I brought the game to our friends' house and we set the game up normally, which already takes a while. Only then did we read the prologue, which is what the rules tell you to do. But in the prologue we had to take out several sheets of stickers, some of which were used to add new rules to the rulebook, others which were used to modify the game board. As the stickers are hard to remove once applied, you have to work really carefully to make the result look straight on the board. Add some other administrative tasks, like adding new cards to the game, and the overall time from opening the box to playing the first move got extremely long. As there were more administrative tasks to change the game that popped up during play, overall we all ended up feeling as if it had been too much work, and too little play.

Game 3 was this weekend at my house. And with the experience of game 2, I decided to ignore what the rules said, and go through the prologue in advance. We still did the story part of the prologue during play, but I did all the parts related to changing the rulebook and board with stickers before the other players even arrived. That meant we could start playing nearly immediately, which was a much more fun way to do things. It also helped that game 3 introduced a game element that made the game a bit more dynamic by removing cards from the adventure row. All deckbuilding games can get into a state where nobody actually want the card on display and is happy if there is some renewal. Game 3 ended up being a great success, where we all had much more fun. Needless to say, I already applied all the stickers for game 4 next month ...