I bought the base retail box expecting to eventually feel envious of the deluxe upgrades everyone talks about online, and then I opened it and found the player mats already double layered with real indents for your resource cubes, no upgrade needed, and I actually said something out loud in an empty room. That’s a small thing to lead a review with but it set the tone for the whole experience, this is a game where the production quality is doing genuine work, not just looking nice for photos.

What actually keeps this in heavy rotation for me isn’t the combat, which is rare and mostly optional if you play toward economic or territorial goals instead, it’s the encounter cards. Little narrative vignettes with a real moral question attached to each one, and even after two dozen plays I still get a small jolt of curiosity every time one comes up, even the ones I’ve seen before. The asymmetric factions and player boards mean strategy has to genuinely shift depending what you drew and who’s next to you, and the mid-game pivot when your original plan stops working is some of the best tension in any euro I own. We eventually added Rise of Fenris, the campaign expansion, and it’s legitimately the best campaign content I’ve played in this hobby, permanent map changes and evolving rules that make the base game feel like a prologue.

Where it’s earned some fair criticism from people I trust: the ending can feel abrupt, whoever triggers game end by hitting six stars first gets to stop on their turn while everyone else doesn’t get equal turns, and I’ve had games where that timing swing genuinely changed the outcome. There’s also a real multiplayer-solitaire risk at higher counts if your group doesn’t lean into the limited direct conflict, everyone quietly building their own engine without much real interaction. Neither has knocked this out of my top shelf. Five stars, and yes, I did in fact flip when I saw those player mats.