Earthborne Rangers

I realized that I've written a bit about this game but I don't think I ever posted anything to the forums; we don't really have any discussion of this I can find besides briefly in the kickstarter thread. Anyway, headline is that it's a kickstarter FFG-style LCG produced as sustainably as possible. It's about a post-apoc future where humanity knows they fucked up the world and goes into arcologies for thousands of years while the machines they set loose heal the environment. Then the remaining humans come out and live somewhat harmoniously with the world. It's based on the Arkham LCG gameplaywise in broad strokes.

Anyway, I played the demo of this game on TTS maybe 3-4 times. I don't quite know if it's good, but it is pretty different and interesting. It's a much bigger twist on Arkham than I thought it was going to be. It's low punishment, unlike arkham, you just fatigue out and maybe get a little injured---then you can start fresh the next day. You kind of wander about the map open world style finding missions to do and following the main storyline, and the cards have a variety of links to the tales of arabian nights style storybook. You get Arkham style card upgrades to your deck and there's a good variety of deckbuilding options to do that don't get quite as involved as Arkham decks for good and for bad; it doesn't feature the mind boggling niche card draw and other weirdo deck goblin nonsense, but there's also less creativity in deck building than AH as well.

The feel is pretty different if you've played this style of game and AH in particular---you don't need to constantly clear all obstacles and oftentimes you'll just avoid something and travel on by hiking your way out of the location or let it be and fatigue yourself doing whatever you're trying to do. Similarly, the game is nicely thematic because it's not like even the predators and bad cards you face even "fight" you in some kind of enemy phase where they automatically punch you so you're way less of some kind of gameplay exterminator of things on the board. Finally, all enemy and friendly card behavior is triggered off a 1/3 random icon that comes up whenever you take a test to do something which is quite an interesting and creative twist than like all of these style of games.

My concerns are variety and repetitiveness. I think you're going to get tired traversing between locations since the locations only seed in a 12 card deck of biome cards and some either random generic character cards or ~5 location specific cards. Compared to the modular decks of Arkham, this is not much variety in the equivalent of the encounter cards ("bad cards" as the team covenant crew always says). Also, a lot rides on the gameplay creativity of the main missions---the demo only features some fetch quests and character interactions without any more complicated quests that I ran into. The game clicked a little bit better for me when I realized that each location in the game was more the equivalent of a location in Arkham Horror LCG than a scenario, and you may only spend 2-3 rounds at the location before heading out. Maybe that will overcome the possible repetitiveness of the biome decks.

I ended up preordering the base set, I'm looking forward to messing with it. It's expensive to buy now since they're doing an exclusive deal in the US to sell at MSRP and the game is just naturally a bit more expensive due to production decisions. My partner does not care for Arkham Horror LCG because it is so punishing and this really strips most of that away and has you exploring and solving problems instead, with no punishment if you "die" by fatiguing all your cards. We'll see! I do think that it is closer to what kickstarter is for, it's definitely pretty experimental and not made by a game company with big deep pockets that runs kickstarters for a living---one of the guys is a hippy looking former FFG employee (Navarro). The boldest experiment, to me, is productionwise by trying to only use sustainable packaging, cards, wood, etc.

My copy is currently on a boat and due to arrive next month. I'm jazzed for it. It's the first Kickstarter I've backed and it's been relatively smooth. A few minor hiccups and delays aside of which Earthborne Games were fully transparent about.

As well as backing a copy I also got invested in the creation side of the game. I've been listening to their loose and rambling fortnightly podcast since the very start so it feels like I've been on the journey with them. As Gary said, it's been a very old-school campaign in that they needed the funding to make the game. It wasn't a glorified pre-order campaign with various tiers and numerous expansions and exclusives. Overall, it's been a good experience. Am very keen to finally play the thing.

From what I understand the game opens up and the story/missions do get more interesting/intense after the demo but don't quote me on that as I haven't played the demo. I really dig the art and the world they've created and hope the gameplay matches it.

I didn't back the expansion in the KS. Their original plan was to send the core and expansion at the same time but that proved too ambitious so the expansion was delayed. The expansion, a new ranger set and a core box second printing will be going live after this fulfilment is completed.

Interestingly they'll be ditching KS and running this campaign on Gamefound. The initial motivation for the move was KS's environmentally unfriendly plan to use the blockchain a year or so back. KS also did some other malarkey after that which I can't remember right now. Maybe something to do with AI? Anyway, they began looking at GF. Ethics aside, GF's campaign tools were also apparently superior.

If anyone's interested the preview is up here: gamefound.com/en/projects/earthborne-gam...orne-rangers-reprint

If you are on the fence and asking yourself "do I want to play this," I can safely say you can watch the back half of this Team Covenant playthrough. If it looks bad, definitely skip, that's what this game is, but it also has a lot of the feel good moments and synergy in it since esp Steven of Covenant is pretty good at card games. They also get to story resolutions, add new player cards to decks, etc.

2:54: "These cards are gorgeous."

Welp that's enough for me. All in.

Seriously, though, the graphic design and art on this one is top shelf.

I'm curious how much of this game is going to come down to milling the encounter deck looking for card x to do a quest while running into the same cards over and over. It has some of that from what I've seen, which granted isn't that much. Will have to wait and see on this one still. It's got such a great style and vibe though.

Yeah, I agree, especially with the small "encounter deck" equivalent (path decks) that have clearly good and clearly bad cards in it.

There's also a weird outsized effect of path card churn when you have one and to a lesser extent two players since you see less of the deck and it's much lumpier. Three of four players you're automatically churning the deck pretty quickly. Somebody has to take scouting cards in solo or 2p.