played the original probably three four months before i actually got my um all in kickstarter package and i really liked it so i i was like yes i can't wait to get this game here now let's go into the review of these games overall and this means for both of them it feels difficult though i played it the first time i think we lost one one one that was with the friend's copy of the original set of watch and then i played games by myself and i got beat and beat and beat and beat and i couldn't win and then finally i won then i went and played again with some friends and one of the people were one of the people who played with me the first time and then we won it again right they kind of scoffed like it's not that difficult um but it's interesting i feel like it kind of is but it's trying to solve that puzzle what dice do you use to do direct damage to monsters which ones of your abilities do you want to use who to set it watch at what time how to use the abilities you use dice to activate them exhaust the ability to activate it it sets up this puzzle that even though i was losing the game i kept going back and i wanted to play it again and i want to play it again i lost i want to play it again and i thought okay when i won the first time i actually went back i was playing this one then i went back to the original and i won i was like i wonder if that means i'm kind of done playing but it wasn't i wanted to play again so i started jumping back between the two of them and then i started throwing the expansion the outriders expansion in so overall the game is fun you have to want to sit there and do that puzzle it says an hour i feel like the games normally take me an hour and a half but there's a puzzle when you're playing by yourself you have to pay attention to a lot of people and there's things that you can swap in and swap out at certain times based on things that are going on in the game so you have to kind of pay attention to what you can and can do cause there's a puzzle and like i said with the dice there's a puzzle right and maybe some of it is me not being as good at the game i realize the more i'm playing the game the better i'm getting at it and i want it more often now granted maybe there are some mistakes made and that's why i won but i want it more often now but it's still a puzzle you have to sit down and play and i think it's an easier puzzle when there's multiple people looking at it as opposed to just you looking at it because you're dealing you have to play four characters no matter what um so you always have to do that but with more brains looking at the easier it becomes all right now let's dig into um swords of the coin and then the outriders expansion so swords of the coin i kind of broke this down into um pros in general thoughts and then negatives so it should have been positive i think i switched it and put an r in at one point so positives um general and then negatives and i'll do that for both um sword of coin uh set a watch and then i'll do a general at the end over both of them so let's go ahead and dive in so for um set a watch sword of coin swords i keep doing that swords of the coin one of the pros i put in is there's new puzzles so with um the original one you have characters and each character has their own puzzle trying to decide what um abilities work best and when you want to use them and when you want to swap them out there's a bit of a puzzle there what direct dice you want to use as opposed to assigning them to we'll just call them your abilities i think it is your abilities or exhausting that ability to use it which is kind of your health too it's really interesting um the sword swords of the coin brings you new puzzles and not just with the dice and the abilities so in swords of the coin you have a witch that has an extra card that's a familiar that it plays with you have a monk that can bump up their dice when they meditate back at camp you have the barbarian who cannot use their dice um to uh make an ability happen to get an effect from an ability you have to exhaust that ability um it just kind of switches the puzzle up a little bit there um then you have the uh artificer i'm probably saying it wrong you guys are probably all laughing that's fine the artificer he's got a staff right and the staff is this whole different counter and there's ways to put charges on the staff and you can use this staff to attack things and so it changes the puzzle not just with the players and different abilities and cards now with the first one you have the beast rider that can collect at beasts and use beasts well with this one you have the hunter that can collect up all them a certain amount beast rider had two beasts and the um hunter you can have three just creatures and have them and use them in different ways direct attack like the um the beast uh master or in different ways and i won't get all that because you can and read into the rules and stuff so um swords of the coin brings new puzzles with new characters right the other thing that swords of the coin do is what the other thing it does the other thing a deuce uh does is it brings in an extra phase so this game goes like this you have your watch are you sorry now your watch face you have your camp phase the original one you have camp phase you have your watch phase and you kind of do it's like this weird kind of cleanup um flip a new location card roll your dice then you go back into camp phase watch phase well with swords of the coin you go that first phase the roll the dice set up the location and what you need to do and then you go into camp phase after camp phase you have the merchant phase and in the merchant phase by doing things in the camp you get coins that you can spend on extra items that you can use some are passive which means they happen all the time some are active which means you have to put a die on there or exhaust it um to activate um some are discard um no i think there's an exhaust i think you can't put dice on there there's an exhaust there's four things and the fourth one is slipping my mind i think that's exhaust it's passive activate by putting a coin on it there's ones that you exhaust by flipping them over and then there's ones that you discard right so this one brings in some more mechanics to kind of deal with some more ideas that you can work with which is cool it's kind of in the general area and like i already said with the more puzzles more characters um there's six characters and this one eight total with the deluxe version basis six eight total with the deluxe i think this one has four with