For me it's the Challenge deck that really makes the game come to life. There's a separate deck with your 4 spread of stat colors on it and values that are either positive, negative, or neutral. When you perform a skill check, you draw from the challenge deck to resolve everything, after you've collected all your effort together. If your check had a requirement of [3] as the target number and you had submitted (3) effort, the challenge deck could subtract {-1} from your gains and force you to fail the task. You can try again another turn, but the cards and resources are spent regardless of the outcome. This means discarding cards isn't as choice, but sometimes you simply don't have enough stats to cover the requirements. Can you get lucky with a 1 stat on a [3] check? Yes, you could get a +2 in that given field, which would make you successful, but it is very risky to do so.

Also note there's a colored crest on the bottom of every challenge card, and these will trigger any cards in play that are keyed off of that specific event and will all trigger their effects, one at a time, until all face up cards with the crest are resolved. This can result in cascading failures if the wrong symbol shows up at an inopportune time, erasing progress you made for an entire round in one swoop. So every check you make will cause the world around you to react, and the outcome you get might be one you do not want to happen. Predators can ambush an animal you're trying to interact with, or a friendly person you met on the trail can get attacked by predators and die if you can't ward them off. Some weather events might make traversing terrain easier in that instant, or harder. It's really unique how they tied the whole game together into these skill checks and the crests that challenges spark the moment they are flipped.

Game's fucking great, check it out.

>>95887330
Really a cool idea to have everything randomized like that. I bet it will allow you to test odd combinations out.