Went back and forth on the standee edition versus the giant miniatures for way too long before backing this, if I’m honest, and I ended up going standee, and I do not regret it once I saw how much shelf space the mini bosses actually eat. My group plays at four and setup for a chapter, once you’ve got the map tiles, standees, tokens, and the companion app all queued up, runs a solid fifteen minutes, which for a game this size is honestly not bad, it’s the teardown mid campaign that gets me, sorting everything back into the right trays so the next session doesn’t start with ten minutes of hunting for one specific token.

The thing that actually sold me on this, more than the battleflow combat which is genuinely clever, cooldown cards you rotate through instead of a discard and refill, is the story half. It’s the best written narrative I’ve gotten out of a boss battler, full stop, and the app narration turns the between-fight chapters into something I actually look forward to instead of a rules delivery mechanism. That said I’ve seen the complaint from other players with more chapters under their belt than us, that after a dozen or so encounters the boss fights start blurring together, different monster, same rhythm, and I can feel that risk on the horizon even though we’re not there yet ourselves.

Where this loses half a star for me is the choice illusion, the story branches feel more cosmetic than structural the deeper you get, your decisions color the flavor without really steering the campaign. Still, component quality and the sheer care poured into every chapter is obvious from the first box you crack open. Five stars, my highest praise being that I genuinely mourn the session where we’re not playing it.