First session I ever ran was something people apparently call “the biscuits mission,” and I closed the box afterward genuinely unsure what had just happened or whether I liked it. It sat on the shelf for a while. What brought me back was hearing enough people I trust describe it as the best thing they’d played that year, so I gave it a second shot, and the advice I’d pass on is: push through to around day four of the campaign. That’s when the systems click and you understand what all those cards in your hand are actually building toward.

The premise is quietly radical for the genre, you’re not a chosen one fighting to save the world from a Big Bad, you’re a ranger doing rounds in a solarpunk-adjacent future where humanity has mostly figured out how to live alongside a wilder, weirder nature rather than conquering it. There’s no combat in the traditional sense. You’re gathering, connecting with locations and creatures that remember you between sessions, making choices that carry real narrative weight instead of just triggering the next card flip. Someone described it as Sleeping Gods crossed with the Arkham Horror card game’s deckbuilding, and that’s about the closest one-line comparison I’ve seen land.

The one card limit per player per turn is a small rule that does enormous work, it keeps analysis paralysis from ever really setting in even in a game with this much depth to think about. I ran it solo with two characters rather than one, which felt counterintuitive since I usually hate managing multiple hands, and it turned out to be smoother than single-character play, since the different rangers cover ground the other can’t. Only real knock: the core box’s mission variety is thinner than I wanted by the time I finished the included campaign, seventeen missions doesn’t stretch as far as I’d hoped, and I’m already eyeing the expansions to keep going. And yes, the actual cardstock is designed to biodegrade, which is a nice touch and also means you should probably not spill your coffee on it.