If someone tells me they’ve never played a deckbuilder, this is what I put in their hands, not Dominion, this one, because you’re fighting an opponent directly with ships and bases instead of just optimizing a solitaire engine, and the goal, reduce their authority to zero, gives new players an immediate visceral thing to chase. I’ve taught this dozens of times at this point and it clicks fast, usually within the first two turns once someone sees a card combo with an ally ability for the first time.
That ally system is honestly the best design decision in the box, cards that do one thing alone and something noticeably better when you’ve got a matching faction card in play, and building toward those synergies is where the actual engine building lives even in a game this small and cheap. The combo click moment here is modest compared to a big box euro but it’s real, the turn you finally draw the second faction card you needed and your whole hand suddenly does double duty.
My one real complaint after a hundred-plus plays is that hand management barely exists, you mostly just dump your whole hand every turn with little reason to hold cards back, which flattens some of the decision space a deeper deckbuilder would have. It’s also purely two player unless you buy the multiplayer add-ons, which caught me off guard the first time I tried to bring it to a bigger table. No insert worth mentioning, it’s cards in a small box, which is honestly correct for what this is. Cheap, portable, and still my answer when someone asks what to try first.