Etherfields | Full & Honest Review

[Applause] welcome back everybody to the meeple marathon today i'm going to be giving my full and honest review of ether fields uh this is awaken realms most recent kickstarter to be delivered not kickstarter necessarily that you can go back but plenty of people around the country are receiving this game and there is a lot of mixed emotions it's probably the best way to put it about this game some people are saying you know it's just awful other people are completely in love with it i've seen it appear up and down on people's top 10 lists of games in 2020 i have not created my top 10 or top 20 list yet so i'm not really sure where it's going to fall but i am about a third to almost a half of the way through from what i can tell of the main campaign based on you know how much content they said was in um this initial scenario or campaign sorry and so i feel like i have a decent idea of you know what's going on um so in typical fashion i'm gonna cover what i really don't like about the game what i have mixed feelings about the game and finally uh what i love about the game and why i feel like it would be worth playing for you uh if it's your type of game so let's start off with the negatives first the first one that everybody has talked about that you can kind of see spread here in front of me is the board it's an incredibly vertical board and um this wouldn't be as big of a deal for example um direwild which i did a playthrough recently on the channel is also a vertical board but what's sitting at the top is the market you can generally just kind of need to be able to see the cards up there and you can pick them up individually and look at them but this one if you were to sit at the bottom of the board where you are expected to sit the actual uh map that you're playing on the dreams and the slumber scenarios the most important part in my opinion of the game it's at the top of the board i honestly don't understand why they didn't just flip-flop the dream world map and the um and and where your dream tiles go and your slumber tiles go it just it really doesn't make sense to me i remember watching the playthroughs of this game when it first hit kickstarter the prototype uh mat and i thought there was nothing wrong with that basically you had your you know slumber tiles and dream tiles right in the middle and then you had these you know dream world map tiles that you were supposed to lay out but then they solved that problem with these these are really nice uh you know i don't know if these are custom made but they hold your dream towels together just like this this is perfect i love this i really don't need to have a spot for my dream world tiles when i can just lay these out and so i really don't understand why there's a need for both a dream tile map area and then your dream world tile area uh and why they didn't flip-flop them because i don't necessarily need to look at this that much um so again i don't know whether they're gonna address this or not but this is probably people's number one complaint about the game and even the people who really enjoy the game are not really sure why they changed the board to be this way this is one of the instances where i am really glad i did not spend the extra money on a play mat because i would be very upset if i had spent that extra money on a play mat that i would honestly be considered cutting i've seen plenty of people cutting their play mats or cutting their boards doing high graphic printouts of their boards and moving it around um alex from board game co honestly had the best idea which probably the next time i get the game out i will try this he just got he didn't get rid of it but he doesn't get the board out he just plays on the table in front of him and he says he it works and he loves it so you can check out his review um on the board game co channel um the next thing that a lot of people have talked about which i'm not gonna harp on uh but it is a negative and it needs to be discussed if this is the only review the rule book i feel like there is there is a lot going on in this rule book there's a lot of text it is not super clear there's also instances where not all the rules are out there in front of you um sometimes you're going to unlock rules to the game via these wisdom cards and um i'll just keep them like this for now but you slot them in again they give you this nice handy dandy little uh carrying sheet for them and you've got these rules here right in front of this is nice i like this this is a positive um but the fact that they don't mention oh you know you may be experiencing this in the future but you'll learn more about that in the future or there's just there's a lot of vagueness in the rule book um i feel like every time i put this away and brought it back out i need to go back and read many portions of the rule book and it took me like three or four read-throughs to get through the rulebook on top of watching play-throughs and asking people questions on bbg so it's just it's not a very good rule book uh this is a not a lightweight game it is a heavy game so i'm just gonna put that out there the second thing is is um the you know the other book in the game is the secret books i have uh no problem with there being a secret book ideally this would be an app but i know that takes additional development but now after having gone through the tainted grail app that they did i don't know why they didn't just jump on the train while they were developing the tiny grail app and have the etherfields app ready to go i don't know if this is something they plan to do in the future but for me the biggest thing is is that you'll have one secret that's on 174 and then your next secret's on 986. i'm literally spending my time just like back and forth back and forth back and forth through this secrets book um why they couldn't have done it like tainted grail where it was like okay this is your dream now this is dream world 14 