I want to say clearly, this is not a fun game in the way that word usually gets used at a table, and I mean that as the highest compliment I can give it. You’re managing a small group of civilian survivors in a besieged city, scavenging at night, managing hunger, sickness, morale, and the actual dread of the design comes from choices like whether to raid an elderly couple’s supplies knowing it might leave them to starve, or hold back and risk your own people going under instead. There’s no monster to fight, no enemy faction with a face, just the war itself grinding everyone down.

Teachability took our group longer than most games this size, not because the rules are complex exactly, but because the game keeps introducing morally weighted event cards that force a rules-adjacent judgment call nothing in the manual quite prepares you for, we spent our first session arguing about what the “right” call even was more than we spent resolving mechanics. The night-raid scavenging phase is where the tension actually lives, sending a character out risks injury or worse for a chance at food or meds, and watching a character you’ve grown attached to come back wounded, or not come back at all, lands with a weight I haven’t felt from a board game’s dice before.

Two player is genuinely one of the stronger configurations for this, oddly, since the smaller shelter roster makes every single survivor’s fate feel more consequential rather than diluted across a crowd. I won’t pretend this gets regular rotation at game night, it’s heavy in a way that needs the right mood and the right people, and it demands a kind of emotional buy-in a lot of games actively avoid asking for. But it’s also one of maybe three games I’ve played that actually made me sit quietly afterward instead of immediately talking about the next game.