The pitch that got me to buy in is genuinely elegant, cards discarded for magic aren’t wasted, they’re the resource that lets your summoner cast more units onto the grid, which means every card in your hand is doing double duty as either a unit, an event, or fuel. Somebody described it as Magic: The Gathering with unit movement and dice rolling bolted on, which is fair as far as it goes, but undersells how tight the actual grid-based positioning feels once you’re a few turns in.

Teaching a new player the basic loop, summon, move, attack, take about fifteen minutes, faster than most tactical games this deep. What takes longer is learning any individual faction’s specific tricks, and here’s the real catch, each faction plays different enough that a match between two people who’ve only played their own side can feel lopsided in a way that has nothing to do with actual skill. I’ve lost games purely because I didn’t know what my opponent’s faction could do, which some players find frustrating and I mostly find is part of the appeal, learning the roster is its own long game.

The momentum problem is real and worth naming directly. Winning an early combat generates more magic, which lets you summon more units, which lets you win more combats, and a lopsided start can snowball into an unrecoverable position faster than the dice would suggest is fair. When both summoners are close in position and magic though, and the dice actually split evenly, this becomes one of the tightest two player tactical games I own, genuine back and forth, no dead turns. The paper play mats some of the older sets include are, in my experience, actively worse than playing on a bare table, they slide and don’t line up cleanly with the card grid, skip them if you can.

Four stars. Best strictly at two, and I’d actively avoid a four player game with anyone who hasn’t played before, it slows to a crawl. If you can find a storage solution for all the faction decks, worth doing, this is the kind of game where owning six or seven factions turns into owning fifteen before you notice it happening.