or dream 14 and here's 14 a b c d e and g and you can jump from a to g to back to b and it may be on but i'm only flipping one or two pages um it's also on a book why didn't they put in a spiral bound book like they detained a girl where i can leave it open to that dream i'm in when i set it down instead i read my thing and i either just leave it sitting in my lap there's already enough stuff out where i can't put it anywhere it's either sitting in my lap or i have to put it down and then flip but it really doesn't matter because i'm flipping entirely to a different page in the book anyways i spend more time flipping through the secrets book than i feel like i do actually like enjoying the game so that's a big big negative for me personally um it just it kind of ruins the experience of uh reading through this narrative for me is having to flip back and forth another thing is is that there are some scenarios in the game that you will either have to replay because you didn't get everything you needed to get or um you know they give you the instance where you can return to the scenario you can return to the dream i keep saying scenarios but their dreams you can return to the dream and it's easier to get back you only need like one key to get back in because there might be stuff you missed but you got the main stuff and so i could understand that but it's the ones where for example i'm going to be very vague here i defeated the main entity that was in the dream because he was bugging me i was worried that i was just going to spend too much time running away from him or you know he was going to um beat me up to the point where i would have received too much damage anyways i got a hand that i was got a strategy i defeated him and then read the text that said when you defeat him read this text and set your dreams over that's it and i was like what there's so much other stuff i needed to do in that dream and now it's just over and so i had to work my way back through this dream world map which uh you know it's kind of it's gonna show up in my mix here in a minute but then i haven't gone back yet but when i want to go back it's gonna be like the same thing and looking at it i think that same person is gonna pop up again so either i have to just run away from him again or i'm certainly not going to defeat him because i know what happens when it defeats him it just i want to just be able to get the main things that's going to help me progress through the game uh if there's easter eggs or if there's like you know awesome items or something like that that i want to go back for then let me go back for those but don't just make me rework a dream because i did what i mean that was just a very frustrating instance of the game last thing and this is the last thing on my negatives list is that this game is a burden to to set up it was a burden to initially set up and to figure out where all the cards are going to go and which ones do i want to put in what piles and then to get the games out there's lots of little it's fiddly there's all these different cards that you have to pull out of the stack so it's one of those games that i you know want to just be able to leave up for a long time but at the same token it's not like i can play any other game on this table while this one's up and there are other games that i want to get to so uh just the the fact that this game was a burden to initially get through the reading of the rule book and the uh unboxing it and then set up and tear down to the game um you know it's it's not one that i want to just get out once a week and play so all right let's move on to some happier thoughts uh and what i have mixed feelings about the first one is the exploration nature of the game on one hand it's it's a beautiful thing because there's all this openness to all of your dream maps um and you can kind of go anywhere and it's very simple you know you just play a yellow influence and and you move and you can kind of go wherever you want to go and there's multiple ways you can finish scenarios which i have discussed but then there's other times where it's almost too open-ended um there's i wish there's a little bit more direction on some of these cards and some of these map tiles um because you can be walking around and it just feels like you've been in this stream a little bit too long you're running out of turns and you just haven't gotten anywhere there's been several dreams like that where i've literally walked around and i've spent my influence on all these different points of interest and the book of secrets isn't giving me anywhere or i i start a dream and i have no direction whatsoever um and i shoot blanks for like three turns and it's only a seven turn scenario and next thing i'm told i have to defeat this monster and get to this exit in four turns and you know the dream's halfway over with so i wish there was a little bit more direction i wish it wasn't so open um or flighty uh in nature um give me a little bit more concreteness some people may really like this which is why it's a mixed thing i really do like the exploration to a point um it's not as big and grandiose as like seventh continent or tina grail was i'm not traveling card of a card and covering my whole table it's all pretty much in this you know three by four grid here but give me a little bit more direction i don't want to be exploring that much um next thing uh that's been a mixed feeling for me are the inspiration cards i really appreciate you know being able to build your deck um from the outside um deck creation per se um and essentially your number one thing of getting these ether tokens is to purchase influence cards and you deal out three and you get to choose which ones you want based on how much ether you have spent on it i like that concept i just when i deal out three i've yet to ever be impressed and be like oh that is the one i want i want that one and there's this huge stack em over there and i'm just wondering