I’ll admit the rulebook photos alone had me half convinced this would be ugly, and I bought it anyway on designer reputation, because when a Dominion-adjacent designer puts out a new card game I am basically incapable of saying no. The retro pulp-poster box art turned out to be charming in person in a way the rulebook scans just didn’t capture.

The mechanical hook is that everyone plays out of the same shared deck, and that deck constantly fills with poison cards, and you can choose to make it worse for everyone else at your own risk. It’s been compared to Ponzi Scheme and Galaxy Trucker for that “you can see the collapse coming and can’t fully stop it” feeling, and that’s exactly right, this is a game about a death spiral everyone’s strapped into together. The victory condition is basically the least-failed player winning rather than anyone actually succeeding outright, which sounds bleak on paper and plays as genuinely funny at the table.

Solo works, it’s a fine way to spend twenty minutes, but the multiplayer version is where this actually sings, watching the deck curdle in real time while everyone tries to make sure it curdles worse for the person next to them than for themselves. The reverse-race feeling, trying hardest to not be the one whose people die first, gives it a different shape than most competitive card games manage.

The campy moon-colony theme, domed cities and doomed astronauts, adds real flavor without pretending to be more than it is, and the flavor text carries a lot of the game’s personality given how mechanically lean the actual card interactions are. It scales down cleanly, my two-player games have run just as sharp as bigger tables, maybe sharper since there’s less deck-poisoning to track between only two of us.

Four stars. It’s early days for me with this one, only a handful of plays so far, but “of course it’s good, it’s a DXV card game” has held up every session, and the theme sells the mechanics better than I expected going in.