The thing that gets me every single play is how visible your options are, all the worker placement spots for a given round are face up and legible, so a brand new player can just ask “what’s the best move here” and a more experienced one can actually answer clearly, which makes this one of the easiest genuinely mid-weight games I’ve ever taught. That transparency does a lot of work that a denser rulebook usually has to do instead.
The combo click moment is the reason I keep this on permanent rotation though, that turn where an assistant card, a research track breakthrough, and a newly revealed worker spot all line up and you realize you’ve built something that scores double what a normal turn would, it happens reliably by the second or third game once you understand the tracks well enough to plan two turns ahead instead of one. Someone described this as their personal threshold for how much engine-building challenge they want in a game and I feel that exactly, it’s crunchy without tipping into homework.
If I’m nitpicking, it is, as one review put it bluntly, kind of a workmanlike euro underneath the theme, competent engineering rather than a wildly original idea, worker placement and deckbuilding aren’t new separately and this doesn’t reinvent either half. But competent engineering that actually works is rarer than it should be, and I’d rather have this than a more “original” design that doesn’t run as smoothly. Insert is genuine 3D foam that holds up over dozens of plays without shedding pieces everywhere, which after some of the boxes on this list feels like it shouldn’t be worth praising and yet here we are.