Every faction in this plays by its own separate rulebook, the Goblins manage three tribes and win by killing the Knight, the Knight runs sidequests for action cubes and wins by killing the Dragon, the Dragon eats goblins and hoards crystals and wins by waking up and escaping, and the Cave itself is a fifth player made of traps and tricks trying to stop everyone else. Teaching this to a fresh group means teaching five different games at once, and I will not pretend that first session wasn’t a slog, three separate rulebooks open on the table, everyone glancing sideways at everyone else’s powers.

It’s worth pushing through. Once people know their own faction the asymmetry becomes the whole appeal, nobody at the table is having the same experience, which is rare enough in this hobby to feel genuinely inventive rather than gimmicky. I made the classic first game mistake with the Knight, misread the bomb ability as useless because there’s no dragon fight yet in an early scenario, and only realized two turns later that bombs are also how you destroy walls, that’s the actual point of the token. An “easy to actually read thoroughly” errata sheet would have saved me the turn.

Two player works better than I expected going in, though it noticeably shines more at four or five once the asymmetry has room to create those unspoken temporary alliances the box promises. Component quality is a strong point, wooden upgrades for what would usually be cardboard, individual player mats that keep each faction’s fiddly bits organized without needing an insert to do it for you. Not a game I’d bring to a casual weeknight. For the right group who’ll commit to learning their own faction properly, this earns its shelf space.