Played this for the first time a few days ago. We enjoyed it and it took about an hour for our first play through. My 8 year old son was able to play it fairly easily as well, showing it’s a pretty simplified version of the main game while still staying true to the main concepts.
I really like this game for the range and flexibility of strategy. It has a lot of different moving parts that work really well together to provide lots of options. Gods replayabilty and nice parts in the deluxe version.