Form a squad of adorable animals through bidding and clever item usage, all in efforts to win the title of the Watchmen of Destiny.
Watchmen of Destiny is a set-collecting tabletop game that’s all about finding the right heroes, with the right skills, to help you found the titular collective. You’ll do this by maintaining a hand of heroes, carefully playing item cards, and spending your heroes so you can fill up seven tents with seven high-scoring heroes.
It’s all rather simple, each player gets a hand of cards and two items. Each of the cards have a value in coins (to spend), a value in points (for scoring) as well as markings that show their class, species and the number of times they can use their class abilities. Their class is important because each class has a limited use ability which you can use to transform the course of the game once you’ve recruited them and set them up in a tent.
You recruit, and earn tents, through exchanging the cards in your hand for other cards in your hand. So, for instance, you might discard two heroes that each have two coins on them so that you have four coins to spend. You can only spend the coins on one transaction (so no splitting between buying 1-coin each tents and a hero) however you can buy as many tents as you like at once. The tents are important because you need one in order to put a hero in it, and the heroes are important because… well, they’re the core of the game.
Each hero’s ability is dependent on their class, and depending on the inherent value of the card (be that high value, low cost, etc) they’ll have a certain number of uses to their ability. You track this by sliding them up (or down, if you have certain cards) the tents to track their remaining uses. Abilities range from stealing the most recently discarded card through to rifling through a handful of cards and picking one.
The end state for Watchmen of Destiny triggers when one player has filled their seventh tent, at while point there are points assigned for the points on the top corner of the card or having the most of a species of animal — you’re also docked points if you have duplicates, which makes sticking with one species a double-edged sword.
To throw a further wrinkle into the ointment is the items you choose from at the start of each round. As I said early, each player is given two to choose from, at the start of their turn they’ll pick which to use and then follow the instructions on it. Some have effects that are optional, while others are mandatory, but regardless of which type it is they also define how many abilities you can use and cards you can draw in your turn. The abilities of the items are varied and range from protecting you from attack to allowing you to recharge a class ability for each hero of that class currently in play.
These items make a real change, and due to them all being wildly varied (from ability to cards drawn and class abilities) there’s a power shift in who has which one. Handy then that at the end of the turn the players each get to claim one of the other cards around the table. However, a player can instead claim the Necklace (of Going First) which means they move first in future rounds and simply collect the scraps from the item claiming stage.
I really enjoyed playing Watchmen of Destiny, especially the cute artwork. We played with the Mercenaries expansion which gives you cards that can substitute, swap out or empower other cards or your turns, however the mercenaries are more villanous and not as cute as their non-expansion watch-mates. For me there’s just enough going on that it’s not a simple spend-to-buy experience, however it did take a while for the people I played with to get to grips with it due to how some of the card icons failed to stand out from the artwork.
Watchmen of Destiny is available now from Kickstarter.
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