It's harder than I like, personally.

It's a high-stress city builder where you're generally struggling against starvation, collapse of morale, or both in the early game. What makes it really distinctive is that you're limited to a small set of buildings each game, and the buildings you're allowed change from game to game.

There are several production chains possible, such as copper ore -> copper bars -> tools, but you rarely have all the buildings unlocked for these chains, because of the random nature of what buildings you have available. You have to make do, either trading for items you can't produce, or hoping you'll find a stash of those items in a chest.

The maps are random, so you're never sure what resources you'll find, and different games start in different biomes, so what resources are possible change from game to game.

To win a game, you have to score 14 reputation points. You can earn points by completing quests, making your villages especially happy, or completing events you find on the map. Generally you do some mixture of all 3, though sometimes one method or another will dominate. There's even a random map modifier that prohibits all quests, so you must score points through other means.

All of that means that no two games really play out the same way, You must adapt to circumstances, and you have to be focused on what you need to do to win, since you can lose the game if you take too long.

Game are short, a few hours each. The game ends about the time your village is starting to get stable and prosperous. The idea is that you're a pioneer founding villages, not a mayor running them after they're healthy.

There's meta-progression, as you unlock additional features and bonuses after every game. That also contributes to the variety in play.

It's good, and it's complex, but I personally got burned out by how you restart and relive the high-stress early game so often. I've played games that push you like Oxygen Not Included or Factorio, but I appreciate how those games have a much more extensive period where you're no longer fighting for bare survival.

Great game! Has boardgame feel to it: games are tight and relatively short. However, there are too many resource types, buildings and recipes. It is tedious to check the nuances and memorise them for the session, The game also sort of falls apart at high prestige (highest difficulty levels) because much of the game seems to balanced for normal difficulty.

Its feels slow and tedious. It just wasn't for me. I didn't like the resource management aspects of the game. Too convoluted to juggle in my head, no easy way to understand what buildings are producing what besides going over to each one and click them. It was fun in the tutorial but as soon as I stepped out on my own I ran about two camps before rage quitting over my units not going to a glad threat that they were assigned to. It gave me no way to identify the units disregarding my orders or a way to understand why they weren't following my commands. That lack of insight or any way to micromanage my units made me request a refund. I think the game needs more gradual scaling (an option to turn threats off in the beginning) and more hand holding. It's was a game that promised clarity and flow but delivered friction, ambiguity, and attrition. Bit of a bait-and-switch I walked into with type of survival/resource sims.