Best thing you can do is get the digital PDF edition of the game - so do it! This game has quickly become my absolute favorite tabletop game. It is near perfect. However, some drawback from the logsitics side of the game prevent me from giving the best possible rating. In this review, I will run though 1. the purchase and logistics, 2. my experience with the game itself, and 3. a summary of last play session's story, as an example of how a game can go.

1 - They sell you an icomplete game: At the moment, the absolute only way (I found) to get hold of the game is via DriveThruRPG, where you can exclusively purchase an incomplete copy of the game. People who were lucky enough to learn of the game during its crowdfunding campaign, as well as early buyers could get a beautiful full box of the game, complete with cards, rulebook, an aspect paper block, dedicated Icarus dice - even a dice holder, player mat and first player token. But you and me, the most we can get is the Story Deck playing cards and PDF files. However, I have found this is the worst deal, because it is the most expensive and yet everything but complete! First of all, if you buy the "Card(s) in Tuckbox", this is really everything you get: the cards. Icarus: How Great Civilizations Fall is a game that is designed to be played with cards and dice. But neither do they come with dice, nor can you purchase the Icarus dice seperately. The game just expects you to have gotten the components you need to play it from elswhere. Also, the useful X-Card mentioned in the rulebook is not part of the game (though you can just write an X on a piece of paper, but still - if it's in the book, it would be nice to have it actually in the game you bought). Buying the "Card(s) in Tuckbox" or the "Watermarked PDF + Card(s) in Tuckbox" editions of the game don't provide you with a lot of better value over the PDF version of the game. You have no chance to purchase a complete edition of the game. So the best thing you can do is go with the lowest-priced option. (Only if you wish to support the creator, do what I did and go for the (not really) full package for the highest price, as these are the only three ways you can go at the moment).

2 - All the best stories, but with no physical rulebook ever: On DriveThruRPG, your only option to get the rulebook is digitally. Print it out at home or your local copyshop, costing you additional money. However, thankfully the rules are few enough to understand quickly, and the story is always greater than the rules. But it is a shame about the lovely illustration. I'd love to have the book stand on my shelf, but well. My friends and I played a session of Icarus. We were six. However, the game is designed for 5 players. We troubleshooted this easily: after dealing the Motive cards, the last remaining player got their Motive by rolling a die. The first chunk of the game felt a lot like preparation and my friends started to wonder when the game began, though we were already playing. But once the actual events started to rain down on us, we all had a lot of fun, and it was worth the set-up portion of the game. We learned how important it is to pull on the same string regarding whether you are crafting a somewhat serious story or are just goofing around. We didn't discuss this at the beginning and so our story didn't know what it wanted to be. It turned out to be half satire, half cartoonish craziness. But in my first test game (I played with myself. Not as sad as it may sound ;D) Icarus fell in a compelling catastrophe tale. Both directions were a lot of fun. You should only decide which one you'd like to go. Also, we created new Aspects whenever we had the chance, instead of expanding or changing existing Aspects (which the rulebook suggests to do, while however not being clear of how). This resulted in far too much paper on the table, with many notes being useless and obsolete pretty quickly. I still wish I had a physical copy of the beautiful rulebook. Gimme that! What I noted is that, Icarus tells an absolute new exciting story everytime you play it, the questions got stale fast after only two times I played it. The game could do with an expansion. Maybe additional Motive cards, different questions. Though if you use the self-print cards from the PDF-version of the game, you can easily create them yourself by altering the text via the commentary and text functions of your PDF program.

