Reef & Ruins
Transcript
Hello. So, today I want to tell you about the game Reef and Ruins from Weird Draft Games and designed by Carla Cop. And I am a huge fan of Weird Draft Games. If you've been here for a minute, you know that. I actually covered this game when it was in prototype form and was coming to crowdfunding and now it is here. It's available. It's in retail. So, you can find it at your friendly local game store potentially or on All Plays web store and they always have $4 shipping which is awesome. So, this is a roll and write game and it uses a feature that I love where everyone is working off of the same dice every round. And I love that because I like seeing that we all have the same opportunities and seeing how it shakes out at the end. So, this game you will have three sheets. Everyone will have the shipwrecks and the enchantment sheets and then you have to decide as a group which side of the reef you are going to be exploring. So once everyone decides, you're all going to play on the same side. You then also get to pick your lucky number. So one to six, you can pick your lucky number um based on or I guess yeah, one to six. You can just pick it or you can roll a dice to determine it. And whoever is the dice roller, they get this cute little otter token that is going to go and is going to mark a round. You're going to play 18 rounds. And there's two different options. There's the low tide option and the high tide option. and they just give you some different things at different rounds. They're called boons. So, they're going to give you some benefits
that are really nice to have. So, you have your sheets set up. That is hard to say. And these two sheets actually have lines that connect them because the way that you do this is you have different ships you're exploring and you're going to end up with a final score there. And then as you're crossing things off over here, you're going to be getting multipliers. So at the end of the game, the coins you earn from the ship will multiply by the enchantment multiplier. And then the reef's also going to get you a lot of benefits and things like that. One of the most important things is you're going to get shells and pearls. And those are going to get you immediate benefits and bonuses. Shells let you manipulate dice values, which is super super helpful.
Um, and then you have your reef bonuses down here that you can mark so you can keep track of everything and then your final scoring. So, what will happen if this is round one? You are going to shake the dice and we have a one, a five, and a [clears throat] five as our option. Now, how do we use these? We have a few different ways we can use these. We could go to our reef and from the start section, we could pick one of the surrounding numbers and we could cross that off. That's an option because that's going to get us to these pearl bonuses for completing the rows and the columns and also in a few other spots we're going to get bonuses which gets us scoring at the end. Or we can do an enchantment. Now the thing about an enchantment is it takes two dice to do it. So I could potentially take my two fives because enchantments are numbered 7 through 12. And I could cross off this, which would get me that bonus of two shells, which is going to help me manipulate future dice. Or I could look over here at my ship and I could say, hm, I can go to ship one and I could unlock it with that. And it wants the same numbers in the rows, which works out really well because I have two fives. So I could mark those off, which would get me one completed row already.
down here. If I unlocked the five ship, it wants evens and I have ones and fives. I do have two shells already, but I don't want to use them that early. So, I think my best move would be to unlock the one ship and then I'm going to put a five in both spots. You do not have to use all three dice in the same location. Everyone gets to divide them up however they want, which again is what I love because then everybody's board is going to look so different at the end. So, that's round one. We go to round two. And in round two, we get a little boon. We're going to get two shells. So, we're going to go ahead and circle those. And then we are going to roll the dice again. So, six, three, and three. H, what would I like to do? So, I could go to nine, which would get me a times two multiplier for this ship.
Or I could come over here and cross some things off. Um, and I could go to ship three and do plus one or minus one. So, I think I'm going to take one here and I am going to explore this part of the reef. You can circle it, you can cross it off, you can do whatever you want. And then I'm going to take one here and I'm going to start with a three. [snorts] And that means my next dice in this area must be plus or minus one higher. So we're going to continue to do this for the course of 18 rounds. And then what we're going to do is we're going to total up how well we did on each row of our ship. We are going to come over here and we are going to multiply it by the biggest multiplier that we unlocked and we'll have a total.
And you can write your dice each round here if you want so you don't forget what happened. And then we are going to look at our pearl bonuses. We're going to put those there. We are also going to score up all of our reef bonuses. And every time that our favorite number appeared, we're also going to get points for that and get a total score. And whoever has the highest score is going to be the winner. Solo game plays exactly the same way. You just play like this and then you're going to have kind of a beat your own score. There's a scoring guide in the back. So, I love roll and write games where everyone has the same opportunities because I like seeing how it all ends up. I think this is a fantastic roll and write. I like how you're having to do things in the ships, but then you're also wanting to get good multipliers and you're having to balance that, but you also want your reef bonuses. So, you have to make careful decisions with those three dice each round. I think this one's a ton of fun. Let me know. Have you played it?
What do you think of it? Give me a like and a follow and I'll keep bringing you more board game content. Thanks. Bye.