Dragons of Etchinstone - How to Play

all right hi everybody this is going to be a rules video for dragons of etching stone this is an 18 card in hand adventure game and it's going to be played over a series of regions you're going to work through regions one through four and then you're gonna face a final dragon at the end setup is pretty quick you set all of your action cards that's these cards to level two the level is at the top there and you give them a shuffle you choose which dragon you want to face there's one of each of the four colors gray blue yellow and red put the dragon to the back of the deck and then you set the region to region one and you draw up your first hand which is four cards off the top goes into your right hand and you're ready to go dragons of etch and stone is played in a series of encounters and then you work through um you work through the deck playing as many encounters as as you need to play and when you're done with the deck you're done with the region and then you shuffle up the cards again you change the region card to the next region and then keep going through the next region when you get through region number four you set up similarly and i'll show you what's different for the dragon fight and then you just see how you do against the dragon and see if you can win the whole game the main thing you'll be doing in this game is playing cards to try to defeat the current encounter in front of you and the way you're going to play cards is in what's called an action set an action set means playing three a set of three cards so three out of your four cards in your hand you're always going to have a hand of four and you're going to assign one of three roles to each of the cards in your action set um you're going to have one be the leader one be the element and one be the booster and it might help if i walk through the anatomy of these action cards the center area is just the actions on the card there's a neutral action which doesn't have a background color and then there's an ether action or a color action that is generally just a more powerful version of the neutral action it's harder to play because you have to coordinate it with your element and if if the card is being played as the leader this is what you're worrying about on that leader card is the um the actions in the middle if you're playing the card as the element there's only two things that matter one of them is the card background color so this is a yellow card so if i play it as the element the element for the turn or the encounter would be yellow and then the other thing that's important on the element card is the initiative so this right here is the cards initiative every card has an initiative and it has that little lightning bolt icon and that's going to be important for enemy encounters and then if this card was played as the booster we would only be worrying about the boost value in the lower right corner so there's two types of encounters there's enemies and journeys enemies have an hp value an xp reward value that you get for defeating them and then they have an initiative value with that orange lightning bolt there they have an attack value and an attack color which is the swords and shield icon and then this shield here is the enemy's armor sometimes they have more than one kind of armor and those are listed and then the armor value is what you subtract from your total attack they use against them and then the armor color um is significant and i'll talk through that i'll probably play a turn and and talk through how an enemy encounter works but essentially the this guy's yellow armor would reduce a yellow attack by one and it wouldn't touch any other colors of attack journeys um [Music] unlike enemies don't really care about um initiative but they do care about movement so you're trying to get to this here i'll do one that i don't have the values crossed out on you're trying to get to the uh it's called an mp or a move points instead of hit points but it works a lot like the hp or the hit points of an enemy you're trying to get to this move value so here with enemies you're you're playing attack against them to try to get to their hp with journeys you're trying to get to the move point value and then journeys like enemies have a color so this is red and this one's blue that icon color this one's yellow but it's not armor it's actually better to play into that color because you get an extra booster if you play um a move action of the proper color so i'll do a couple of examples so you know what's going on there enemies can have icons on them so they're like ranged and slow and freeze and there's one more uh i think poison yeah there's a poison icon i think instead of talking through those since they're kind of hard to remember unless you kind of see it written down a few times i'll put it in the description of the video the same goes for so those are enemy abilities and these are journey perils and there's a few of those this is treacherous and this is steep and so journeys can also have some perils tied to them and i'll put those descriptions in the video description as well so why don't we just try i'll give you an example of what an encounter might look like so you draw up your four cards and then you reference the um icon here this is the encounter icon it will either be a skull or the journey gotta find one here that's the journey icon there and then there's also a number value next to it this is not my most updated prototype so i have notes on it so this would be monster number one and all you do is you count from left to right uh in terms of their position so this is monster number one and this would be two three four and the same for journeys going across left to right so if we were facing monster number one we're trying to get to that seven hp and we're trying to do as much attack as we can but we also need to worry about initiative so i'm going to be trying to get to eight initiative or he's gonna hit me first or basically he hits me an extra time there's three possible outcomes based on how much damage you do in terms of how that relates to their hp if you deal damage or if you do attack equal to or greater than their hp it's a complete win you get to collect the xp reward and you don't have to take any damage any combat damage that is uh you still might end up taking damage by losing initiative but i'll get to that in a second so if you do complete victory and you do seven or more to this guy you don't have to take combat damage and you get to collect the reward if you do at least half of their hp rounded up then you get to collect the reward so you get the xp but you also have to take combat damage so from this guy that would be one yellow damage if you don't do at least half of their hp in attack