The art is doing a lot of misdirection here. It looks like a cozy woodland game you’d hand a kid, and it is in fact a tight, occasionally vicious area control war with four factions that all play by completely different rulesets stapled to the same board. I’d heard the warning going in, don’t unbox this cold, get someone who already knows it to teach the first game, and I’m passing that same warning along because it’s correct. My first session without an experienced teacher at the table was genuinely rough.

Once it clicks, and it does click, usually somewhere in that first taught game, the asymmetry is the whole appeal. The Marquise de Cat is playing an engine-building tempo game, the Eyrie is locked into a rigid, self-punishing rulebook of decrees, the Woodland Alliance is quietly building a revolution from underneath everyone else’s feet, and watching those four completely different games collide on one board produces stories my group still tells. One session an Eyrie player got trapped by their own decree rules into an objectively terrible move and the table watched it happen in real time, unable to look away, which is exactly the kind of emergent moment I play games for.

The player boards for each faction are dense with their own unique iconography, and there’s a real learning curve just getting comfortable reading your own faction’s stuff before you even worry about anyone else’s. It’s not a quick weeknight setup either, more of a “we’ve cleared the evening” kind of game once everyone’s actually experienced. Four stars, brilliant with the right table, actively bad with the wrong one.