I demoed this at a con before owning it and the thing that sold me wasn’t the combat, it’s how it lets you build a genuinely weird character the way the video games do, training skill lines and rolling dice with special faces that start combo-ing off each other in ways no single class in a normal dungeon crawler would allow. That’s the trick Elder Scrolls fans actually want translated, the freedom to build something iconoclastic instead of picking rogue or mage off a shelf, and this delivers it better than I expected a board game to manage.
The rulebook is a genuine wall though, ninety pages of it, and I don’t think that page count reflects real strategic depth so much as keyword bloat that a tighter edit could’ve trimmed by a third. Teaching a new player cold off that rulebook would be rough. What actually works is running one demo round yourself first and then teaching by doing, which gets someone up and playing about as fast as a medium weight euro despite the intimidating box, once you’ve absorbed the vocabulary yourself ahead of time.
The skill line system has one real flaw worth flagging, since which skills you can train are drawn randomly from a bag at the trainer, so you can have a build in mind and simply never draw the piece you need to finish it, and that randomness bothered me more than the marketing suggests it should. Sessions run long too, three to six hours depending on how deep you go, so this isn’t a weeknight game for most groups. But the moment your dice combo clicks, when a shield ability chains into a follow up attack you didn’t plan three turns ago, is as good as this genre gets, and I’ve got real affection for this one despite its rough edges.