Box is small enough to travel with easily, and setup is genuinely under a minute, shuffle, deal, lay out the display, go, which made this an easy pickup for a night when nothing bigger was going to fit. The hook, and it’s a real one, is that you build a row of cards across the game but score them in reverse order at the end, last card played counted first, which means the planning problem isn’t just what to play, it’s how to sequence what you play so the reveal order actually works in your favor.

That backwards-scoring idea is doing all the heavy lifting here, and it mostly earns it. The sanctuary bonus, extra points for placing cards in ascending numeric order as you go, is the one piece I’ve seen split opinion pretty sharply, and I land closer to the critical side on this one. It creates something close to a correct way to play a lot of turns, since skipping the ascending order costs you real value, and that pulls against the looser, more improvisational feel the rest of the design is going for. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it flattens some of the decision space that the reverse-scoring twist otherwise opens up.

Player count matters more than I expected going in. At two, the display of cards to choose from is small enough that it leans more luck-dependent than I’d like, and it’s noticeably better at three or four, where there’s more to actually plan around and the display refreshes with more options each round. The art, travel-poster landscape tiles, is genuinely gorgeous and gives this a table presence well above what a small box usually manages. Setup and teardown are as close to zero as a card game gets, which matters a lot to me on a weeknight. Four stars, best with a full table rather than just the two of us.