There's a lot of hype over this game. Take a look at the GameNight! play-through. If you're interested in building games, it's probably very interesting , but in my opinion there is, has zero theme for average gamers. It comes across like 'Game Prototype: The Game'. It seemed to me that most of the games you'd play are Pick Up and Deliver, but you end up collecting different things, or changes some of the scoring rules and some of the mechanics for movement.
504 sounds like a lot, but really the rule book is broken into 3 segments. Top/Middle/Bottom you change one of the three bits and the combination changes. I once had a cookbook that designed 3 course meals like this Starter/Main/Dessert. Unfortunately, half of the starters were rubbish, so the number of combinations dwindled rapidly! Like Mr Numbers points out Carcassonne offers more
