Setup is quick, hand out wonder boards, deal the age-one hands, done in under five minutes, and the game itself runs on simultaneous drafting rather than turn order, which is the actual trick that lets this scale to seven players without the runtime crawling the way most games that size do. Pick a card, pass the rest, everyone resolves at once. Three ages, then it’s over, usually inside forty-five minutes even at a full table.

The strategic ceiling here is lower than the hype had led me to expect, and I say that having gone in with high expectations after years of hearing about it. A handful of reviewers put their finger on exactly what bugged me, that green science cards feel like the dominant path more often than the other options, and that once you commit hard to military or civilian buildings in age one, you’re largely locked into finishing that direction whether or not the cards cooperate. It’s a well-oiled machine, but the machine has fewer real forks in the road than a first read of the box suggests. That’s not nothing, plenty of good filler games are honest about being one good idea run efficiently, and this commits to that idea about as well as a game can.

The component that actually lets the whole thing down, and I’m apparently not the only one who’s noticed, is the coins. For a game this polished everywhere else, cardboard chits standing in for money in a game built around resource management and building an ancient civilization feels like a real miss, and the scoring at the end still runs on a stack of paper rather than a proper track, which is a strange thing to still be doing at this price point. Two-player uses a dummy third hand that works fine but loses some of the drafting tension the higher counts create. Four stars, a genuinely well-designed filler that I’ll keep pulling out for larger groups, with the coins as my one real ongoing gripe.