Revenant

Revenant begins with a clean idea and gives it a theme that works, although the Galactica influence is hard to miss. As a complete design, though, I find it less successful than Perseverance 3-4 and Trickerion. The ambition is not the issue; it is that the ambition seems determined to ask for everything at once.

The central premise is straightforward; its implementation is a crowded network of moving parts that demand constant attention. A turn is not merely about the action in front of you, but about tracking what that action will set loose in a system capable of producing engine-building combinations from apparently nowhere.

That is the interesting decision: building an efficient engine is insufficient; you must also judge when its pieces will actually engage. Players are linked chiefly by the pressure of operating within that shared system rather than by clean, direct confrontation, while the rules need proper time because the complexity is not located in one subsystem but distributed everywhere.

I had a very good time with it, and would readily play again. Still, Revenant is one of those designs that would benefit from a little subtraction: there is plenty of game here already, and not every cog needs to demand an audience. It is an impressively ambitious game that, for me, becomes rather more than it needs to be.