A Preface: I received a review copy of Renegade from Victory Point Games. I hope it’s clear that I’ve done my best to give a thoughtful, thorough review, with that in mind.
~
The setting: me at a big ol’ table
The year: 2013 probably
*my roommate comes out of his room*
Roommate: what’re you doing
Me: I’m learning how to play this game, it’s supposed to be really fun solo, but it feels a bit overwhelming
R: what is it
M: it’s called Mage Knight, there are so many rules
R: k
*roommate returns 4 hours later*
R: um are you still playing that game
M: I have accomplished so little in the time since you’ve left
R: …
M: maybe a video will help me understand this game
M: oh who is this Ricky Royal fellow
*two hours later*
M: this man is a saint
~
Renegade is a deck-building game designed by Richard Wilkins and published by Victory Point Games. Richard Wilkins is likely best-known in the board game community for his absolutely outstanding playthrough video series on YouTube called Box of Delights, where he goes by “Ricky Royal.”
But we’re not here to talk about his outstanding shuffling skills or his nifty wrist bracelets or his soothing voice; we’re here to talk about the GAME he made.
So, uh, let’s do that.
The Game
In Renegade, you’re playing a hacker who is moving your avatar around a virtual landscape in a dystopian future, trying to place different contaminants in different partitions of a multi-colored digital world in an effort to shut down your tyrannical digital overlords/ladies.
If you thought that was a mouthful… just wait until later.
![]()
Photo credit to BGG user ricky2002 (the game's designer)
You start with a 15-card deck, and you will be buying new, better cards throughout the game that will upgrade your deck. (Something I absolutely adore about the game: your deck must always be exactly 15 cards: every time you purchase a card, you have to remove from the game one of the cards that you used to make that purchase.) (Another thing I love: the cards you purchase go directly into your hand and can be used immediately. The game only lets you go through your deck three (or four, on the hardest setting) times, so this is a critical, genius mechanism.) (Why am I using parentheses so much)
There are several different “currencies” that you’re using throughout the game: blue icons on your cards let you move around, red icons let you attack the baddies on the board, green icons give you increased access to other spaces on the board, and yellow icons help you manipulate and change the kinds of tokens on the board.
![]()
Photo credit to BGG user ricky2002 (the game's designer)
On your turn, you’ll use your hand of five cards to do different things: maybe you’re moving over to fight some sparks (oh, uh, the way the game works is that you are trying to stop sparks, the bad stuff populated by the game system, from overrunning the board), maybe you’re placing tokens on the board that will help you do stronger things on later turns, maybe you’re buying new cards, etc.
When you set up the game, you choose a super-massive computer to fight against (which just defines the difficulty level of the game, and some of the setup and in-game specific rules), and then you randomly pick some objective cards that will give you different objectives to meet as you play the game. These objectives will give you specific things to accomplish before you’ve run through all 15 cards of your deck, and you’ll get bonuses/penalties depending on whether or not you accomplish those goals when you’re resetting your deck.
![]()
Photo credit to BGG user Dimitris Xs
![]()
Photo credit to BGG user The Innocent
I want to emphasize that I have left out LOTS AND LOTS of details about the game and how it works. With that in mind, here’s another quick-re-summarizing-thing of the game as a whole (with, uh, some things I’ve said and some things I haven’t said already): Renegade is a deck-builder where you’re moving a figure around five different “servers” that will have sparks on them (i.e., little black tokens that are bad). Each turn, you’ll populate one or more random sparks on the board, and then you’ll use the five cards in your hand to get new cards, strengthen your position on the board by placing tokens that give you different ways to combat the sparks, move around the board, etc. Depending on which super-massive computer you’re fighting, there might be unique rules for the game beyond that, too, and you will always have some random-and-escalating-in-difficulty objectives you’re trying to accomplish. You win if you can go through your deck three times (or four times, on the hardest setting) without losing. You lose if you ever need to place a bad token on the board and can’t. If you win, you tally up your score based on several different conditions and see how good/bad your win was.
