Renata and I picked this up expecting something like an RPG-in-a-box campaign we could pick apart together, and for the exploring, that’s exactly what we got. You’re sailing a crew around an unmapped world running into events, characters, choices with real consequences, and the writing on those event cards is genuinely good, specific and strange in ways that made us actually stop and discuss what to do instead of just optimizing the numbers.
The problem is combat, and I want to be direct about it since it colors a big chunk of the playtime. Every resolution in this game runs off a card flip, exploration outcomes, resource gathering, ship movement, and especially fights, and while push-your-luck works fine for exploring, it turns fights into a slog where you’re mostly watching cards flip and hoping instead of making real decisions. We hit an unexpected battle two sessions in that neither of us wanted and it just sat there, tedious, for longer than the story moment around it deserved.
Setup and storage is its own project too, this needs a real organization system, we ended up buying a sectioned box just to keep the sheer volume of tokens and cards from turning every session start into a twenty-minute sorting chore. Once that’s handled it’s a smoother experience, but that’s an extra cost and an extra step most games on our shelf don’t demand.
We’re maybe a third through the campaign and Renata’s enthusiasm has cooled some since our first few sessions, the shine that got us both excited early has worn a little thin on repeat plays once the push-your-luck pattern became obvious across every system instead of feeling fresh each time. The art and the writing are still good enough to keep us going. The combat is the reason this isn’t higher.
Great theme, gorgeous production, but budget real patience for the fights.