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 within a few plays you know exactly what’s in the pool and the whole game becomes about anticipating who needs what more than you do. 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’ll win next turn, if they haven’t actually locked in enough victory conditions by the start of that turn, play just continues, and we’ve had games stretch an extra two or three rounds past when it felt like it should have ended. One session that should’ve wrapped in an hour ran past ninety minutes purely on that mechanic, and my group 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 don’t think it ruins the game the way some reviews claim, but it’s a real seam, and my more competitive friends noticed it faster than I did.

The tile art and interconnection system genuinely is lovely, best I’ve seen in this genre, box art undersells it badly. I’ll keep it on the shelf, but it’s not the Cyclades-killer I was promised, more like a sibling with a different set of rough edges.