Interesting

I want to love this board. It is incredibly clever and a nice change from the typical eliminate-your-opponents approach.

The problem I've got is that gameplay seems fairly one-dimensional and frequently boils down to luck. One can usually pick up every quest item in two or three turns, rendering strategies relying on the pools fairly ineffective; most games seem to devolve into a blitz for quest items, followed by a waiting-period in which you find out if someone's blind luck will result in a successful sabotage.

For what it's worth, the elimination rule makes complete sense to me and I wouldn't change it. You might be able to make it slightly friendlier without affecting game-play by not having the characters revert to neutral.

So, I was initially pretty excited about this board and did a few of the dev games. It's original with some unique dynamics reminiscent of a number of old style role playing board games.

However the automatic self-elimination for placing 1 too many guys on the board is a deal breaker for me.

It is written in the rules, but how often do you read and remember every rule to a map every time you take a turn? I'd argue one single placement should not be an automatic self elimination on any map.

There should be some other penalty like loss of one or more items, or at the very least the automatic you're "F'd" rule should be written on the board itself.

I'd be happy to revise my review if something get's changed.