Stonemaier’s pitch here is an entire planet you and up to five other players explore while scattered across different regions, radioing information back and forth, no shared board, everyone building their own understanding of the world from what they’ve found. Nearly eight hundred interconnected locations spread across four hundred cards, fully self contained, no expansion treadmill required to feel complete, which after some of their other lines is a genuinely nice change of pace.

The two player viability is where this either clicks for you or it doesn’t, honestly. At two, communicating what you’re each discovering becomes the entire texture of the game, and when it works it’s a strange, quiet kind of co-op tension I haven’t felt from much else on my shelf. When it doesn’t, and it didn’t for us the first time, one player ends up sitting on information the other can’t act on fast enough, and the downtime between turns starts to feel like real dead air instead of anticipation.

I’ll be honest that a lot of the noise around this game before release was pure hype, box previews and coin photos and people rating it a ten before a single copy had shipped, which made the actual experience a little harder to judge fairly against the noise. Once you strip that away, what’s left is a genuinely ambitious open world concept that doesn’t fully solve the “what do I actually do with information I can’t act on yet” problem it creates for itself.

Worth trying with the right group, especially if you’re the sort who wants a board game that feels more like collaborative exploration than optimization. Just don’t expect the version of this that the hype cycle was selling you before anyone had actually played it.