I went in skeptical that a board game could actually capture what a video game MOBA feels like, the lane pushing, the hero builds, the moment to moment tension of deciding whether to commit to a fight, and this is the closest anything on my shelf has come. Every champion runs on five cards, used for movement, abilities, and defense, no dice anywhere in the core loop, which means every bad outcome traces back to a decision you actually made rather than a roll you got unlucky on. That’s rare in this weight class and it’s the thing that’s kept me coming back.

The learning curve is real and I won’t pretend it isn’t. New champions play differently enough from each other that “knowing the game” and “knowing this specific hero” are two separate skills, and I’ve had games where I picked someone unfamiliar and spent the whole match feeling like I had no good moves, moving around the board without making any real impact, before realizing afterward it was a champion-fit problem and not a game problem. Once you and your group have five or six plays in, though, the depth that first felt like friction turns into the actual appeal. It scales unusually well too, up to eight or ten players split into teams, which almost nothing else at this weight handles gracefully.

I’ll flag the same asymmetry concern I’ve seen leveled at games like Root, a huge cast of wildly different champions means staying sharp takes regular play, and if your group only breaks this out once a season you’ll be relearning from scratch every time. For a table that plays it often, that asymmetry is the whole draw, every champion carves out a genuinely different niche and the strategic ceiling is higher than almost anything else in my collection at this price point. This is the rare “team versus team” game I’d call a must-own for a group with the numbers to support it.