I’ll say the multiplayer solitaire complaint upfront because it’s the correct complaint and it’s the first thing anyone should know going in, this is a shared deck, sure, but each colonist’s fate mostly plays out independent of what anyone else at the table is doing, and more than one person has flagged this bluntly, calling it exactly what it is. Normally that’s a dealbreaker for me. Here it isn’t, quite, and I want to figure out why.
Part of it is the death spiral is the entire joke. The deck fills with poison as the game goes and players can actively choose to make it worse for everyone, and the least-failed player wins, not the most successful one, which is a genuinely funny inversion once you accept “bloodbath” isn’t just marketing copy. It’s less a race to the top and more a reverse race, everyone spiraling down together, and that shared doom is where whatever table interaction exists actually lives, even if your individual turn is mechanically isolated from mine.
Being a Donald X. Vaccarino design carries real weight, and it shows, the underlying card engine is tight even when the theme is doing most of the emotional lifting. A couple people compared the overall feel to Galaxy Trucker or Ponzi Scheme, that specific sensation of watching a disaster unfold that you can see coming but can’t fully steer away from, and that comparison is dead on. The art gets called ugly as sin by more than one person going in off rulebook images alone, and honestly the campy tone grew on me, it’s not trying to be pretty, it’s trying to be gleefully bad news, and it commits to that.
Solo mode holds up fine on its own, beat-your-own-score stuff, but this is clearly built to be funnier with more people watching each other’s colonists die in real time. Worth trying if you already trust the designer. Not the game I’d hand someone who needs real interaction to feel like they’re playing together.