The comparisons to Gloomhaven are everywhere in the community around this one and I understand why, dice-and-card combat, an app running the storyline like a quiet digital DM, a campaign structured in chapters, but the resemblance stops mattering pretty fast once you’re actually inside a chapter. Each one plays completely differently from the last, I’ve done a tense stealth run, a straight-up tower defense, and something closer to charades than combat, all inside the same core rules, and that variety alone is doing more for replayability than most legacy games manage with a box full of stickers.
Teachability is where I want to be honest about the cost. The learning curve is real, similar in weight to Gloomhaven’s, and I wouldn’t hand this to a table that’s never played anything heavier than a filler. The first chapter functions as a tutorial in the loose sense, it introduces the combat puzzle, but it doesn’t fully prepare you for how much the game escalates once the app starts throwing genuine curveballs at you. Worth the investment of a slow first session, but go in knowing it’s an investment.
Combat itself is the part I keep coming back to, counting cards, rolling dice, managing a shrinking pool of usable actions as your gear wears down, you’ll start a fight with a bow and end it swinging a short sword because that’s all you’ve got left, and that attrition mechanic does more to sell the desperation of the story than any amount of flavor text could. I actually found myself reading the story beats in full instead of skimming for the next fight, which almost never happens to me in this genre. Deluxe components if you spring for them, but the app-driven storytelling and the combat puzzle underneath it would carry this game even in the base box.