Yay: Clever Deckbuilding Mechanisms
As I mentioned before, you always have a deck of 15 cards no matter how many you purchase, and you get access to cards the moment that you purchase them. I love both of these twists on deckbuilding: no worrying about the bloat of your deck, or worrying if your newly purhcased card can be used for some eventual combo. You see a card you want, you take it, and you use it right then and there. This game emphasizes a level of control and planning that I don’t always see in deckbuilding, and I think it’s absolutely fabulous how you manage your hand and the turns that you take. You’re also allowed to hold onto one card when you draw five more at the end of your turn, so you aren’t as hamstrung by bad draws as you can be in other deckbuilders.
Nay: The Card Pool
With that in mind, there is a relatively small pool of cards that you have to choose from when you’re upgrading your deck. You’ll have four to choose from at the start of each turn, and there are only 36 cards you can use to upgrade your hand in the base game. That’s not a trivial number of cards, but it isn’t quite as much as I would have liked. This is a nitpick more than a major complaint, however – you can get a lot of mileage and do very neat combos with the cards that come with the game.
Yay: Variability
While the card pool isn’t quite as robust as I would have liked, there is just oodles and oodles of variability baked into the game at almost every turn. Every character has their own asymmetric ability, and the super-massive computers and different objectives combine in ways that really do feel quite different from each other. Each game will require a fresh assessment of what you’re up to, what emergencies need attention RIGHT NOW and what can wait, and how you can build up your infrastructure of tokens to continue forging through the game’s fraught conditions.
You also build the board every time you play, which makes for a different-feeling physical space every game, too – and I love deckbuilders that bake movement into the game in some way, so that’s a major plus for me. There are also several interesting variants in the back of the rulebook for even more variability with the way sparks are placed, the way the board is constructed, etc. It’s all really quite very good and nice.
Nay: The Terminology
This is something talked about quite a bit with this game, but I want to give my take on it, too.
When I write reviews, I often leave big ol’ notes for myself in the drafts that I’m making. They often look something like this:
“Once you are done with the NAME OF THE THIRD PHASE, then you move on to WHATEVER THE CLEANUP PHASE IS CALLED.”
For someone who writes way too many board game reviews in my spare time and (no joke) would work full-time as a Board Game Teacher if that was a thing, I’m really bad at remembering the specific terminologies given to specific games: I have my own lame heuristics that allow me to cope with this shortcoming of mine.
And there are just, like, a LOT of terms to slog through when you’re learning Renegade. And maybe the problem that I have is that the terminology is impressively thematic but massively unintuitive, at least to me, when you’re first learning how to play the game. I know that “elegance” is an overused term for describing board games, but it felt like Renegade sacrificed elegance in the name of staunch thematic fidelity. It’s not that you can’t learn these terms or that they’re bad/uninteresting; it’s just that, in the process of learning the game and the way that things work, I had a hard time keeping these kinds of things straight:
The actions all have different names (move, shift, upload, modify, install, infect, shop), the currencies (called command points) on your cards have different names (destruction, deception, cognition, information, leadership), the tokens (called contaminants) associated with those currencies have different names (data nodes, replicants, viruses, uplinks, rootkits), and the upgraded versions of those tokens (called installations) have different names (propagators, replicators, neural hubs, and data ports).
Thankfully, the player aids and back of the rulebook are comprehensive and QUITE helpful for understanding what you can do on your turn, but for me, personally, I had to just ignore keeping all these terms straight for my first few games. Whenever these terms are referenced in the game’s cards or player aid, there are immensely helpful symbols and shapes that they use in very consistent, intuitive ways to help remind you of what the specific term means.
![]()
Photo credit to BGG user Pascal_PAN
My biggest gripe is that these terms don’t do much to establish a mental shortcut, on their own, that I can use to easily understand the game in the context of things that I know or expect words to mean outside of the context of the game. There’s a non-trivial load of mental work to do, at least when learning the game at first, that might be a significant turn-off for some people. This critique doesn’t affect my enjoyment of the game now that I’m familiar with it, but it can feel daunting at first.
