The pitch for this one is that four players sit at one board and each plays what amounts to a completely different game, the Marquise doing engine-style resource management, the Eyrie locked into an escalating rulebook of forced decrees, the Woodland Alliance quietly building an insurgency from sympathy tokens, the Vagabond just wandering around doing quests and staying out of the crossfire. That asymmetry is genuinely the best idea I’ve encountered in a modern board game. It’s also, and I want to be honest about this, an absolute pain to teach.

My first session took almost an hour of rules explanation before a single piece moved, and even then half the table spent the first thirty minutes reacting to what their own faction could do rather than reading the wider board state, because you kind of have to know every faction’s rules to understand what’s actually happening around you. That’s not a small ask. Once it clicked though, somewhere in game two for most of my group, the interlocking nature of it became the whole appeal, watching four totally different sets of rules escalate against each other into one coherent, tense endgame.

The thing nobody warns you about clearly enough going in is the kingmaking. Whoever’s pulling ahead gets ganged up on by everyone else almost automatically, which some players find is the entire meta-game, a functioning diplomacy layer on top of the board, and other players find genuinely frustrating, punished for playing well rather than rewarded for it. I land somewhere in the middle, I like it in theory, I’ve had one session where it felt like it overrode actual strategy entirely.

Four stars, not five, mostly because of how steep and lopsided that first game curve is, and because the base game alone starts feeling thin after a handful of plays, you really do want at least one expansion faction in rotation to keep it fresh. The Mayday sleeves are worth skipping if you’re on a budget, the card stock is already solid. But if you can get four committed players who’ll sit through the long teach twice, this becomes something genuinely unlike anything else on my shelf.