The logistics of this game are genuinely remarkable and I don’t think I say that lightly. You can seat seven people, hand everyone seven cards, and be finished with a full civilization-building game in half an hour because everyone drafts and plays simultaneously rather than waiting their turn. For a group with mixed experience, mixed patience, or just limited time on a weeknight, that’s an enormous advantage almost nothing else in this hobby matches.

The catch, and it’s a real one, is that “no downtime” comes partly from “not much actual interaction.” You mostly only affect the two players sitting next to you, passing hands of cards down the line, and I’ve had games where I could have played the entire thing with strangers on either side and barely noticed the difference in outcome. A newer player at my table once won an entire game without really understanding the strategy, purely because the person passing them cards happened to dump good ones their way, while two experienced players at the same table finished last. That’s not a knock exactly, luck of the draft is part of the design, but it does undercut the “great strategy game” reputation a little.

I’ll say the theme is thinner than the box art promises, you’re technically building a civilization but in practice you’re managing resource icons and a scoring engine, and more than one person’s pointed out that the blue “civic” cards especially feel pasted on rather than meaningfully thematic. Still, four stars, because as an on-ramp for people who “don’t really play games,” or as the thing you throw in a bag along with a smaller filler for when you’re traveling, nothing else does this specific job as well. It’s not going to be the deepest game in your collection. It’ll be the one you can always convince a full table to actually play.