Every review I read of this before buying it mentioned Gloomhaven in the first paragraph, and I rolled my eyes a little going in, and then about two chapters into the campaign I found myself doing the same thing to friends unprompted. Set up and tear down here is genuinely faster than the games it’s chasing, the app handles bookkeeping that used to eat fifteen minutes of table time, and that alone changed how often my group could actually get it to the table on a weeknight instead of saving it for a full Saturday.

The story is where this one actually separates itself, and I mean that as an emergent-story person more than as a rules person. James Cosmo’s narration in the app sells beats that would read as flat on a card, and the encounters branch in ways that make you feel like your specific choices, not just your dice, shaped what chapter six looked like. My group still argues about a decision from our third session, whether we should have trusted a particular NPC, the way you’d argue about a real disagreement, which is the exact thing a campaign game is supposed to produce and mostly doesn’t.

The rulebook is the one real complaint I share with other reviewers, some edge cases around enemy movement at the board edge just aren’t covered clearly, and we’ve had to make a table ruling more than once and move on rather than lose the session hunting for an official answer. But the production, the combat feel, the sheer table presence when it’s fully set up, all of it is close to the top of what this genre has done. Five stars, and I already know I’m buying the next campaign box the day it ships.