is there only like five really good ones in the stack um or what if i see one that's amazing that costs four ether but i only have three and it's just going to disappear and god knows if i'll ever see it again um i i wish that they had been a little bit more also hero specific like i've been playing with the gambler but only like three or four cards really feel like they have a gambling mechanic to them and honestly i don't really ever see the benefit of using the gambling portion of those cards i just use them for the influence numbers at the top i feel like tayden graham they did a really good job of building hero specific decks um you know your amount of cards you could choose from was smaller and more hero focused and so if you didn't choose a card even though you shuffled it back in you were more likely to see it because there was only like twenties on my cards you were choosing from um and in line with that is my next mixed feeling is the progress cards oftentimes it just seems like it's so expensive to lock or whatever you want to call it a progress card under your player board and make it become an active progress card it just doesn't ever seem worth it to spend six either which a lot of time or six influence of a certain color which a lot of times you have to have and wipes out your entire hand as you're spending an entire turn just locking one progress card now some people have recommended well that's what a great way to use your slumbers for and maybe that's just what i have to be doing is looking at slumbers is more of a way of like prepping my progress cards and things like that and wasting more time in my slumbers usually i'm just like get in knock out the entity get a reward and get out with slumbers um but progress cards really just don't seem to be that powerful to me i don't ever really want to lock them so this really just becomes looking at the influence numbers at the top and is match the color i need and do i have what i want do what i want and then move on and hope i get the right colors the next time um so uh as i just spoke about slumber tiles let's get into that as my next mix mixed emotions of thing i don't mind so much the working around the dream world map i don't mind slumbers per se because i think that it gives you a chance to earn a little bit of loot um and maybe i need to just look at them as a chance to lock your progress cards and i understand you know trying to take a little bit damage but also this just seems like too much work to to be pacing circles around this dream world map here like there's this one you know loop here on the main board that uh you just you basically take when you need two keys and then you get your two keys you can probably get dumped into a slumber at some point and um you know then you go about your business um it seems very fiddly at times um setting out your slumber map tiles and adding the court cards that are fake cards and there's sometimes where you spend all this time and you're building up this giant slumber map arena but then you happen to get your key and you get to a spot and you go into a dream and you wipe it all away it's like i just spent all this time going around and around the dream world map putting out these tiles and i never came across a slumber card that was an entity so all that's just going away now it was just a complete waste of time i definitely feel like the slumbers could be done better um make the slumbers purely just a way for me to you know hopefully gain some loot if i don't play well then give me some damage give me a chance to lock my progress cards give me a chance to earn my keys just make it that way um and so it's a mix um i i really don't mind them but most of the time i just race right through them i try and knock out the entity as quickly as possible getting the best loot as possible and you know i look at it as a way to either unseal cards or gain ether or things like that um but other than that i i feel like they're very fiddly and i know a lot of people just skip them for example because a lot of times it just gives you negative effects like gives you damage or works through your deck more or makes you steal cards more similar to gloomhaven um after a while my brother-in-law and i were when we were playing our gloom and command just quit with the road events and the city events um we would do city events but we just stopped with the road events because they almost always were negative uh i don't know whether we just always made bad choices or whether there was only just two negative choices on the card but it's like why am i gonna bother this is ten extra minutes when i want to be able to knock out two scenarios instead of one i'm not even gonna bother reading with this car because i'm just going to go into every scenario cursed and it's like what's the point um it wasn't fun they weren't fun they were just a burden on you and the last thing i want to talk about is this hole you come out of a dream and your discard pile stays put you don't reshuffle anything your cards stay locked in progress this is kind of a mix i like that your progress cards stay locked um i don't so much mind that your sealed card stays sealed but like what if you made it down and you worked your way out until you had one card left in your draw pile so you didn't take a wound well the very next time you do anything whether it's in a slumber or the start of a dream you're gonna have to reshuffle that deck and then you take a wound like why don't you let me reset my influence deck um draw pile things like that um this whole like dragging off but then at the same token if i am have a lot of damage and i want to just be able to resell i'll just do an awakening i'll spend my ether and you know do a shopping trip and lose all my progress cards that's fine but i'll wipe my site clean it just there could be a better balance there of you know when you come out of a dream spend your influence if you want to um keep your progress cards