The game is quick, taking about twenty minutes to play, and very easy to learn. It has a lot of the same fiendish humor found in Nuclear War with none of the endless waiting around for the right missile to launch your warheads. The artwork on the cards is top notch. It is styled after medieval woodcuts and features hair raising renditions of Death in all his bony glory. My favorite is the image of Drought, a dry, leather covered skeleton with a few stray hairs still sticking to its head, grabbing a bucket of water out of a serfs hands and drinking it all down in one go.
Game play is interesting.
Its very tempting to spend the whole game bashing the other cities with rats. But if one player manages to play and hold onto a civic improvement of some sort early in the game, their population will be much larger when the plague comes and their chances of winning much greater. In the first few games we've played I've also noticed a tension between slowing down the plague attrition by adding civic improvements versus speeding the death of your opponents by playing rats. Its a very tricky call and a few bad rolls near the end can leave you with an empty city. My current belief is that in the second half of the game your real enemy is the plague and limiting its effect is the shortest path to victory.