the bass don't quote me on that in six with the deluxe but there's six in this version they're both deluxe on both these um so if you have this one you're getting more characters if you don't have this one you just want to buy um swords of the coin a set of watch swords of the coin i think it's probably 34 35 dollars right there i think it's worth it i'll get back into that i guess later on but you can go with that one and you have it's six characters um six characters and i think eight but don't um quote me on that all right um and i just played them too and i can't remember the character count but more characters a set of watch swords of the coin brings you more characters which means more puzzles all right so some of the that i don't know if i like negatives but some of the the gripes let's say gripe so i'm like an old grumpy griping old man right some of the gripes i kind of have with it is the rule book can be cleaner um and i say that as someone who deals with technical writer i used to i don't deal with this much anymore but worked in the area of technical writing there's some things you could do to clear it up i'm not saying i'm an expert but rock man or games if you want to reach out if you for whatever reason happened to see this video which i had all right but if you wanted to i would be happy to to help out and look over because there's some easy ways to make the understanding um better make what you're saying clear without having your your players having to read it a few times to make sure they're doing it right and i found in setup i would keep going back just to make sure i was doing it right there's an easy way where someone can glance at the page see what they need to do and do it you guys do it pretty good on the back with turn phases and stuff you just kind of need to work that into the rules so a cleaner rule book this is kind of generally both of them they they're both the same this adds the the watch phase and some extra stuff and the other thing this is a complaint i guess about the deluxe versions is there's two extra characters i think there's only one extra character with set of watch time i think about it but there's not enough dice if you want to use all like this one has six-sided eight-sided the original version if you wanted to play four characters with six-sided dice because there are four in here with six-sided dice you don't have enough dice you have three sets of six sided dice right each character gets three dice or if there's four characters that use eight sided dice but there's only three eight sided dice in here i believe on this one it's just one extra um i'd have to go back and look there might be two but there's not enough dice to play all of one carat you you would have to pick and choose or bring dice from somewhere else to play with those characters it's not a huge negative or gripe it's not a huge gripe but i just kind of wish there were now i'm thinking i need to go out and find dice that i like to add to the sets if you get both of them and combine them together you probably have enough dice um no matter what all right so that is basically the set of watch let's look at the expansion right swords of the coin and the original set of watches let's look at the expansion here and so the expansion um a set of watch out writers brings you i can't remember how many cards i probably got 34 cards it has six new one hollowed which are like stronger monsters that kind of get mixed in and then do math steven 28 uh is it really 28 yeah 28 um monster cards other other cars the regular monsters the creature cards and it gives you some interesting things so let's go ahead and talk about this so pros this adds a lot of replayability right if you are someone who has set a watch and you didn't pick up um set a watch sort of coins you can go out and get this expansion pack i think i glanced and saw it a couple times at about nine dollars online i don't think any of this was kickstarter exclusive you can get some of these deluxe ones after but these are the basic retail versions so i kind of set the box plus it looks kind of fun but you can get this at retail too now it's about nine dollars right for it and i guess i'll talk about the cost later so the pros is it brings replayability right um so some of the general ideas that i'd want to say about it is uh i feel like it makes the original a bit more difficult which must could be nice for people um it definitely changes it up but it makes it a little more difficult it's just my opinion in playing with it um the other general is there's a good amount of reveal effects so some cards when you flip them over there's a reveal effect and i found with this because i put this into both games and played both of them a couple times with this in there this expansion in there is there are dragons that pop up and they attack as soon as they're revealed they get your fire they don't have to be in first place they get your fire there's some guys in here that do things in second place which is kind of fun or difficult however you want to look at it so if you don't have that fire burning we could see three out they might kind of affect you a bit um and there's i believe it might even be a whole new class i could be wrong so don't mark me on that but demons it's a trickster demon and it comes out and it causes you to exhaust one ability no matter what every care every every hero on watch has to exhaust an ability and then they may um unexhaust another ability so i've ran to a couple times where i i'm working really hard to make sure all my heroes don't have exhausted abilities and then the trickster um comes out and then after exhaustion ability and i can't right i may re-exhaust an ability a different ability so you can exhaust an ability and then re-un-exhaust that ability right so you would have to unexhaust an already exhausted ability which gives some um difficulty problems that you have to deal with while you're playing and then the fire one's kind of interesting because you're really constantly on the fire with this all right and then the one gripe i have about it is even though there's a blurb on the back and i know you guys can't see this there's just a short blurb on the back what the writers do it does not and this is a copy that came out was printed with this i'm assuming it does not say anything in this book about the beast writers and the dragon riders because you have two different kinds of writers and so basically what they do is they add to an animal a beast for a beast rider a beast next to him or a dragon that's next to him and