The chip quality on this thing is the first thing anyone says about it and I’m not going to be the exception, the poker-style chips have a heft that regular cardboard tokens just don’t, and the neoprene mats mean setup doesn’t turn into a slide-everywhere mess the second someone bumps the table. It’s the nicest production I own by a real margin, and I don’t say that lightly given what else is on my shelf.

Where it earns its four stars instead of five is teachability. This is genuinely one of the more edge-case-heavy rulesets I’ve played, and I’ve had more than one session where we paused to look something up rather than just make a table call, which cuts against the flow more than I’d like on a weeknight. The dice-building itself is the real hook though, each Gearloc plays meaningfully differently depending on which dice you draft onto their board, and that variety is what’s kept my group coming back to characters we thought we were done with. The story that emerges across a full campaign, which baddie nearly wiped us, which build finally clicked, is the kind of thing we still bring up months later at game night.

Setup and teardown is heavier than I’d like for how often I actually want to play it, sorting the dice bags back into their trays takes real time, which is the one place the component quality works against convenience instead of for it. But between the tactile satisfaction and the genuine replayability across different Gearlocs, four stars, with the caveat that you should budget real time for both ends of the session, not just the middle.