I bought this almost entirely on the designer’s name, Donald X. Vaccarino built Dominion, and I’ll follow him into a premise this odd without much more than a rulebook skim first. The premise: everyone draws from one shared, increasingly poisoned deck, and you can spend your turn making that shared poison problem worse for the table instead of better for yourself, which sounds like a recipe for pure chaos and mostly is, in the best way. “Least failed player wins” isn’t a joke, it’s the actual victory condition, and the game commits to that bleak framing with a straight face the whole way through.

Solo, it plays more like a puzzle, manage your own deck’s decline and try to beat your own prior score, and it’s a perfectly fine way to spend twenty minutes but it’s clearly not where the design’s heart is. With a full table it turns into something closer to Galaxy Trucker or a Ponzi Scheme simulator, everyone can see the disaster coming and nobody can fully steer around it, and there’s a specific kind of laughter that happens at my table when someone adds a development card that’s engineered to hurt everyone else’s strategy more than their own.

I want to be honest about the production, the component art is not going to win anyone over on looks alone, it’s serviceable at best and a little ugly at worst, which tracks with a few other reviewers noting the same thing before they’d even played it. It didn’t stop me from buying it and it hasn’t stopped it from getting real table time since. Setup is minimal, one shared deck plus a starting hand each, teardown is even faster.

Four stars. Underrated, likely to stay under most people’s radar the way a few of this designer’s smaller titles have, and worth seeking out anyway.