I played this Sunday for the first time and liked it. The decoupling of special abilities from exact positions on the board does a lot to reduce snowballing... if your first couple turns are badly chosen, you're not locked out of the rest of the game as much as in Kingdom Builder. The tunnels being available to everyone likewise makes it easier for everyone to travel all across the board, which is where a lot of the fun of the game comes in. Each player has a hand of enough different abilities that they should hopefully all average out to similar power levels, though I imagine it could be frustrating to draw a hand of all movement abilities or all placement abilities, rather than a mix of the two. We did have one player who thought there were just too many possible moves for too many competing objectives at all times, but that's kind of the point of the game. I do think, though, that the rules could have put a little less emphasis on saying everything in as few words as possible, and instead focused more on clarity.
