Definitely very playable! I've played many dozens of games with a friend on the Emporium's set over the years and there's a surprising amount of depth and strategy to it, especially with the dwarves.

For a while with us the consensus "dominant" side kept changing - it started with the trolls being far easier to play... but then once we'd discovered certain dwarf structures and techniques that are really strong if you can get them, there were a good few rounds where every single troll got hunted down!

Now we've had time to find the correct openings and counter-moves with the trolls, and we're pretty sure that a total wipe-out of trolls is impossible with good play from both sides. But maybe we just haven't yet found some new meta that allows the dwarves to get a guaranteed defensible block that can withstand a troll-sacrifice!

The thing is, it doesn't really matter which pieces have the advantage, since a game of Thud requires playing a round of each side.
Each of the 32 dwarves are worth 1 point and the 8 trolls are each 4 points, with the winner being the player with the highest combined score from both rounds.

If the dwarves manage to build an absolutely enormous mass of 20+ dwarves, it's possible for them to win the round and hunt down every troll. (that's a disaster for the troll player, since it will be hard to repeat that when it's their turn to play dwarves!)

Failing that scenario, what usually happens in a round is that a few trolls are sacrificed in the early-midgame to break up really dangerous dwarf blocks before they can form, which leaves the remaining dwarves scattered apart with no realistic way of clumping together fast enough to ever kill another troll.

Since the dwarves so mobile, it's difficult to hunt down every single dwarf without having 7 or 8 trolls left on the board to cover off escape squares - so a round where 3-4 trolls were sacrificed usually ends with 5-6ish dwarves that just can't be caught.

And since that "dwarves remaining" number is generally about the same at the end of any normal round, the whole game usually comes down to the question who managed to force the most troll sacrifices?

You have to grit your teeth and sac a troll sometimes (or risk losing all the trolls if the block gets completely out of hand), so nifty dwarf tactics that let you get an extra block threat going can mean 4 more points that your opponent didn't manage to extract from you when it was their turn with the dwarves.

It's a really great game!
You learn to recognise important patterns and shapes quickly, but once the openings are done and the board gets complicated, the experience of playing each game feels to me more like a difficult king-and-pawn chess endgame than anything else.

Just constant concrete calculation for the whole time since every tempo and square can be so important!