Yay: Crunchiness
My gripes with the terminology of the game come in the context of a concern I have going into any new game: am I willing to commit to my feeble brain whatever’s going on with this new game? Is the joy of the game’s output commensurate to the mental load/input that I, as a player, have to take on?
Fortunately, the answer here is a pretty emphatic yes. There is a delightful level of crunch and thinkiness to the game: I find it’s a nice balance of strategy and tactics, of carefully crafting your deck for future moves and frantically working to put out the fires popping up all over the board. The game rewards multiple plays, familiarity with the deck and the way the game flows. It is a really good, solid, fun, engaging game.
But.
Nay: The End Game
The way the game ends is, in my opinion, a bit quirky. You’re working through your deck three or four times, and if you can do that before too many bad things are out on the board, the game tells you that, objectively, you’ve won.
You then go to a scoring chart and contextualize your win, getting bonuses depending on how many objectives you completed along the way, how many sparks are on the board, etc.
Because of the way this comes together, there were times where I felt a bit unguided as a player: is my ultimate goal to just make it to the end, no matter what (and just be happy I survived at all), or should I be willing to sacrifice my likeliness of winning the game in the pursuit of having a higher score IF I do, in fact, make it all the way to the end? (I’ll note that if the answer here is “You, as the player, can decide for yourself!”… I don’t love that. Maybe the issue I have here is that the game seems to be giving ME, as the player, the ability to decide how much all of those things matter. But for me, personally, I don’t WANT to have that power.) Perhaps some system where you win if you make it to the end AND score X points would have been more satisfying.
Yay: The Whole Game
I Like and Maybe Love Renegade. I fluctuate wildly between “All is hopeless and meaningless in this hellscape and I am an idiot” to “I am the master of space and time” in, just, the BEST way possible when playing. This is a wonderful game system that solo players (oh, uh, this is a solo-focused review... it makes sense to put that in the last sentence, right) interested in crunchier deck-builders might just love.
If you like this review, please check out my other reviews of solo games and variants in the Meeple, Myself, and I series!
~
The setting: me at a big ol’ table
The year: 2013 probably
*my roommate comes out of his room*
Roommate: what’re you doing
Me: I’m learning how to play this game, it’s supposed to be really fun solo, but it feels a bit overwhelming
R: what is it
M: it’s called Mage Knight, there are so many rules
R: k
*roommate returns 4 hours later*
R: um are you still playing that game
M: I have accomplished so little in the time since you’ve left
R: …
M: maybe a video will help me understand this game
M: oh who is this Ricky Royal fellow
*two hours later*
M: this man is a saint
~
Renegade is a deck-building game designed by Richard Wilkins and published by Victory Point Games. Richard Wilkins is likely best-known in the board game community for his absolutely outstanding playthrough video series on YouTube called Box of Delights, where he goes by “Ricky Royal.”
But we’re not here to talk about his outstanding shuffling skills or his nifty wrist bracelets or his soothing voice; we’re here to talk about the GAME he made.
So, uh, let’s do that.
The Game
In Renegade, you’re playing a hacker who is moving your avatar around a virtual landscape in a dystopian future, trying to place different contaminants in different partitions of a multi-colored digital world in an effort to shut down your tyrannical digital overlords/ladies.
If you thought that was a mouthful… just wait until later.
Photo credit to BGG user ricky2002 (the game's designer)
You start with a 15-card deck, and you will be buying new, better cards throughout the game that will upgrade your deck. (Something I absolutely adore about the game: your deck must always be exactly 15 cards: every time you purchase a card, you have to remove from the game one of the cards that you used to make that purchase.) (Another thing I love: the cards you purchase go directly into your hand and can be used immediately. The game only lets you go through your deck three (or four, on the hardest setting) times, so this is a critical, genius mechanism.) (Why am I using parentheses so much)
There are several different “currencies” that you’re using throughout the game: blue icons on your cards let you move around, red icons let you attack the baddies on the board, green icons give you increased access to other spaces on the board, and yellow icons help you manipulate and change the kinds of tokens on the board.