round it up then it's a complete loss and so you don't get the xp and you have to take combat damage so for this guy you'd have to get to um four in order to at least have a narrow victory so a narrow victory is if you do at least half of their hp rounded up but not all of their hp and then a complete victory is the whole thing and then initiative you are trying to get to eight initiative or higher with this guy if you don't tie them or beat them in initiative you have to take what's called initial damage and all that is is you have to take their damage and extra time so if i would say have a complete victory and i do seven damage to him i don't have to take combat damage but let's say my initiative was five i lost initiative i'd still have to take one yellow damage from initial damage so you could end up taking initial damage only you could end up taking only combat damage or you could end up taking both or you could end up taking neither um let's do an example here so he's got seven and he has a yellow yellow armor i'm going to look at my actions you'll notice the icons here so this is a move action these are move actions but this these are combat actions you can use a card for its opposite action type so i could use this as attack except it's only worth a value of one uh no matter if you do the ether action or the neutral action so i could if i use this as my leader card i could play this for one attack but we're going to try to to play a good attack here this is my best attack card and would probably hopefully get me there which means i need to play this as my element so i'm going to play this as my leader so i use the leader actions and then since this is my element and it's yellow and that matches the color of this ether action i get to do the ether action if this was any other color other than the color of the ether action i'd be forced to resolve the neutral action so the yellow matches the yellow which means i get to do this one that's six but that's not enough so i'm going to rely on my booster and it doesn't really matter which booster i do i think i'm going to play this one because i want to save this card and i'll show you kind of how that works so right now i would win in a complete victory because he has seven hp i'm doing six damage plus two which is eight and that would be good enough for a complete victory but we haven't talked about initiative yet so he has 8 initiative and i use the initiative of my element card which we decided was this card and that's six so actually i'd lose initiative and so i would end up in this case having to take one yellow damage because i had to take his attack once because i lost initiative but i don't have to take combat damage because i had a complete victory if i had let's say only been able to get to five attack and i also lost initiative i would end up taking two yellow attack from him because he'd attack me twice you always wait and just total up the damage that you have to take until the end of the encounter so you don't like take the initial damage first and then play out your turn and then take the combat damage you just save it all till the end and then take it once the encounter is over based on how you do um i feel like there was one other thing that i was going to get to there but i can't remember what it was oh yeah you can if you choose instead of using the booster to improve your leader's action you could use the booster to improve your initiative so in this case we could have chosen to take six initiative plus two to actually get to our eight initiative but then so we we'd actually wouldn't have to take initial damage in that case but we wouldn't have gotten there with our attack so we would have had to take in combat damage um so it probably would have worked out the same either way and i just noticed that he does have the one yellow armor but we were okay because we were up to eight even though so this was a yellow attack it doesn't matter the color of the backgrounds of the cards it matters what color the ether action is for the enemy armor if you're doing a neutral action um i guess some enemies could have neutral armor i don't think i made any of that do but most enemies just have one or two different colors of armor so it only affects the ether action or the color action so that's how let's let's say that played out the way that we said initially where i had a complete victory but i uh didn't win initiative so i have to take one yellow damage from that enemy you have to take damage into your current hand but you can take it into any of your four cards and the way damage works is cards have an armor value so you can see that's a two with a yellow shield this is a two with a black shield and that's a three with a black shield so that's where the armor is on the cards so each card has its own individual armor value and all that means is this card could soak two damage and that's neutral armor so that's it has no special advantages but this is yellow armor so color armor has an advantage against attacks of that color so this has an advantage against yellow attacks and all that means is it can soak twice the damage value or twice the damage of the value that's listed so this could soak four yellow armor or two damage or it could soak for yellow damage but it could soak only two damage of any other color and this can just soak two damage of any color um so even though we only have to take one damage the the remainder or the surplus armor we have is just lost we have to downgrade the card anyway so if you if you devote any damage to a card um you have to downgrade that card even if you had overkill and armor so what i'm going to do is probably choose a card that i'm okay with downgrading kind of permanently or at least for now i think i am going to damage this card so um applying damage to a card you just downgrade it from from the level it's on by one so this goes from two to one there's not a level below one you can damage level one cards but that trash is the card and you can either just take the card out of the game or put it in your pocket or you can slide it in between your region card and your dragon card and that's where trashed cards live and you don't get those back so you got to be careful about doing that but it is a last resort option available to you you can't damage cards more than once more than once in a given encounter so i couldn't let's say this was on level three and we had just a bunch of damage to take i couldn't damage it from level three to level two to soak like let's say three blue damage uh taking it to level two and then i couldn't damage it again taking it from level two to level one so you can only downgrade each card once to take damage per encounter if you end up having to take more damage than you're able to