But now I will tell the lineage and the names of the heroes, and of the long sea-paths and the deeds

incredibly elastic regarding skill!! play it like a mindless set collector or use your discards to draw a map of your opponent's hand. toss those heavy face cards or let your opponent feed you free sets? Knock quick or play for Gin? or maybe fish out an undercut?? all the double think and bluff of a trick taker but without a table full of people. i'd go so far as to say i'd prefer this over many 2-player designer games. somehow this game makes Jaipur feel too casual, too random. to me, it's on a similar level with Fox in the Forest and 7 Wonders Duel. plus it plays with a standard poker deck and doesn't need to lean at all on theme. more games like this!!

Draw and discard to create sets and runs in your hand. When you have enough, lay down your hand and compare the cards not part of any groups (deadwood). Winner gets the points in the loser's hand.

You can start with a bad hand and your opponent with a good one so that a round is over after only a few discards. Since you can't do anything when your deadwood is worth more than 10, you can be stuck without interesting decisions to make.

If things are going well, there's some tension in deciding what to discard and whether to lay your hand down now or later, but it's not frequent enough for me.

The game seems designed to emphasize a contest of probability skill and memory, with a lot of noise for gambling at the whole-game level. Normally I would welcome noise, but it's not employed to make decisions interesting at the level of the turn or round.

The fact that the rules offer a bonus for a one-sided game (you get 100 extra points if you win every round) means that the game is one-sided often enough to warrant a rule for it. But if the subjective decision-making experience and endgame tension were instead the focus, the game would be designed to allow players to make the scores as close as possible and it would keep the outcome suspenseful for as long as possible. It would not contain a rule to make a one-sided result more one-sided to make gambling on the whole game more exciting.

If you played many games in succession, the noise could even out and the points could end up close. But why would you put yourself through non-interesting decisions to find tension so far removed?

Move your meeples, or towers containing yours (and other players') meeples around a circular board to get to the scoring spot. Or don't move and wait until the scoring spot rotates past you, being the twist, and then jump in. But only move as the cards you draw allow you. Oh what fun when all your meeples are trapped under towers and you're forced to spend actions moving towers off your pieces to allow them to move next time. Unless they're trapped again in the meantime. And oh what more fun it is memorising where your trapped meeples are. I wasn't altogether unhappy when drink was spilt on the table and the game abandoned. It's not my cup of turme.