I hear you on the conundrum of mastering a game that may not even turn out to be great. With 427 board games in my collection I’m at the stage where games that don’t wow me, go up for sale quickly.

The Xia rules summaries on the back of the two rule books are quite good in my opinion. As a first-time player I also thought that the rules worked surprisingly well as references during play, which may mean that they are less easy to learn from, but I was taught by a friend, so I don’t know for sure. Based on your experience I’m now certain that he had studied quite hard before teaching us. That said, we also encountered some edge cases.

How many players did you have? I’ve only played it with three, and imagine that to be the game’s sweet spot to avoid too much downtime.

I found Xia, gorgeous, with a great theme, and cool components, but incredibly chaotic! In my play trading was definitely the way to victory, something I suspect to always be the case.

Xia is the type of sandbox game I would’ve loved to play as a teenager, but I now find that other games give me a similar experience in a less chaotic manner. It’s still a fun experience, due to its theme, exploratory nature, and cool bits, but not something that I want to play too often.