I bought my first set almost entirely for one specific character, the way I’ve seen a lot of people describe doing, and ended up loving a completely different one on the same map more. That’s the real hook of this whole line, you’re not just learning a ruleset, you’re getting to know a roster of legendary figures who all play meaningfully differently off the same core hex-map skeleton, King Arthur, Sherlock Holmes, whoever’s in the box you grabbed, each with their own deck defining their whole identity.

Setup and teardown is genuinely painless, a map, a deck per player, done in under five minutes, which keeps it in regular rotation on nights when a bigger box feels like too much commitment. The card art carries a huge amount of the personality, each character’s deck reads like a small piece of writing about who they are, and my group has started narrating fights in character partway through a session without anyone suggesting it, which is exactly the kind of emergent moment that makes a light game worth keeping around.

The balance issues are real though, and I’d be lying if I said otherwise. Some characters are noticeably stronger than others even within the same set, and cross-set balance is looser still despite the box claiming full compatibility, so a casual pickup game can occasionally tip lopsided before either player’s made a real mistake. It’s not deep in the way a heavier strategy game is deep, there’s an honesty to that I appreciate, this isn’t pretending to be more than a sharp, elegant skirmish. Four stars, and picking a favorite character has become its own small ongoing argument at my table.