The combat resolution in Cloudspire is the reason to own it, full stop, you build a personal bag of attack and defense chips that gets pulled from simultaneously by both sides, and it means fights resolve fast, tactile, and without the fiddly dice-and-modifier math a lot of skirmish games drown in. Once you’ve got a spire built up and a couple of unit types synergizing, there’s a real click, the engine you built is doing exactly what you built it to do, and that feeling doesn’t come cheap in this genre.

Getting to that feeling is the problem. Setup on this thing is genuinely brutal for anything short of a dedicated permanent table, sorting bits by faction, laying out the spire tiles, distributing starting resources, easily forty minutes before a single unit moves the first time you play, and even once you know what you’re doing it’s not a weeknight game. The rulebook doesn’t help, organized in a way that has you flipping between sections mid-explanation more than any game I’ve taught recently, and I had two separate first sessions where we had to stop and hunt down a ruling.

It does scale to two fine, which surprised me given how skirmish-forward it looks on the box, my partner and I have had genuinely tense two-player sessions once the spires are established. But downtime between turns creeps up fast once you add a third or fourth faction, watching someone plan a multi-unit assault while you wait is a real ask on patience. Reminds me structurally of Kemet in the aggressive-area-control sense, but Kemet’s rules overhead is a fraction of this, which is honestly the whole review in one sentence. Three stars, genuinely good game buried under a genuinely bad first-contact experience.