This is a survival game about civilians, not soldiers, trying to make it through a war siege in a destroyed city, and it does not go easy on you. My first run I lasted maybe a day, two at most. I’ve since read plenty of people saying the balance can punish you before you’ve even had a real chance to make a decision, and I don’t fully disagree, though I also don’t think that’s necessarily a flaw so much as the entire point of the theme landing as intended.

You get attached to your survivors fast, which is the trap, because this game is very clear from the outset that not all of them are making it out. The dilemmas are the real content here: do you take supplies from another group of civilians who need them just as badly as you do, do you let someone go hungry so someone else can keep working, and there’s no clean answer offered to any of it. A campaign runs three chapters and there’s a lot of text to read along the way, so if you’re not up for that, this isn’t the game for you.

Two things keep it from a perfect score for me. The permadeath-adjacent unbalance can feel unfair rather than tense on a bad run, less “hard choices” and more “the dice decided before I did anything.” And the setup and teardown between night and day phases adds real downtime that a lighter game wouldn’t ask of you. Still, when it clicks, when a decision actually costs you something you feel, it’s doing something almost no other board game attempts.

Not a game for a casual weeknight. A genuinely visceral one for the right mood, with your attachment to these fragile little cardboard people doing more emotional work than I expected walking in.