I nearly gave up on this one the first session, which I’ve since learned is close to a universal experience with it. The cards are covered in dense symbol language instead of text, which is supposed to speed up play once you know it and instead makes the first two or three games feel like reading a foreign alphabet cold. I kept the reference card glued to my hand for way longer than I wanted to admit, checking symbols that should have been second nature by session three.

Then there’s a real eureka moment, the exact word other reviewers reach for too, where the icons stop being obstacles and start being information you absorb at a glance, and the whole simultaneous-selection structure, everyone secretly picking a role and the rest of the table getting a partial benefit from whatever got chosen, suddenly clicks into something genuinely elegant. Setup is trivially fast once you’re past the learning curve, a real point in its favor on a weeknight, shuffle, deal, go. Two player games move especially quick, hotly contested in a way I wasn’t expecting from something this compact.

I’ve seen the San Juan comparison a lot, and the criticism that it’s just that game with a space coat of paint and worse onboarding, and I think that’s fair as a criticism of the first few sessions specifically, not of the game once it opens up. It does lose a little of its shine for me at higher player counts, where the combo engine of any one player’s cards matters less than the general race. Four stars, mostly for what it becomes once the wall comes down, less for the wall itself.