they double that value they stay as the writers type of card so either a goblin or a human but it doubles their power it might slide someone else into a position where they reveal giving you more problems things like that i'm the dragon uh the beast rider it's if they're revealed in the dragon once you flip it it reveals ones on the other side i feel like they can either clean up what they're saying and put it on the each individual card um they could put a card in the pack this just says the rules really quick just a card throw it in there i don't know the cost and i'm pretty sure this is made for mass consumption but you could have put something maybe here on the back a quick blurb explaining what the cards did because at one point i put them in i was like ooh what do i do i was actually using this one i want to make sure i had the rules right so this one i was actually using the original set of watch i had to open up this box take the sleeve out get the book out i know it's like the the snuggie commercial have you ever tried to answer a phone with a blanket on i can't find my hands right it's not all that difficult but this is an expansion and it's lotted as workable with either so i think you should have the ability to understand the rules easily and clearly for either version or they just come with it so that would be one of my great gripes about it so now let's jump back and i'll try to go really quick through my normal review price i think either of these um the person who had this deluxe i think they paid 35 anyways with the deluxe they found a local store here that tends to get a lot of kickstarter um game has games and kickstarter games and everything um but they got a deluxe and i believe they played around 35 and i paid 35 i think i paid 35 and 25 and then i can't remember he was 75 for all of it and then this mat was extra that i that i ordered um for the cost of the games i think it's worth it i think it's fun it's even by itself one of these versions the original or swords of coin for 35 dollars you're getting a lot of play out of it the um ones that aren't the deluxe version i believe they might be less they might be like 5 10 i think like 10 less they don't get the fancy slip they don't have some of the kickstarter the deluxe ones have everything that you would have gotten from the kickstarter so a couple extra beasts couple extra heroes but that's it i mean kickstarter normal right so i think it might be 25 and definitely at that you still got a lot of um replayability and then this like i said it's probably eight or nine dollars for the cards you get and everything it adds replayability i think the value is there the amount of players um one to four i like larger groups but i do find this fun enough to play and now that i'm getting more groups i can play with i have time groups that i can go play this with plus once reswan gets here when she can sit down and look at the cards and read it it's gonna be a lot of fun to work through this with her now um the mechanics obviously like there's cards and there's dice involved like all that kind of stuff replayability even the normal set the replayability is there because you have more creature cards and more on hollow those more powerful creatures than you're going to use you have more location cards than you're going to use in one play one play you go through eight locations and a final so nine locations total and then you have a whole stack of locations with uh respite locations they're just better location kind of things that happen so the replayability is definitely there and plus the roll the dice and figure out which abilities you want on or when to move them and things like that definitely gives you that replay ability now for both of them would i play it again yes i i had ordered it played it once i think twice in the same night and i wanted to play it again couldn't wait till my copy got here once i got the copy i've played it a whole bunch of times i'm trying to track him games that i play but i'm really bad at it but i've played it a whole bunch of times and now both versions i've played a lot of time they keep jumping back and forth and adding expansion and see what happens and stuff like that um so i'd definitely play it again and i would ask people please and i actually just asked a friend if i can bring it for a game night that's coming up and um the response was yes and we'll see because there's another person there we don't know how much they'd be into this style game but we'll see so yes i would ask to play it again the one last thing i just thought about this is slightly a negative it's if you got your hands on this mat and maybe this is just talking to old uh stone manner games is probably not listening to my video anyways the mat is just a little too wide let's see if i can set it up here it's a little too wide to go into one of the boxes the mat's kind of cool i don't need a super spongy mat it's kind of fun it has the skulls where you can put everybody down but it's slightly bigger i don't know if you guys can see but i'm not good at measurement but at least a millimeter or two wider on both sides which means i can't just fold it up and put it in one of the boxes right i could like fold it in half and fold it fold it fold it and put it in the box it's going to crease up really bad as you can see there's creases in it anyways just from being folded normally so i kind of wish that this mat was sized for this and at that point i mean the cost would be to put this out further so you have more spots would probably cost more so i'm okay with it like it is right there just um a little thinner right would have been nice but i mean that's neither here nor there overall i kind of have fun having the mat out i enjoy it i'm okay with what i paid for it and i can't remember what it was it wasn't much it's why i got it so that's my review a little bit of rambling probably of uh set a watch set a watch swords of the coin instead of watch the outriders expansion overall like the game enjoy the game i think there are some things that can be improved in the game but as of right even talking about i want to sit down play it again so i hope you guys enjoyed my name steven with cardboard coalition see you later everybody bye

Channel: Cardboard Coalition

Views: 674

Keywords: Set a Watch: Swords of the Coin, Set a Watch: Outriders Expansion, Set a Watch, Stone Manor Games, review, card games, board games, tabletop games, Cardboard Coalition

Id: mq1lMjVMmg8

Length: 21min 34sec (1294 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 17 2021