Covenant

The last hefty offering from Devir, Covenant arrives packed to the lid: cards, tokens, dice, hexes, acrylic bits and bobs, buildings, columns, and doors. On the table, it looks exactly as you would expect a box like this to look: lavish, busy, and full of things to admire and arrange. The story is utterly standard dwarf fare—digging in the kingdom awakens the orcs, the dwarves get eaten, and then comes the reconquest. There is zero thematic innovation, and the artwork, let’s put it politely, is not O’Toole.

At its core, it is a tableau builder: I gradually construct my own engine through cards, hexes, buildings, and the other options the game unfolds. Its big idea is not original, but it works: my dwarf workers level up during the game, which immediately brings the much-loved Caverna to mind.

The complexity is spread out symmetrically. The tracks and paths to victory points share a related logic, with a clear cost-benefit relationship, so the game remains quite approachable despite the endless mass of material and options. The focus is on developing my tableau and workers properly; the source does not present player interaction as its main spectacle, but rather as part of this shared race to develop.

The thorn in its side is the manual: it is big and comprehensive, yes, but arranged in a way that confuses more than it helps. Still, even though I was judged for failing twice to distinguish the colours on the hexes properly, Covenant comfortably belongs among the good 7.5/10 medium euros—along with, of course, countless other titles. It is the holidays: if you want to feed your FOMO with a large, overflowing box, there are certainly far worse choices.