 For all the complexity of the premise, the game itself is very simple, with minimal opportunities for character interaction. It is competitive, but mostly in a solo sense, with characters individually attempting to best challenges presented by the GM. In fact, aside from the option of trading discovered texts, it could easily be a 0-on-0 or even a solo game if there were fixed or randomly rolled obstacle difficulties for the various seasons. Honestly, the part I find least compelling of this - since I like searching for documents amidst desert ruins filled with deadly traps - is the moralistic part, where the texts are supposed to represent virtues that the characters aspire to. It seems tacked on and without much support in the rules. The different stages of play also seem variably important, with racing being less important than avoiding traps, but the entire enterprise also being undone if you can't tattoo yourself successfully. Additionally, I would have loved to see some kind of more active endgame where the characters use their skills at raiding desert ruins or their secret knowledge gleaned from texts to attempt to save or escape the city, rather than it being more of a passive thing, where those who haven't gathered up enough texts are simply destroyed along with the city. It's not hard to imagine the city's destruction in terms of traps, after all, and maybe if you bested one of those traps, you could activate one of your inscribed texts to do something., like preserving things from being destroyed or deciding what gets remembered.  For all the complexity of the premise, the game itself is very simple, with minimal opportunities for character interaction. It is competitive, but mostly in a solo sense, with characters individually attempting to best challenges presented by the GM. In fact, aside from the option of trading discovered texts, it could easily be a 0-on-0 or even a solo game if there were fixed or randomly rolled obstacle difficulties for the various seasons. Honestly, the part I find least compelling of this - since I like searching for documents amidst desert ruins filled with deadly traps - is the moralistic part, where the texts are supposed to represent virtues that the characters aspire to. It seems tacked on and without much support in the rules. The different stages of play also seem variably important, with racing being less important than avoiding traps, but the entire enterprise also being undone if you can't tattoo yourself successfully. Additionally, I would have loved to see some kind of more active endgame where the characters use their skills at raiding desert ruins or their secret knowledge gleaned from texts to attempt to save or escape the city, rather than it being more of a passive thing, where those who haven't gathered up enough texts are simply destroyed along with the city. It's not hard to imagine the city's destruction in terms of traps, after all, and maybe if you bested one of those traps, you could activate one of your inscribed texts to do something., like preserving things from being destroyed or deciding what gets remembered. 