Card drafting scratches a real itch for me generally, and I know the amount of praise this game gets, so I went in expecting to fall for it the way most of the hobby has. Five plays in with a rotating cast of people at the table and I still land somewhere in the middle. It plays fast, everyone resolves their stuff at roughly the same time so there’s minimal downtime, and it can seat up to seven without the game buckling under the extra players, which is genuinely rare and worth crediting.
Where it loses me is how thin the theme feels once you’re actually playing. It’s a points engine with an ancient-world coat of paint, a mishmash of civilizations that don’t have much to do with each other beyond the shared time period, and the iconography-heavy card text asks new players to learn a whole visual language before they can parse what’s actually in front of them. Teachability suffers for it, the first game usually has at least one player just reacting card to card without seeing the wonder-stage strategy underneath, and it takes a couple sessions before anyone’s really playing on purpose instead of drafting whatever looks strongest in isolation.
The opponent-screwing through military conflict is the part that keeps me coming back more than the building itself, there’s real tension in watching your neighbors’ military tracks and deciding whether to invest defensively or just eat the loss and focus your resources elsewhere. But I keep thinking about a smaller, cuter drafting game doing more with less baggage, and I can’t fully shake that comparison. Solid, reliable, easy to get to the table with almost anyone. I just don’t reach for it first the way the reputation suggests I should.