Too Much Game for One Night Off

Never backed the Kickstarter, wouldn’t have anyway. A line cook I used to work with unloaded his copy on me for cheap, still had shrink on half the expansion boxes, and I only agreed to take it off his hands because I’d heard the name enough times at the bar to be curious. Chip Theory Games, out of Minnesota, three credited designers, and it plays like a MOBA somebody smuggled onto a table: four asymmetric factions clawing over floating spire tiles, health chips and tech trees and hero leveling stacked on tower-defense bones. Everything’s poker chips instead of minis, thick, laminated, and they do feel great in the hand, but the box has real heft from it, more than a game its size has any business weighing.

First thing I learned setting this up after a Sunday close: not a weeknight game. Between sorting faction trays, staging the fortress, and getting the market laid out, I lost the better part of an hour before a single chip moved, and teardown wasn’t much faster going the other direction. With setup and teardown both eating into it, one scenario can run two-plus hours before you’ve decided anything. That’s before the keywords start, and there are a lot of them, half our first session was somebody flipping through the reference sheet asking what a status meant on a unit that already had two others stacked on it.

Once it’s moving, the strategy phase is where the real decisions live, troop movement, resource spend, what to buy off the tech tree. Then the round flips into the onslaught phase and the game runs on autopilot, pieces move and attack in an inviolable pattern, and you sit there watching dominoes fall that you set up twenty minutes earlier. My AP radar was going off hard through that first half. Walt, same guy who freezes on the lunch special every day, took what felt like a whole ticket’s worth of time working out one strategy phase while the rest of us sat with nothing to do. Downtime’s real here, worse at three or four than at two. Two’s the sweet spot if you’re keeping it at all.

I don’t regret the trade. The asymmetry is the real thing, not a reskin job, and the production is stupid good. But it’s a lifestyle game and I don’t have the open nights to live inside one. Back on the shelf, probably stays there.