Photo credit to BGG user ricky2002 (the game's designer)
On your turn, you’ll use your hand of five cards to do different things: maybe you’re moving over to fight some sparks (oh, uh, the way the game works is that you are trying to stop sparks, the bad stuff populated by the game system, from overrunning the board), maybe you’re placing tokens on the board that will help you do stronger things on later turns, maybe you’re buying new cards, etc.
When you set up the game, you choose a super-massive computer to fight against (which just defines the difficulty level of the game, and some of the setup and in-game specific rules), and then you randomly pick some objective cards that will give you different objectives to meet as you play the game. These objectives will give you specific things to accomplish before you’ve run through all 15 cards of your deck, and you’ll get bonuses/penalties depending on whether or not you accomplish those goals when you’re resetting your deck.
Photo credit to BGG user Dimitris Xs
Photo credit to BGG user The Innocent
I want to emphasize that I have left out LOTS AND LOTS of details about the game and how it works. With that in mind, here’s another quick-re-summarizing-thing of the game as a whole (with, uh, some things I’ve said and some things I haven’t said already): Renegade is a deck-builder where you’re moving a figure around five different “servers” that will have sparks on them (i.e., little black tokens that are bad). Each turn, you’ll populate one or more random sparks on the board, and then you’ll use the five cards in your hand to get new cards, strengthen your position on the board by placing tokens that give you different ways to combat the sparks, move around the board, etc. Depending on which super-massive computer you’re fighting, there might be unique rules for the game beyond that, too, and you will always have some random-and-escalating-in-difficulty objectives you’re trying to accomplish. You win if you can go through your deck three times (or four times, on the hardest setting) without losing. You lose if you ever need to place a bad token on the board and can’t. If you win, you tally up your score based on several different conditions and see how good/bad your win was.
Yay: Clever Deckbuilding Mechanisms
As I mentioned before, you always have a deck of 15 cards no matter how many you purchase, and you get access to cards the moment that you purchase them. I love both of these twists on deckbuilding: no worrying about the bloat of your deck, or worrying if your newly purhcased card can be used for some eventual combo. You see a card you want, you take it, and you use it right then and there. This game emphasizes a level of control and planning that I don’t always see in deckbuilding, and I think it’s absolutely fabulous how you manage your hand and the turns that you take. You’re also allowed to hold onto one card when you draw five more at the end of your turn, so you aren’t as hamstrung by bad draws as you can be in other deckbuilders.
Nay: The Card Pool
With that in mind, there is a relatively small pool of cards that you have to choose from when you’re upgrading your deck. You’ll have four to choose from at the start of each turn, and there are only 36 cards you can use to upgrade your hand in the base game. That’s not a trivial number of cards, but it isn’t quite as much as I would have liked. This is a nitpick more than a major complaint, however – you can get a lot of mileage and do very neat combos with the cards that come with the game.
Yay: Variability
While the card pool isn’t quite as robust as I would have liked, there is just oodles and oodles of variability baked into the game at almost every turn. Every character has their own asymmetric ability, and the super-massive computers and different objectives combine in ways that really do feel quite different from each other. Each game will require a fresh assessment of what you’re up to, what emergencies need attention RIGHT NOW and what can wait, and how you can build up your infrastructure of tokens to continue forging through the game’s fraught conditions.
You also build the board every time you play, which makes for a different-feeling physical space every game, too – and I love deckbuilders that bake movement into the game in some way, so that’s a major plus for me. There are also several interesting variants in the back of the rulebook for even more variability with the way sparks are placed, the way the board is constructed, etc. It’s all really quite very good and nice.
Nay: The Terminology
This is something talked about quite a bit with this game, but I want to give my take on it, too.
When I write reviews, I often leave big ol’ notes for myself in the drafts that I’m making. They often look something like this:
“Once you are done with the NAME OF THE THIRD PHASE, then you move on to WHATEVER THE CLEANUP PHASE IS CALLED.”
