The core loop here is almost embarrassingly simple to explain, pick a card, pass the rest to your neighbor, and yet the decision of whether to lean into military, science, resources, or your wonder stage each round stays interesting for the whole thirty minutes it takes to play. That’s the real trick of the design, it teaches in under five minutes and still gives you something to chew on well after you’ve internalized the basics.

The honest tradeoff, and it’s one I’ve made peace with rather than solved: this is close to multiplayer solitaire in practice. You’re mostly optimizing your own tableau and reacting to the cards passed to you rather than actively responding to what your neighbors are building, and I’ve had full games where I genuinely couldn’t tell you what half the table ended up with. For a quick warmup game before something heavier, that’s fine, even a feature, it doesn’t ask for the same kind of table awareness a more confrontational game does. As a centerpiece for the night, it can feel a little thin.

I’ll also say the table sprawl is real. With five or more players and everyone’s tableau spread out, reading anyone else’s board from across the table is genuinely difficult, which reinforces the multiplayer-solitaire feeling more than the box wants to admit. The Cities expansion fixed enough of my mild complaints about early-game randomness that I don’t play without it anymore, if you’re buying this, buy that with it.

Four stars. It’s the right game for the right slot in an evening, a quick, pretty warmup rather than the whole meal, and it knows exactly what it is.