The buttery smooth game play and the really great coopetiton – you quite often can’t avoid giving things to your opponents. The double use of action cards for both the actions you can take and end game scoring, the breat visual way the map fills up – it all snaps together so well. And you just feel great while playing it. Add that it is quite easy to teach, if people have played some other modern games before. And the different maps give nice variability without overburdening people with complexity.

One thing to keep in mind: they have horizontal (adding to gemerl game play) and vertical (adding new story by adding curses) expansions. I only went for the vertical ones, as those will provide play outside the allredy known, while horizpntal (weather, devourer) only add uf you throw them in from the start or replay curses, which I don’t relly see myself doing.

For me it was Polis: Fight for the Hegemony – I know, not a real war game, but that one made me look for more games on the border of euro and war games, stuff like Wir sind das Volk or the COIN series, CDGs and stuff like that. Games where grognards usually complain that they are not war games 😉 – sooner than later that drew me deeper into war game territory with stuff like Paths of Glory, Washington’s War, Twilight struggle. Then solo gaming got me closer to other publishers, since some of them have great solo variants, so now I have stuff around like Comancheria, War Fighter, Churchill, Pericles, but also things like Conflict of Heroes: Awakening the Bear (with the solo expansion) and Night of Man. And COIN. These games always feel like they were built for me.

Military wins happen only when the right science is up for grabs and even then it often needs help by either military wonders or double-turn wonders to grab juicy fat military cards. More often than not a military win means your opponent didn’t pay attention or was too greedy. Science wins on the other hand are happening quite often, as that is a good way to go when you notice a runaway leader problem early enough. But again, without the help of double-turn wonders or the mausoleum allmost impossible.