It is said that Recall is an evolution of a previous game, Revive, but I didn't play that. So I'll try to explain from the ground up. Recall is a game that is played over 13 rounds, with some other things happening in mini-turns in between. In each of the 13 rounds you can either insert a key in a slot in your player board or you can recall all your keys. You start with 2 keys, so if you manage to gain a key before turn 3, your first recall will be in turn 4. Then if you manage to get another key before turn 8, your second recall will be in turn 9, and the game will be over before the third recall. I got this very simple math wrong, thinking that I would have an advantage if I concentrated early on getting keys. But the reality is that it is simple to have only 2 recalls in 13 turns, and impossible to get down to just 1, so the keys are actually not all that important.

While your starting keys are blank, you can get keys with symbols on them during the game, either as new keys or from upgrading. If you insert a key in a slot of your player board, you then do all the actions shown as symbols on the key plus all the actions shown as symbols on the slot. As you can also upgrade the symbols on the slot, moves tend to be short in the early game and get longer over the course of the game. Still, 13 turns feels short to achieve everything you want to achieve, and we didn't even reveal all of the map tiles before the game ended.

Much of the game is played on those map tiles, which consist of 7 hexes, one in the middle, and six around. Two starting tiles are revealed at the start of the game, the other tiles need a special reveal action, at which point the revealer can choose the orientation. The hexes have different types of terrain, and the terrain determines what kind of building can be built on that hex. The overall map is elongated, and all players start at one end, exploring the map in roughly the same direction. Getting anywhere first is an advantage: The first building on a hex is cheaper than the second or third, some spaces have a single relic cube to collect, and excavation hexes only have 3 ability stones to excavate on. So while the player board has 6 slots to put keys in, 4 of these slots are some variation of moving your followers across the map and then interacting with the hex by building or excavating.

Every player starts the game with a tribe, that gives him an asymmetric player power. We followed the suggestion to distribute those randomly for the first game, but I had the impression that these powers weren't all that balanced, and one player got a lot more out of his power than the other two in our game. There are also three, initially hidden, neutral tribes in the game. A big part of the game is going up on three knowledge tracks, which reveals these three tribes, and then allows to use their powers. The player with the winning strategy concentrated on these knowledge tracks, and it turned out that they also score the most victory points in the end scoring. Tribes also come with random gadgets, and players can during their turn use ability stones to activate the powers of the tribes or the gadgets as a free action. Besides keys and ability stones, an important third resource are crystals, which come in three levels from white to pink to purple, and which are used to pay for some building or excavation actions, or to boost certain moves.

It is totally possible that if you add up all the symbols on your key, your key slot, and your free actions from tribes, gadgets, and crates you found, you will do 6 different things in a turn. Helpfully every player gets 6 green cubes, which are simply used to mark which symbol you already used, as you can use them in any order. But as you can imagine, doing many different things in a turn in any order makes this a rather complex game, and if you are the kind of player who tries to optimize things, you can well take a rather long time for your turn due to analysis paralysis. Recall isn't really a game for casual gamers playing intuitively, as they would score rather badly. There are six different scoring cards, plus a secret objective card per player, and players need to make decisions on the scoring cards and the objective card in those intermediate mini-turns. That creates quite a point salad, so by the time I realized that my strategy was bad, it was way too late to rectify.

Still, I had fun playing Recall. The long setup is due to lots of things being randomized, so the replay value is quite high. And Recall is clearly a game which I would need to play a few times before getting a solid feel of which resources and actions are more valuable than others. I can totally see a group of players that have the time for 4+ hour sessions regularly to have great fun playing Recall repeatedly. Unfortunately for my board game night time constraints, Recall disqualifies itself. It isn't really the optimal game for pickup groups, but would benefit if everybody had already played it a few times. For me it means I won't be able to get Recall to the table all that often, and that much diminishes the game's value for me.