Inis

Bought this after enough people told me it was “Cyclades but better” that I stopped arguing and just got it. Mixed results, honestly, though not for the reasons I expected going in.

The card drafting is the best part of the design. You’ve got a small set of action cards, maybe seventeen, that get redrafted every round, so you get to know the cards real fast, and the whole game turns into guessing which card a particular opponent has drafted based on where they’re sitting at the table and trying to counter it. That’s a genuinely interesting kind of tension, closer to a bidding game dressed up as a territory game than a typical dudes-on-a-map wargame, and I like it more than I expected to.

Where it falls apart for my table is the endgame trigger. Once someone declares they’re going to win, the game doesn’t stop, it just paints a target on their chest, and if the table doesn’t manage to knock them back down in time, play drags on into another two or three rounds nobody needed. I stopped someone from winning once, only to delay them by another forty-five minutes, we could’ve played a whole other game in that stretch, and by the end my group had started visibly checking the time, which is never a good sign for a game.

There’s also a kingmaking problem baked into how the drafting works. A weaker player who’s out of contention can hand a card to whoever they like out of spite or alliance, and in a four-player game that’s enough to swing a close finish. I’ve ended up playing literal kingmaker myself more than once, stuck deciding which of two opponents to hand the win to, and that’s never a good feeling. It’s hard to avoid in this genre, honestly, but my more competitive friends noticed it faster than I did.

The tile art and interconnection system genuinely is lovely, some of the best character illustration I’ve seen in this genre, and the box art undersells it badly, I’d have liked the cover to carry that same energy through. I’ll keep it on the shelf, but I’d be oversimplifying to call it Cyclades with drafting replacing the auction mechanism, more like a sibling with a different set of rough edges.