For someone who writes way too many board game reviews in my spare time and (no joke) would work full-time as a Board Game Teacher if that was a thing, I’m really bad at remembering the specific terminologies given to specific games: I have my own lame heuristics that allow me to cope with this shortcoming of mine.
And there are just, like, a LOT of terms to slog through when you’re learning Renegade. And maybe the problem that I have is that the terminology is impressively thematic but massively unintuitive, at least to me, when you’re first learning how to play the game. I know that “elegance” is an overused term for describing board games, but it felt like Renegade sacrificed elegance in the name of staunch thematic fidelity. It’s not that you can’t learn these terms or that they’re bad/uninteresting; it’s just that, in the process of learning the game and the way that things work, I had a hard time keeping these kinds of things straight:
The actions all have different names (move, shift, upload, modify, install, infect, shop), the currencies (called command points) on your cards have different names (destruction, deception, cognition, information, leadership), the tokens (called contaminants) associated with those currencies have different names (data nodes, replicants, viruses, uplinks, rootkits), and the upgraded versions of those tokens (called installations) have different names (propagators, replicators, neural hubs, and data ports).
Thankfully, the player aids and back of the rulebook are comprehensive and QUITE helpful for understanding what you can do on your turn, but for me, personally, I had to just ignore keeping all these terms straight for my first few games. Whenever these terms are referenced in the game’s cards or player aid, there are immensely helpful symbols and shapes that they use in very consistent, intuitive ways to help remind you of what the specific term means.
Photo credit to BGG user Pascal_PAN
My biggest gripe is that these terms don’t do much to establish a mental shortcut, on their own, that I can use to easily understand the game in the context of things that I know or expect words to mean outside of the context of the game. There’s a non-trivial load of mental work to do, at least when learning the game at first, that might be a significant turn-off for some people. This critique doesn’t affect my enjoyment of the game now that I’m familiar with it, but it can feel daunting at first.
Yay: Crunchiness
My gripes with the terminology of the game come in the context of a concern I have going into any new game: am I willing to commit to my feeble brain whatever’s going on with this new game? Is the joy of the game’s output commensurate to the mental load/input that I, as a player, have to take on?
Fortunately, the answer here is a pretty emphatic yes. There is a delightful level of crunch and thinkiness to the game: I find it’s a nice balance of strategy and tactics, of carefully crafting your deck for future moves and frantically working to put out the fires popping up all over the board. The game rewards multiple plays, familiarity with the deck and the way the game flows. It is a really good, solid, fun, engaging game.
But.
Nay: The End Game
The way the game ends is, in my opinion, a bit quirky. You’re working through your deck three or four times, and if you can do that before too many bad things are out on the board, the game tells you that, objectively, you’ve won.
You then go to a scoring chart and contextualize your win, getting bonuses depending on how many objectives you completed along the way, how many sparks are on the board, etc.
Because of the way this comes together, there were times where I felt a bit unguided as a player: is my ultimate goal to just make it to the end, no matter what (and just be happy I survived at all), or should I be willing to sacrifice my likeliness of winning the game in the pursuit of having a higher score IF I do, in fact, make it all the way to the end? (I’ll note that if the answer here is “You, as the player, can decide for yourself!”… I don’t love that. Maybe the issue I have here is that the game seems to be giving ME, as the player, the ability to decide how much all of those things matter. But for me, personally, I don’t WANT to have that power.) Perhaps some system where you win if you make it to the end AND score X points would have been more satisfying.
Yay: The Whole Game
I Like and Maybe Love Renegade. I fluctuate wildly between “All is hopeless and meaningless in this hellscape and I am an idiot” to “I am the master of space and time” in, just, the BEST way possible when playing. This is a wonderful game system that solo players (oh, uh, this is a solo-focused review... it makes sense to put that in the last sentence, right) interested in crunchier deck-builders might just love.
If you like this review, please check out my other reviews of solo games and variants in the Meeple, Myself, and I series!