I don’t play League of Legends and it did not matter even slightly. Underneath the Yordle-pilots-in-mech-suits skin this is a cooperative programming puzzle, you and up to three others each build a queue of movement and action cards blind, then execute them all simultaneously, which means half the fun and most of the frustration comes from watching your carefully planned mech veer directly into a wall because you misjudged how another player’s card would resolve first. It scratches the exact itch that a real-time programming game should and rarely does this cleanly on cardboard.

Teachability is genuinely a mixed bag, the campaign’s built-in tutorial missions ease you in well over the first two or three games, but the full ruleset once upgrades and the more complex mission objectives kick in takes real table time to internalize, this is not a one-shot pickup game. Component quality is where it goes from good to genuinely special, the mech minis have real weight and the pop-up 3D terrain pieces, the docking clock mechanism, the little brown paper bag of extra bits for later missions, it’s some of the best production I’ve seen packed into a board game box, every piece has a satisfying clack or thunk that makes the whole campaign feel like an event rather than just another session.

Two player works better than I expected, each person just runs two mechs instead of one, and it keeps the same blind-programming chaos intact rather than diluting it. My only real complaint, shared by basically everyone I’ve compared notes with, is the setup and teardown time for each mission is genuinely long, easily twenty minutes on either end, which is exactly why this sits on my shelf mostly unplayed despite being one of the best games I own. It deserves a full evening, and full evenings are the rarest resource at my table.