Our first game of Covenant with 4 players took about 3 hours. Of that, 45 minutes were spent to set up the game and explain the rules. There are over 30 different types of tiles and tokens to set up, and the rulebook is 40 pages. This isn't a game that is quick to bring to the table, and it is also quite a table hog. I used several Gamegenic Token Silos to keep everything sorted, but as the game box is on the small side and very tightly packed, the token boxes then don't fit inside. You can keep everything in the box if you use the provided plastic bags, but that makes setup or storing take even more time.

Every action in Covenant has several steps, and some of these steps can then trigger additional steps as a reward. As a result, this is a game that requires a huge amount of concentration. We were constantly asking each other things like "did I take the victory points for this?" or "did I get the reward for this tradition?". Each move being so complicated also makes it rather hard to find the best move and optimize your actions towards victory. I mostly play casually, and Covenant isn't a game well suited to be played casually. While the rulebook isn't bad and has lot of examples and pictures, it is missing an index, and we had to look up rules questions all the time.

The strongest point of Covenant is its replayability: A great many things in Covenant are working via tiles, of which you have a larger stack, but only have something like 4 of them laid out. At the end of each turn, removed tiles get replaced. So from the start each game is different, and ever changing. Again that makes strategy difficult: Whether one strategy is better or worse than another might very much depend on which era objective tiles are laid out, and what personal objectives you drafted. My strategy in my first game, which was all about growing the strength of my dwarves and killing goblins, orcs, and trolls, ended up not being very successful, as I had neglected other things that brought more victory points. I placed only third out of four players, with the first two players being significantly ahead of me. Covenant rewards more hardcore gamers, who are able to calculate several complicated moves ahead.

That makes Covenant a good game if you play repeatedly the same game with the same people. After a game or two the game flow should improve, unless you have players suffering from analysis paralysis, for whom this would be the worst game possible. For my purposes, with board game nights in public spaces, where some of the players are more casual and groups change, Covenant is less ideal. I also dislike how Covenant is complicated due to so many different game mechanics, game pieces, and rules. I prefer games that create complexity more elegantly, with fewer moving parts, and shorter rules. Overall I am giving Covenant a 6 out of 10 rating.