I hesitated a long time before bringing this to the table because the premise is exactly what it sounds like, you’re civilians trapped in a city under siege, scavenging, rationing, trying not to become the kind of person the war wants you to be, and I wasn’t sure any of my regular group would want that on a Friday. Turns out the discomfort is the point and everyone who’s played it with me has come away affected in a way lighter games never manage.
The blank tokens are a small design choice that does an enormous amount of work, you write your own characters’ names on them before you start, which sounds like nothing until three sessions in you’re genuinely reluctant to let one of them die because you named her after your actual grandmother without thinking about it. Losing here doesn’t cheapen the time you put in the way losing usually does in a game, which is a strange and specific kind of achievement.
I won’t pretend it’s frictionless. The rules are scattered across a journal in a way that makes rulebook-flipping a constant background task, and there’s real bookkeeping fatigue by hour two that occasionally breaks the immersion the theme worked so hard to build. It’s also just long, and heavy in the emotional sense as much as the mechanical one, not something I reach for on a normal night. But it’s a genuine work of art, something else entirely from most of what’s on my shelf, and I think every serious game group should sit with it at least once even if it never becomes a regular. Four stars, one held back for the fiddliness, none held back for the theme, which does exactly what it sets out to do.