Here’s the pitch and it’s a genuinely great one, five players at one table, each running a totally different rule set toward a totally different win condition, the Knight hunting the Dragon, the Goblins hunting the Knight, the Dragon trying to escape before any of that happens, and, in the biggest swing, the Cave itself is a playable character trying to collapse and trap everyone inside. On paper this is the most ambitious asymmetric design I’ve bumped into. In practice, two player, which is basically the only way it hits my table these days, you’re locked into just two of those five roles and a huge amount of what makes the concept special just isn’t in the room with you.

Teaching this is a genuine hurdle, thirty minutes easy since every player is learning an entirely separate rule set from everyone else’s, and you can’t teach in parallel, you’re going one person at a time while the rest sit there. Setup isn’t bad on its own, maybe ten minutes once you know which faction pieces go where, but the fiddly exceptions pile up fast, the Knight can’t move without Encounters left, the Dragon die wants different results depending on what’s happening elsewhere on the board, little things that individually don’t matter and collectively make you double check the rulebook mid turn more than I’d like for a seventy five minute game.

Where I actually landed on this, cost per hour, is the real sticking point for me. I’ve gotten a decent number of plays out of my copy and I don’t regret the purchase exactly, but a game this rules dense really wants its full five person cast to justify the investment, and at two it’s an expensive way to get a fraction of the design. The theme is genuinely great, the ambition is real, I just don’t think it was built for the table size I mostly actually have.

Three stars. I’d bump this a full point higher if I could get four or five people to the table more reliably than I can.