Welcome to Reckoning Preview

Welcome to Reckoning – a small mining town in the old west. Life generally was quiet, until a mysterious substance, called Dust, was discovered. Dust has the ability to warp time, but not without other-worldly consequences… Now, calamities befall the town every single day – from weather disasters to creatures from other planes; Dust has corrupted this once-pleasant town. Your only hope for survival is to escape Reckoning on the last Wagon out. In order to afford the ticket, though, you’ve got to score a winning poker hand. Can you endure the misfortune that has befallen your town and escape the catastrophe? Or will you fall prey to the Dust?

Disclaimer: We were provided with a preview copy of the game for the purposes of this preview. What you see pictured below may differ from finalized production copies. -L

Welcome to Reckoning is a solo card game, in which the player is trying to survive long enough to collect 4 cards of a kind to end the game. To setup, place the Health and Willpower cards to the side set to their starting values. Take 1 Dust card to be your starting Dust and place it above the Willpower card – the remaining Dust cards form the Dust Reserve and are set to the side, and a space below the Willpower card is saved to be the Corruption Pile later in the game. Place the 4 Location cards in a row. Create the Event deck as described in the rules, shuffling in the Wagon card, and place the deck facedown under the Location cards. Deal 3 Event cards to your hand, and deal 5 Event cards face-up to form the Event Row. Place the Character Card underneath the left-most card of the Event Row, and you are ready to begin. The game setup is pictured below.

Played over a series of rounds, you will be working to resolve Events, stave off the destruction of Reckoning, and collect a winning poker hand (4 of a kind, in this game), while trying to not lose the game. Each round is broken down into two phases: Events and Losses. During the Events phase, you will be resolving every card in the Event Row, one by one from left to right. To resolve a card, perform every effect listed, from top to bottom. Some effects are positive for you – drawing additional cards to your hand, gaining Health/Willpower/Dust, or visiting Locations and using their corresponding actions. Unfortunately, most effects will be negative – losing Health/Willpower, adding cards to the Event Row, or attacking Locations (either with Tentacles or with Fire). You must resolve every effect on an Event card before you can move onto the next card. Once a card has been completely resolved, move it to a discard pile. During this Event phase, you may use your special Character ability to ignore one effect on a card – strategize wisely when to use it, as it can only be used once per round!

Before or after resolving an Event card, you may perform some special abilities for a price. You may choose to Consume Dust (move a Dust card from your cache to the Corruption Pile) in order to: Remove a Tentacle from a Location, Remove a Tentacle or Rider card from the Event Row (discard it), or Draw a Card. You can perform these actions as many times per round as you have Dust to spend, but be careful – if the amount of Dust in your Corruption Pile ever exceeds your current amount of Willpower, you immediately lose the game! You may also, once per round, discard a card from your hand to: visit a Location and use its ability, or Put out a Fire at a Location card. It is important to note that you can never visit Locations or use their abilities if they have been attacked by Tentacles or are on Fire. You must first remove those conditions before you are able to go there again!

Once every card in the Event Row has been resolved, the round moves to the Losses phase. You lose 1 Health for every Location card that is on Fire, and if you have more than 5 cards in your hand, you must discard down to 5. Refresh your Character ability (if it was used this round), set up a new Event Row of 5 cards, and begin a new round. The game continues in this fashion until either you lose, or the Wagon card is drawn. When the Wagon comes into play, place it at the Warehouse Location, discard the Event Row, and shuffle the discard pile to form a new Event deck. Setup for a new round, and the race truly is on now. You need to have 4 cards of a kind (same number) in your hand in order to get on the Wagon out of town. So hopefully over the course of the game, you’ve been working to collect a set! In order to finally win the game, these conditions must be met: you have 4 of a kind in hand, the Wagon is at the Warehouse, the Warehouse is not on Fire or being attacked by Tentacles, and you must visit the Warehouse. If you manage to pull that off, you win!! More likely than not, though, you’ll lose the game by: running out of Health, having too much Dust in your Corruption Pile, or the Event deck runs out of cards before you’re able to escape on the Wagon.

For being a game that consists of only a 53-card deck, I have to say that Welcome to Reckoning is way more strategic than it might seem! The gameplay itself is simple enough, resolve every effect in the Event Row, and collect 4 cards of a kind. But actually accomplishing that is something else. With 3 different ways to lose and only a single way to win, the odds are stacked against you from the start, and you really have to give it your all. You really can’t just focus on one game element – you’ve got to constantly be strategizing and adapting that strategy with every single effect. You can’t ignore the Tentacles, otherwise the town will be overrun. But you also can’t just Consume Dust willy-nilly to remove them, as that increase your Corruption Pile and brings you closer to a loss. Locations on Fire can’t be ignored long-term, as that will deplete your Health, and you won’t be able to use their powerful and unique abilities, but you can only put out one Fire each round. So many things to keep track of, and to prioritize differently with every Event card!

One really neat thing that I love about Welcome to Reckoning is that the Event Row is visible the entire round, so you know what is coming up next. That can really help inform your strategy, as you can weigh the options before resolving an Event card. Yeah, having Tentacles seize the Homestead isn’t great, but the next Event card allows you to visit a Location, and you can just go to the Bell Tower, use its ability, and get those Tentacles out of there! The effects on the Event cards aren’t necessarily surprises, and it gives you a chance to plan and adapt your strategy. That being said, I have to admit that in my plays of this game I have only won once. There have been many, many losses at the Rodriguez game table…..So it’s a hard game for sure. It kind of gives me Tiny Epic Defenders vibes, in the sense that everything starts off ok and seems manageable, but at a certain point you get behind and can’t catch back up. Not a knock on the game necessarily, but just a forewarning that winning this game isn’t common. At least not for me. BUT, even though I lose basically every time, I immediately set it up to play again. I just can’t give in, and need to play again to see how I fare this time around. Spoiler: usually, not well. Even though this game burns my brain with its plethora of strategy, and I can never keep my head above water long enough to actually win, I just can’t stop. And to me, that’s the sign of a great game.

To touch on components for a second, the copy of Welcome to Reckoning that I have is just a prototype copy, but it is very high quality. The cards are sturdy and feel good in hand, the artwork and design style are true to the Western theming, and the text is concise. No qualms from me about the actual components of the game. And again, the finalized production copies may vary slightly from mine, but I think it’s already good to go.

Welcome to Reckoning really surprised me with the depth of its strategy and the overall difficulty to win. But I really am a big fan! It’s easy to learn, fast to setup and play, and it has a small footprint. Yes, it’s not easy to win, but the experience of the game is really what hits it out of the park for me. You are constantly engaged and invested in this game, and the playtime flies by. Seriously, I played this about 5 times last night and didn’t even realize that I had spent just about an hour playing! It keeps me coming back, and even when I put it away for the night, I can’t wait to try again to see if I can eke out a win next time. Or the time after that. Or after that, if you have my luck in playing this game. If you’re in the market for a generally short solo game, but with massive strategy involved, I highly recommend checking out Welcome to Reckoning. I cannot get enough, and I applaud Wonderspell for bringing this challenging game to the solo world.