Excellent miniatures and terrific art are the frosting on this game, which is a battle for glory. The unpredictable card element of a fantasy board game like Talisman is made more interesting here with a more immediate focus, multiple characters per player (leaders, warriors, sea ships, and monsters), more of a reliance upon strategy, and a board that evolves throughout the three different phases of play. Add to this the GREAT mechanic of self-sacrifice possibly working in a player's favor--and thus, a player's goals shifting mid-game or being hidden from others at first--and the resultant game has a lot of possibilities. This is not an analysis paralysis monster like Mage Knight (my favorite solitaire game alongside Thunderbolt Apache Leader and Perdition's Mouth), but there are often tough choices and gambles to be made.
A couple things are counterintuitive--I'd rather that warriors could not "March" to non-adjacent lands and the term "Invade" is not well chosen for landing new pieces on the board ("Invade" sounds like an action that would occur after a "March")--but these are minor quibbles.
Overall Blood Rage is a really enjoyable game that has some of the immersive qualities of far heavier games while being fast moving, unpredictable, and a very good balance of luck and strategy. (One aside: In every instance that I can recall, the re-pillaging card massively warped the game in the card user's favor. I won't say that this card fully breaks the game--I can think of some theoretical ways around it--but it affects things more than any other card I've seen, by far, and I wish it weren't in mix.)
My favorite board game is Cave Evil while my girlfriend adores Pandemic, and Blood Rage is game that we both have a great time playing together. It is immediate, goal-driven fun and an engaging fantasy with lots of choices and great visuals.