The Rating I Went Back and Lowered

Godtear went up here at a five originally. I want to be honest about that upfront rather than let the current number sitting on that review pretend it was always a four, because I think the correction itself is more useful to talk about than the clean version I could have quietly published instead.

The first night I played it, everything clicked in a way that games rarely manage on a first session, the tug-of-war objective scoring, the champion synergies, the fact that a whole match resolves in five rounds instead of eating an entire evening. I came home, opened the notebook, and wrote something close to a rave. In hindsight I was rating the night, not just the game, and those are two different things that happen to share a review slot more often than I’d like to admit. Good company, a rules explanation that went smoothly for once, a genuinely tense final round, all of that colored the number I wrote down, and none of it is really information about the game itself holding up over time.

Four more sessions in, a pattern started showing up that the first night hadn’t given me enough data to see. At exactly two warbands per side, which is what the starter set actually gives you, the game leans hard toward whoever gets early tempo, and that snowball is a lot less forgiving than I’d registered the first time. The starter box’s own limitation, only two warbands when the design is really built around three, was invisible to me on a first play because I didn’t yet know what three warbands felt like by comparison. My mind is not changing on the strategic depth being real, that part held up completely. What I had to reconsider was whether a five was rating the design or rating one specific great night with specific people who happened to be in a good mood.

So I went back into the file, changed the number to a four, and rewrote the paragraph that explains the two-warband problem, which wasn’t in the original draft at all because I hadn’t hit it yet. I thought about whether to just quietly ship the correction and let nobody notice, and I decided that’s a worse habit to get into than the original overrating was. If I’m asking anyone to trust a number on this site, the honest version includes admitting when the number was wrong and why, not just fixing it in the dark and hoping the paper trail doesn’t matter. It matters to me, at least, the same way an inspection file that gets corrected needs the correction documented, not just the clean final version standing in for what actually happened. The game’s still good. I just needed more nights with it to know how good, honestly, instead of how good it felt that one time everything went right.