Fall of Lumen Review: Quick Take with Tom Vasel

About Fall of Lumen, from BoardGameGeek:

Listen pals. We did not fight the Void to make Lumen even brighter. The flying citadel has proven worthless, profiting from scrolls and abandoning us to our empty fate. Can't you figure out the Eternals on their terrace eating grapes and enjoying the show we put on against the Seraphs? Guess what? we mortals survived and pushed back the Void. We have shown the Seraphs the door. What about the Eternals now? - Commonly heard in Gon'Mar Taverns - Fall of Lumen is a stand-alone tabletop game based on deck-building and tableau building. It is a follow-up of Legends of Void. The Void battles have ended. The Outer Lands are devastated after years of battles against the Seraphs, and the people are happy to return to a peaceful time and rebuild their houses and society. But a small group of rebels is sick of the citadel of Lumen and works in the shadows to free the Outer Lands from its dictatorship. Their plan is as simple as it will be effective. Bring back the Keepers that once saved the world from the Nihil of the Pale Night and sneak them into the flying citadel as incognito agents. You play a rebel Hero, an ex-Keeper banned from the Outer Lands long ago. Now you are back thanks to the dimensional fracture caused by the Void. You'll rescue comrades from the Inner Worlds, where the Eternals, the founders of Lumen, banished all of you. You will infiltrate Keepers into Lumen to take power back until the flying citadel becomes the falling one. You will be supported by a Faction, which shares your cause against the Eternals, and compete with the other Heroes to be the most influential Hero, the one who has infiltrated the most Agents on Lumen. You will move your Hero across the Outer Lands and spend their skills to gather resources such as Gold, Mana, Mithril, Dark Matter, and Genasi. Using these resources, you will acquire traits, learn spells, buy trinkets, retrieve artifacts, and hire followers to help your cause and improve your skills. Finally, with enough skills, you can restore the dimensional connection to an Inner World and bring back a Keeper stuck there. To unlock a portal and reach an Inner World, you need a different combination of skills: Deception, Wit, Fighting, Wizardry, and Void (the most precious and versatile skill). As the game gets closer to the end, your interest will switch from rescuing Keepers from the Inner Worlds to sneaking them onto Lumen, which is the goal of the game and the greatest source of victory points. You can infiltrate a saboteur in any of the five districts of Lumen: Informers, Engineers, Fighters, Wizards, and Voyagers. Each saboteur will grant you a recurring or immediate income and victory points. The main mechanics are: Deck-building: the deck is your main resource; improving it by buying better cards will help you perform better. Open drafting: market elements are face-up, so you can plan what to buy and collect the resources you need to get them, but you have to get there before the other players. Tableau Building: in addition to your deck, you will hire Followers and buy Trinkets for your Hero. They are valuable because you can always count on them and not depend on the luck of the draw draw. You can use them once per turn, and then they are exhausted. Area Movement: the game board is divided into eight regions, irregularly shaped. Regions grant access to gather actions, markets, and Challenge locations. During the game, you will move your Hero many times from one region to another to access what you need most at that moment of the game. Once-per-game abilities: some cards have very powerful abilities, but you can use them only once per game, then they are removed from the game. The game will feature a Solo mode and a 2-player cooperative variant. Fall of Lumen has No Take That elements. The interaction between players is indirect. It mainly comes from solving challenges, market acquisitions, and timing the infiltration of Agents on Lumen. The more saboteurs are on a District Window of Lumen, the higher the cost to send a new one. Our estimated complexity is 3.2 on the BGG scale (max 5.0). -description from the publisher