Worker placement games and deckbuilders both scratch different itches for me and I’ve played plenty of attempts to smash the two together that end up feeling like two separate games taking turns rather than one integrated system. This is the one that actually got it right for me.

The cards you buy feed directly into what actions and resources you have available on the board, and the board in turn determines what you can afford to buy next, and that loop is tight in a way that kept surprising me across five research-track rounds. Quick turns, a card row that actually matters instead of decoration, exploration and guardian-defeating that feels thematically earned rather than a resource-conversion excuse. Someone described it as reminding them of Clank but more euro and less push-your-luck, and that’s about the right neighborhood, minus the dungeon-crawl randomness.

The solo mode is genuinely one of the better automas I’ve played against, not just a token bot to justify a “1-4 players” label on the box. I’ve gotten real mileage out of playing this alone on nights nobody else wants to sit down for an hour.

The honest criticism, and I’ve seen it from more than one corner, is that no matter which strategy you’re leaning into, you end up needing the same handful of resources, so the deckbuilding ends up more loosely tied to your actual plan than a true engine-builder would deliver. There are really only two viable paths, guardians or research, and after a few plays that can start to feel like a smaller decision space than the box’s ambition suggests. I’ve also had a round where I ran out of usable cards early and just watched the table for a stretch, which is the one real structural pain point.

Five stars anyway. The artefact-power-creep problem some reviewers flag, where each new expansion card feels more broken than the last, is a real thing, but it’s the kind of “so is that also overpowered” escalation that I find charming rather than a dealbreaker.