take so let's say we have downgraded every single card once and that would have been a lot of damage to take and you still had more damage to take then you are knocked out you have to discard your hand discarding means just putting it to the back of the game and then you have to lose a turn and losing a turn just means discarding four cards as if you had drawn up a hand and discarded it right away and then you just drop your next hand and you can keep going let's see so that was the bad part of it uh taking the damage so let's say we damaged this card but we haven't damaged these three cards yet and we get to collect four fame from that enemy because we had a complete victory a complete or a narrow victory gets you the fame reward so we get to upgrade cards and that's what this is here in the upper left of the cards that's the upgrade cost it's the upgrade cost for the current status of the card so you have to look what's the level what's the level three upgrade cost that would be three going from two to three for this one would be four and so on so i have four to spend i know that this one's gonna cost four to get to level three so i'm gonna upgrade that one to level three and that's all my upgrading you can't upgrade a card that you downgraded to take damage so we could not have upgraded this one back up so again you have to be careful which ones you damage because you can't upgrade them again in the same encounter unlike taking damage where you can only downgrade each card once to take damage you can upgrade cards as many times as you like so let's say we had a bunch of fame and we wanted to upgrade this card twice you're allowed to do that so we take it from level two to three by spending four and then we could take it from level three to four by spending five uh you can upgrade your unused card so if you remember this was our action set we only played these cards this one was just hanging out extra and this will actually stay in our hand for next turn so you don't discard this you can upgrade this card you can downgrade this card and then next turn next encounter it doesn't matter if you upgraded this or downgraded this it's kind of a fresh start so you could you know you could take damage into it in during your next encounter or upgrade it during your next encounter so um so let's just pretend and and move on here that we let's see if i remember right we upgraded this card once and we downgraded this one which it still is and then you just discard your action set once you've done your upgrading and you're downgrading and then you drop your next hand so let's do a journey so this is uh journey number two according to my notes uh one thing i should get to before i forget is these are circumstances so that's what that a lot of times that space is empty sometimes your reference card over here that's what this is called as your reference card you look at the top card of the deck to see which encounter you're facing and what type and then to see if there's any circumstances i think it will be probably too cumbersome to go through all of these and talk through them so i think i'll just list them in the description but this would be a storm and there's other things that affect journeys like night and let's see with enemy encounters there's a few like hazardous environment and ambush typically they make the encounter more difficult so um you just have to be aware of them okay so this was journey number two according to my handwritten note there and um i've crossed those out those are actually three higher in the newest prototype so we're taking on journey number two we have to get to nine mp or move points it's a blue type of terrain so we're actually going to try to do a blue ether move action if we can and then the penalty instead of taking damage from journeys would be a time penalty which means discarding cards off the top of the deck you don't really want that to happen because you kind of want to have more encounters to to upgrade so that you don't face the boss when you're not prepared for it um so so time penalties can be kind of scary if you're taking a big penalty and then these can provide xp as well so let's do a move uh action here try to get to nine so let's take stock of what we have that's gray so that's potentially seven gray move which might be enough that's attack that doesn't help much that's move or attack so if it has a slash you can pick either or you'll notice there's a couple of cards in here too that have a different action type between the neutral and the ether action um and that's a move but that's very light so can we get the gray action no because this is our only gray card these are blue and that's yellow so we can't get that and our next best option would be this because we could get that gray ether action by using this as our element so let's just run that scenario for a second let's just say this was our element get my camera to focus for you let's say this is our element this is our leader so we would resolve this and we'd use that for move and what's our boosters that's a two and that's a three so even if i used my best booster on it it would be four move plus three and that's seven and that's not good enough to get to the nine and we don't have opportunity for a blue move action so as long as i get to similar rules apply as long as you get to at least half rounded up it's still a narrow victory against the journey and that means you get the xp but you have to take the time penalty if you don't get to at least half the mp rounded up you take the time penalty and you don't get the xp and then if you get to the total mp then you get to you don't have to take the time penalty but you get to accept the xp so we'll just play this like we had it and then and then we'll keep this card since that was our unused card and so we got to at least half because it was a four plus three and that's seven out of nine and so we get to we have to take the time penalty and so you do that first you take your penalty first so we'll just discard that top card to the back for the one time penalty and then we get to do the upgrading so we got three xp because we had a narrow victory so we still get the xp i think i'm gonna see what this cost is ah that costs four do any cost three that one does i'm gonna look at this one i think i want to upgrade this one a little versatility from those actions so i upgraded that from level two to level three for three cost spent my xp i discard my action set to the back i keep my unused card and i draw my next hand and so you would work your way through the deck like this until you don't have enough cards to do a full encounter so even if you're able to draw a hand of four but there's not a reference card that's still not enough to do a full encounter and you might end