Releasing an album that consists entirely of cover songs is a risky proposition. For every Renegades of Funk there’s also a Thank You. IV Studio’s Realm of Reckoning is such a perilous venture, excising slices of ingenuity from some of the area control genre’s most prolific entities. The originality and expression exist in how these components are woven together, and in how the totality of the experience emerges. While this game has the looks of Garage Inc., the dynamic range and punchy chords are often overtaken by Pat Boone bizarrely crooning Hetfield’s lines.
The wobbly foundation is hinted at from the get-go. I appreciate the dark visuals and unsettling aesthetic. It’s my bag. But the swathe of muted tones and contrasting potpourri of dissonance leaves a board that is mired in visual static. Inexperienced players have a tough time understanding which colors belong to a faction, which are associated with regions, and how the areas are segregated. Even experienced reckoners will often forget which color belongs to which player, as there is far too much overlap and obfuscation. Setup and bedecked, the game looks like a Varg Vikernes tie-dye session.
There are moments where the game overcomes this deficiency. I can certainly look the other way and even appreciate the overall tone if the experience delivers.
The card drafting is the initial hook. Players scoop up a hand of cards, select one, and then simultaneously reveal. These cards are executed in player order, one at a time. It’s a relatively quick process, as they offer a primary benefit of a certain resource – such as dudes placed in areas of the map or more flexible coins for your player mat – and a secondary benefit of moving you up one of the many colored tracks adorning the board. The flow is very bottom-up, as it’s all resources which serve as currency to spend later in battle. The nuance of the draft then is in the subtle delineation of how the various resources affect conflict.
This draft occurs across three ages. Each age is a major segment of the game, breaking up the action and clearly outlining the course of play. This sounds familiar. This sounds like Blood Rage. In reality, it sounds like a garage band covering Blood Rage while changing up the lyrics and dropping notes from its killer riff.
There’s no escalation. Each age is identical in terms of the potency of actions. Everything is resources, which creates a homogenous shade that betrays the design’s modern Eurogame stylings. Do you want three gold, one iron, or four cloth? Except cloth are acolytes, iron are wardens, and gold are coins. You later spend these resources in battle under various restrictions. They all do the same thing – contribute points towards your bid for strength. There’s little zest. No pizazz.
Imagine Blood Rage but instead of drafting that Frost Giant, you draft four points on a track. Yeah, you’re getting it.
There is a touch more texture in the draft than I’ve portrayed. Two cards scattered amongst all of the rest are not resources. They’re battle. Split skulls, felled limbs, bloody carcasses.
Not exactly. Realm of Reckoning isn’t violent, it’s calculating.
This is why it’s not actually called a battle. It’s called a reckoning. The player who selects the reckoning card in the draft foregoes resources, instead gaining influence over the resolution in the ensuing conflict.
The reckoning is another cover. If you’re going to pay homage to those who came before you, why not offer tribute to a god? I’m talking about the ’79 Eon classic Dune. The Lisan al-Gaib.
Precisely, I’m talking about the battle wheel. Dune is a masterful area control game which boasts the best combat mechanism. Ever. Both competitors dial a wheel to a number, with the higher result winning the battle. The catch is that the value you set your dial to is the number of troops you must sacrifice from the region. It’s more dramatic than Days of Our Lives. You cut pounds of flesh from your body in order to tip the scale in your favor. There is tremendous pressure, for whatever scraps of an army you have left is what you will defend with against the next challenger. The tension is extreme.
Realm of Reckoning is a facsimile of this system. One that’s vague and lacking in sharp detail. Every player at the table participates in the battle, unlike Dune. This produces a less focused, more uncertain feeling. One could say more random. In fact, this is another little nod towards a peer. Perhaps a sampling of audio in the greater cover. This all-involved and difficult to predict conflict is heavily reminiscent of recent darling, The Old King’s Crown.
Let’s not get distracted with that run. Back to the wheel. What you’re bidding isn’t your troops. It’s rather a mix of all those resources you drafted previously. You can indeed lose the hooded acolytes from the board, but you can also spend mercenary cards, coins, points from tracks, and wardens on your player board. You’re not actually fighting over the area. You’re fighting over first choice on a list of rewards.
These rewards consist of more resources. Coins, acolytes, wardens, and so on. You push wood through the chipper and it spits out more wood. Since holding the area isn’t the reward, the stakes in the conflict are naturally lower, even if they’re very important in the overall scheme of the design. It conveys an atmosphere more akin to an auction game than a cutthroat battle to the death.
