The game play seems simple enough with a Move and Explore action on your turn. Each player has a toolbox of additional actions they can potentially take to aid their tasks.
The paths help movement, on your turn you can move one unfamiliar path (ie one without one of your coloured path tokens on it) per turn but you can move over your own coloured paths for free thereby enabling longer movement with careful placement.
Components:The components, as expected from DOW, are top quality maybe overproduced but you'll get no complaints from me on that score. The artwork throughout is great, working in a consistent and believable way with the theme. All in all it works well to set the tone of the game whilst not detracting from the gameplay.
The rulebook could have been laid out better and go into a little more detail in places, but its mostly there. It's certainly not the worst I have ever read, but there is room for improvement.
Gameplay:I have played with a full compliment of players, as well as with only 2, I'm not convinced there is enough there for the 2-player game and that the inclusion of 2 is to try and appeal to a wider audience. Having more players certainly changes the dynamics of the game, there is plenty of tension as players compete for the various levels of Temple and ultimately the Relics themselves. With more players early mistakes like not getting enough of your paths down, cost dearly as I have found out.
There is a danger, with new players, to have a couple of players end up front runners for the win but I would imagine on future games with the same players it would be a lot more balanced as you would know the game better.
I have seen reviews where people have raised the point about the theme not really working with some of the mechanics, especially a rule about not going down the same paths in the same turn. As for the why would you not go down the same paths thematically, well they are explorers surely the point is they want to find new undiscovered relics, why would they back track on old ground whilst they have provisions and drive to explore new territory?
Conclusions:It's not perfect but for what it does it executes it very well, producing a good solid game that is immense fun to play.
I would certainly want to play this again and feel it has earned a solid place in my collection.