3 - How the Superior Space Station People of Icarus Became a Barbaric Dying Lot (Session Story Example): This is the story my friends and I told by playing Icarus one Saturday. We chose a Science Fiction setting, though none of us feels really "at home" in SciFi. We are more of the Fantasy type. Our version of Icarus was a giant space station, populated by people who have stopped aging due to the efforts of one Dr. Long, yet having to find out when their longevity ended. The people of Icarus had started erecting a tower in which they archived knowledge - theirs and that of their ancestors from Earth. It was calles the Mill of Signs. Icarus orbitted around a planet that held an unknown substance, which the space station absorbed and, through a device designed by my character Roger McStuffy, generated energy. However, Icarus was not entirely self-sufficient, as there was no direct water supply to draw from. One of us built party cruisers (all named S.S. Party Hard) that were popular elswhere in the galaxy. She traded them for water, holding the monopoly on it. Since it was scarce, stealing water was a heavily punishable crime. Whoever drank water that wasn't theirs had to repay their debt by bloodletting (yes, this law was introduced by a player who is a real-life nurse, obviously). Society had a clear structure: The workers responsible for maintaining the Icarus were most important and therefore had the best reputation. Soldiers were the middle class, and the common mob consisted exclusively of educated people. Society referred to the educated as Nerds (duh), which made Bob-247, one of the most intelligent residents, the King of Nerds. He was fed-up with the ways Icarus went and wanted to destroy it. Soon problems started to appear left and right. Alien monsters - the Waterlickers - entered the station and consumed our water. Erosion let parts of Icarus break off its core. Bob-247 convinced Soldiers to be worth more that Workers, resulting in severe class conflict. When an alien race, set on spreading wisdom and knowledge throughout the galaxy, visited Icarus, the Justice (our real-life nurse friend), who was jury, judge and executioner, distributed extra water to whoever educated themselves through the aliens. Soon the entire population was in class conflict. McStuffy's generator construction broke, causing a deficit in energy. He repaired it, tried to upgrade it, but it malfunctioned, causing for increased dehydration among the citizens. Then a virus appeared, countering Dr. Long's treatment against age, causing people to instantly age to death. The citizens tried to protect themselves by wearing plastic suits, which made them dehydrate faster, intensifying the water shortage. Soon a rivaling space station called Daedalus (because what else? :D) became the destiny and new home for many a citizen, but once Daedalus learned about the many problems troubling Icarus, they turned away migrants, and even became hostile over time. At one point the Mill of Signs fell (when the holder of the water tried to stack her dice on top of the dice tower), the final sign of Icarus' collapse, caused by erosion because Icarus had started to fall apart a while ago. Bob-247 snuck on a new S.S. Party Hard set out to leave the breaking space station. Dr. Long, too, bought herself on board the ship. Then the Party Hard left Icarus, leaving the Justice, Roger McStuffy and Guy (a Lufia-lifted engineer) to fend for themselves, quite literally. The Justice raced through the rioting lot on the crumbling streets, taking down as many people as she could, while Guy slaughtered his way to be the leader of the remaining bit of Icarus' civilization. Whereas my poor McStuffy ran through the corridors of the station, trying to fix what he could where he could as quickly as he could to save as many lives as possible, when one of those corridors broke apart, leaving him to die in the nothingness of space. Whatever survived under the rule of Guy, degenerated to a barbaric, savage lot, after what remained of the Icarus crash-landed on the planet it was orbiting. It was a blast. Play it! (But get the digital version and print the game yourself.)

So, I decided to try Icarus out with my regular gaming group after seeing Dicebreaker's review online, and purchased the digital version as the physical version was out of stock everywhere. I printed the cards on cardstock, and used an assortment of 16mm round-cornered dice that I had in my possession, as per the recommendation.

We used one of the scenarios in the rulebook as our starting point -- "The Holy Jungle". Our city of Icarus was built on the base of a cliff at the edge of the jungle, with advanced hydraulic power for our otherwise Neolithic society. Our civilization was based on water, abundance, and obsessive cleanliness. However, an "outcaste" of people who were responsible for handling the filth and waste of our city had a festival to the Mud spirit, which began a cascading set of problems and social unrest. As we focused on solving this domestic crisis, our monopolization of the water upset our neighbors, and in the end, we were overrun by our neighbors just as it appeared we'd solved our internal disputes. Icarus endured a brutal sack, only ended as the outcaste "Mud People" seized control and restored order to what remained of our ruined and broken city.

We had a great time going through the event prompts and shaping the city, and deciding how our various Pillars of society would focus their efforts trying to address the problems. Our Energy pillar had the motivation to bring down Icarus, and ultimately worked in two interesting ways: Pushing the hydraulic energy system past its safe limits, and scheming to discredit the other Pillars. He also brought down our Safety Pillar by revealing his solicitation of bribes (he had the "Get Rich" motive), which led to a ritual humiliation involving dirt and filth, pushing our Safety minister into the waiting arms of the Mud People.

I highly recommend this game to any group that has an occasional night where you need a break from the ongoing game. The wide-open nature of the game is such that you should never have anything close to the same story twice. Certainly, I don't think any of you will end up with the Glorius Mud Revolution. It was easy to play, easy to explain, and is highly replayable.

I'd recommend you spring for the pre-printed cards, if you can afford it. I printed my own cards, and the print-and-play cards didn't line up very well for 2-sided printing (not sure if this was my printer or the PDF), so I wound up with folded cards instead. You'll want about 20-30 dice and a relatively stable surface to play on. You'll also want a lot of index cards or notepads for writing aspects. You'll also weant to figure out a good way to keep aspects straight -- we wound up with a nearly unmanageable pile, and occasionally had to stop to find aspects we wanted to address.

Also, a quick note: the game is designed for 2-5 players, but we had 6. The only real limitation to 5 is the number of motive cards (also 5). I hot-patched the game by printing an extra copy of one of the motivations and adding it to the deck. If the makers of this game ever decide to do an expansion to the game, adding extra motives to support more players would be a good place to start.