Actually, time to be the Reckoners! The Reckoners board game is based off the Brandon Sanderson series of the same name, following a group of rebels (the Reckoners) as they challenge superpowered megalomaniacs like the Epic Steelheart. Appropriately, it’s a cooperative game, featuring a team of 1-6 players coordinating to defeat Steelheart before he wipes out the population.
That’s more complicated than it sounds, naturally. Steelheart has a lot of lackeys hanging about the city making life difficult, and whenever you defeat one, another takes their place. You have to defeat them, though, as left unchecked these Epics will devastate both the population and your efforts at defeating their boss.
The short version is this: players each have a character ability and dice, and each turn everyone rolls up to three times to determine their actions for the round. These include wiping out Enforcement (which accelerate the rate at which Epics grow more destructive), containing Epic abilities (the ways that they’re destructive), researching Epics’ weaknesses (to lower their health or, if they have a prime invincibility, to render them mortal), attacking Epics, and acquiring Plan Tokens or money. Plan Tokens act as wild dice, and dice in general are also used to move between parts of the city and take down barricades. The Reckoners will take their actions, cash in the rewards for any Epics they’ve killed, and purchase nifty gadgets to make their jobs easier. The Epics, in turn, will repopulate the vacant City Districts and activate their abilities, including Steelheart’s, who then moves to a random location. This is especially inconvenient, as you have to be in the same City District as an Epic to affect them. Steelheart also has a prime invincibility, so you have to research his weakness before you can deal him any damage.
The first time we played this, it wound up being a slow and calculated damage race between Steelheart’s health and the remaining population, won only barely. The second and third times, the damage part proved to be our strength. It helped that we played with Megan, whose character ability is turning one containment die into three attacks, and helped even more when we got her an Equipment Card that turned one anti-Enforcement die into three containments. In the picture below, she had the potential to do twenty-seven damage in one turn, or more if she used her Plan Tokens. Yeah… Steelheart didn’t stand a chance.
If you can’t tell by the fact that I’ve played it repeatedly, I adore this game. I loved the books, and to see them adapted so well into a board game I can play with my fellow fans is perpetually exciting! It’s heavy in both strategy and luck, and no matter what difficulty you play it at, a plan well-executed is always something to celebrate.