up with odd numbers based on how much time penalty you've taken once you get to the end you just rotate that region shuffle up your action cards and then start region two so you work your way through to um all the way through region four and then for the dragon fight you shuffle up your action deck one final time excuse me and then this time you put the region card in back first and then you have the dragon sticking out the top for the dragon fight i'm gonna choose one that i don't have notes scribbled all over for the dragon fight you have to do the final journey first and then you do the final encounter so for the final journey you actually draw six cards for your hand you don't use this as the reference card although you do use this card for the if you match the journey color so this is yellow so if we would do at least one yellow ether action for our move we could add this as our extra booster if you're doing a normal encounter a normal journey and you have your hand of four if you do the proper color the matching color of what color the journey icon is [Music] then you get to add the extra booster i think i mentioned that briefly so you get to use your fourth card your unused cards booster you still get to keep that card for next round but you get to add that extra booster so for this one you don't really have an extra card and i'll explain that in a minute so if you do happen to have a yellow move action you get to add the reference cards booster okay so with your six cards you actually get to make two action sets out of this so you would you'd pick two leaders two elements and two boosters and then do them into two sets and so that's a good move but i don't have a gray element that's too bad um this wouldn't be a very good hand but i haven't been playing so i didn't upgrade cards [Music] i would probably do this as an element this as a leader and then i could do [Music] just an off color so i would do that as an element that as a leader so that i could play that as a neutral action and then i'd add this as the first or this action sets booster and then i'd add that as that action sets booster and i'd have my two action sets then you add your total movement together so you you take your so this would be what this would be four plus two so that's six total move and this would be three plus two so that's five total move uh so six plus five is eleven so i'd have 11 total move i'd come over here and this would hopefully be better than that after upgrading cards and playing through the regions but i didn't make at least i didn't even make the lowest tier but i'll explain how this works you just look at how much move total you were able to do and you find the tier this is tier one two and three you find the tier that you were able to reach so say i did like 29 movement that would put me to this tier and that means this is my time penalty uh and the same if you do anywhere above or on 32 so say i did 35 you only have to discard three and then if you do 23 to 28 this is your penalty but if you do less than 23 you actually lose the game at this point you don't get to move on and so let's just say i hit that middle tier i was able to do like 29 so you discard your two action sets your six cards and then you take the time penalty so the time penalty would be four one two three four and discard those and then you get to draw all the rest of the cards in the deck for your final hand against the dragon so you'll notice that depending on how good you do in the journey your hand might be larger or smaller if you do the middle tier you have a hand of six and that works out fine because you're gonna once again be doing two action sets against the dragon but if you are able to do better you'll have a hand of seven which means you just have one left over card you don't use that card it just gives you more options and then if you have to discard five you only have a hand of five and you have to just forgo one of the boosters so one action set won't have a booster so then you do the same thing for the dragon you you create two action sets from your six cards and you total up your attack that you're able to do but you also total up your initiative so if these were this was eight was that cards initiative my my element card has an initiative of eight so that's that action sets initiative and then this would be my element card for my second action set which would be six and so my total uh what is that 14 yeah that's 14. my total initiative would be 14 and then i would total up my attack as well then you compare that to first you come up here and you compare the initiative value so what did i say 14 so i actually would have won initiative that's pretty good unlike normal enemies dragons have a special initial attack so this is the attack that eight yellow damage there is the attack you'd have to take if you lost initiative um and then dragons typically have more than one armor type against different colors so um if i'm if i can manage it i'll probably try to upgrade my deck into like blue or gray attacks in preparation for the dragon's yellow and red armor to avoid that if possible and then you look at the combat tiers or the hp tiers so there's one two and three just like the journeys if you don't get to at least the lowest tier so 17 if you don't get to at least 17 attack against the yellow dragon here you lose the game at this point if you if you get to at least 17 but less than 24 then this is how much damage you have to soak in order to win the game so you're always going to be soaking some damage it's just the better you do the the more attack you're able to do the less damage you're going to have to soak and whether you win initiative or not the lesser more damage you'll have to soak and so what you do then once you figure out how much damage you have to soak if you have to add in the initial damage and then you look at what combat damage level you have then you start taking damage into your hand and so i just actually work from right to left and i'll be like okay that soaks three and one and two and then after damaging each card once if you still have damage to take then you lose the game so you have to be able to to do the as much attack as you can and then you have to be able to soak all the damage into your final hand if you have a hand of seven um you can use that extra card to soak the damage so that's a pretty good advantage to have that card okay i think that's all i wanted to cover yeah i can't think of anything else that i wanted to cover but if i think of anything i'll put it in the description of the video so thank you guys for watching i hope you enjoy the game

Channel: Joe Klipfel

Views: 966

Keywords:

Id: XLpOnNQPqK4

Length: 32min 32sec (1952 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 28 2021