But the auction is of significance. The real prize here is the monument. Each reckoning a monument is awarded, and it’s almost always chosen first by the player with the highest bid in battle. You’d be a nutjob not to pick it.
In case you missed the transition, we’re onto another track. Another derivation of something special. In this instance, a charged percussion-driven cut that will lacerate your eardrums. This is the song of monuments.
Monuments are the sole determinant of what’s important. They signal what the game cares about. And it’s pretty gnarly that they’re entirely player driven. Thus, they reflect what the players care about.
Surrounding the board are roughly a dozen scoring parameters. Things like controlling regions on one of the board’s hemispheres, pushing up one of the many tracks, and having certain colored sets of wardens. There are a lot of conditions. Being in the first chair of a reckoning bid allows you to place a monument, which means the selected condition will score at the end of each age.
I think some of you will recognize the melody. This lick is Cole Wehrle’s latest, Arcs. You know what I’m going to say? Of course you do. This cover is fine. Enjoyable, even. But it just doesn’t bite like the original.
Arcs is restrained to a limited set of scoring conditions that shift each chapter. They don’t persist across the entire game as they do in this new design. While this approach in Realm of Reckoning bears its own set of interesting consequences, it creates an inverted tension curve that I find wholly undesirable. By this I mean that the game hits its high notes very early, where the scoring parameters are restricted to just a few conditions. This makes for an initially tight experience where a narrow set of resources are fought over fiercely. Once more conditions are piled on and the game opens up, it transforms the honed draft procedure into an efficiency endeavor. Instead of fighting over a few resources, each turn you calculate several options and form a mental spreadsheet to locate the best selection.
So, check it: this card will grant me five points due to tucking it under my board to gain some icons, plus it offers two acolytes which I could use in the yellow area for the upcoming fight. But this other card moves me up twice on the green track, which scores three points, and I also get a warden which almost completes a set that would be worth six more. This can be extrapolated to possibly several cards and needing to constantly re-calculate with each new passed hand.
Look, some may enjoy this. The game, slowly over time, morphs from a tight conflict into a heavier Euro-style point optimization shindig. It’s very much what we would call a point salad game by the end of it. I find this completely draining of momentum, with the song slowly being choked out by fuzz and distortion in the climax.
Arcs doesn’t have this problem. Arcs builds to a crescendo and explodes out your speaker.
I’m beating the hell out of this one. It’s not entirely deserved as Realm of Reckoning remains a cover album of really strong tracks. There are a few uniquely clever touches. Like selecting the weakest option on a reward card to avoid paying your bid. Done strategically, this allows you to retreat and keep all of your resources. The dual-layer of benefits to the card drafting is also neat and adds a much-needed dimension.
I really enjoy relics. These are effectively special powers which are passed around the table. You acquire them by hitting a threshold on the associated track and being the sole player in the lead on that track. If someone passes you, they yoink the relic from you and begin to benefit immediately. One of the reasons relics are so enticing, however, is due to the game’s lack of asymmetry. It’s as if they took a queue from Blood Rage but then forgot to allow you to draft powers and upgrades to carve out your own niche. Instead, asymmetry is defined by your particular ownership of resources.
My favorite moments are those of heightened drama, where a player bids a crazy number like 21, and yet another player does the unthinkable and bids 22. This happened to me. What the hell.
But it was great.
Those moments are not as frequent as I’d like. I also don’t love that every single player is involved in every single reckoning. It’s a quality that creates an incalculable wavelength of possible bids in sessions with larger player counts. This undercuts the utility of the auction. If you can’t calculate odds, the element of risk-taking feels far more arbitrary. This can sap a player’s will.
Another quality that emanates from the resource draft and point salad philosophy is the concept of safety. Nearly everything you own is eminently safe. Build up a huge collection of wardens? Nothing anyone can do about it. This is particularly dreadful if they’re a scoring condition. Sure, the table could have prevented this in the draft, but that hindsight is little solace when trying to claw your way back into it.
My criticisms are legion, but Realm of Reckoning is competent, if nothing else. It presents an interesting composition of ideas, even if those ideas are mostly ganked from other minds.
But games iterate. Some of my favorites build upon what came before them. The weakness here isn’t the methodology, it’s the execution. Mid-game, I continually find myself thinking about those other designs. Realm of Reckoning doesn’t make me want to play more Realm of Reckoning. It makes me want to play Arcs. And Blood Rage. And Dune.
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Player Elimination 