Just grabbed the core set and tried it out today with my son! Love the mechanics of the game from what we've seen from that set. We did change up our game rules a bit after the first few matches to maybe tailor it better to 2 player games:
1. We cut the draw pile to 3/4 of the anomalies, both scenarios, and half the characters -- chosen at random from the card pool. Otherwise, 2 player games last a long time and the deck out endgame condition almost never happens. Those numbers changed from a lighter stack, and we found that this amount makes 2 player games last the perfect length of time... Not too short, and well-paced with the civilian pile. Oh, and civilian pile was unchanged.
2. Uncontained anomalies stack horizontally (in the order they're added) in the Uncontained zone and only the last/top anomaly's effects can occur, but you can Contain any anomalies in the zone normally. This added some strategy to when you'd leave anomalies Uncontained, and also seemed to cut down on some of the wild Uncontained zone combos that could just shut another player down. Also made turns go faster because you only needed to check the top Uncontained for effects.
3. We initially banned The Hanged King's Tragedy and Hard-to-Destroy Reptile after they each killed a player 2-3 turns into a game. It was too easy to combo them with your own civilian loss or civilian stealing cards to effectively take 2+ civilians from the other player every turn, which effectively left them drawing 2 civilians (for draw + action) and losing them right back until they inevitably lost the game. We tried out a higher starting civilian count and max civilian count (from 5 / 9 to 7 / 11) and upping the number of Public cards drawn during the Action step from 1 to 2, and that definitely helped a lot. Actually had an active combo where a player was losing 2 civilians per turn and was able to draw out of it because of this.
3a. We're revisiting banning Hard-To-Destroy Reptile after it sank another game unexpectedly. Also considering a possible errata to the card along the lines of: "This anomaly cannot be Contained by paying the normal civilian cost. ( > ) If Uncontained, Discard 1 civilian. You may discard an additional civilian and a character card from your hand to Contain this anomaly. ( / ) When neutralized, return this to the Draw pile." This errata seeks to preserve the hot potato nature of the card while making it less likely to just abruptly destroy a player, and keeps neutralizing from sticking a player with a permanently uncontained card if they ran out of character cards.
(Edited my comment based on another play session the day after.)
(Edited again based on a few more play sessions later in the week.)
We loved playing the game, though! Definitely looking forward to getting some more matches in and trying out some expansion cards. :)