locked it would be so simple to have a save mechanic where you just noted turn them backwards or something that the progress cards you have locked or something like that so again um this whole like your hero board stays exactly the way it is until you store the game away and then we start the game back you get to reshuffle everything and i just i really just got mixed feelings i have no other better way to to say it all right all the out of the way um let's talk about what i love about the game and what um why i would recommend this game for anybody um real briefly let's touch on some of the stuff that i already covered these are wisdom cards i'm not gonna flip them over for spoiler reasons but these are um new ways to interact with the game that you have unlocked through going through dreams and then like rewards but um it's just new ways to interact with the dream world web interact with your dreams how to do awakenings things like that i i really like how they did this and gave you this holder for them so that these rules that come up new are always right here i really appreciate this step i also really appreciate that they gave you your dream world map tiles um to hold right there um also the turn order deck i really like how this works this is like these multi-use cards that there's only ever 12 of them and you basically just kind of shuffle this thing up and then you sit down and you turn over say there's four rounds you're going to turn over the top four cards put them face up and so not only is this keeping track this is a time limit for your game and you can kind of add to it by taking certain penalties but it's also showing you it this runs the ai and so it's showing you um what the ai is going to do and it's also the loot and so you can see do i want to take out the a iron do i want to finish the scenario right now and gain this loot or would i rather have look and see what's on the next card and so the loot changes i just really like how this is done um and i don't really get tired of you know there's three effects that you know basic effect morphing effect special effect and roll the movement die but each entity handles those things differently um so the ai i think works just fine and i really just like the way they did the turn order deck i think it works great um and it's just a perfect way to to run things the way it covers so many things um also the uh secret tiles this thing which um somebody said they actually recommend it in the rulebook that you leave it punched in i did not see that i just happened to make the decision to it would be easier to store uh this came down to a storage aspect i didn't want to have to punch all these out and then dump them out and i wasn't sure where i would have put them if i put them in a bunch of baggies because there's only so much room in the box it's so much easier to store it like this well i just keep this sitting up off to the side here where i can uh review i know where my row is and i know that the top four three or four rows are for everyone in the game and i really like it's like a little mini game as soon as i start flipping over setup tiles i'm like staring at the tile playing this mystery where do i see do i match a picture and and i enjoy that it's a fun little mini game and um you know there's awesome stuff when you do find something whatever secret you're going to read it usually gives you good things so i really like those secret tiles um another thing that is just in general really nice about this game is the artwork the artwork is very unique it's very interesting to look at um you know this is not an eyesore of a game it's a very beautiful game uh even the board is beautiful even though it's turned the wrong way and oriented in a horrible fashion the board is still beautiful it's a beautiful game so if you appreciate good artwork in a game this may be a game worth sitting down and learning just so you can kind of play through it and soak in that artwork um in the same fashion and this is probably looking down um yeah my my second to best yeah so i kind of ordered these and what i feel like is the best thing um the second best thing i love about the game is that this is a different game this is not a dungeon crawler this is not a dice chucker this is i don't really know what category to fit ether fields and other than the fact that it's a campaign game you're supposed to sit down and just kind of you keep building up your character and you keep progressing through a big narrative story it's a narrative driven campaign game but it is unlike anything i've ever played before um with the exploration style and the focus of the game and it it is just truly um unique in nature and so it is something worth experiencing um now unfortunately it's a hefty price tag and it's at the moment kickstarter only but at the moment of this filming and i believe by the time i release the video it should still be available for they open back up the pledge manager and i think anybody that wants to can go in and join and you'll have to wait for wave 2 shipping to get your base copy but there are ways to get the game and there are probably a lot of people out there who just soured on the game for whatever reason who are looking to get rid of their copy too so i don't think it's truly going to be that difficult to find uh it is just it's not a cheap game by any means it's probably like 100 price tag unless somebody's going to gouge you but this is an experience um it's more than just a board game it's almost like an experience it's the very last thing that i that kind of goes along with that that i love about the game is that each one of the dreams the little scenarios that you go into are incredibly unique in nature um and they're relatively short even though this is a lengthy campaign that is going to probably involve multiple breakdowns and setups of your board and things like that the dreams don't feel like they take forever there's a few times where i feel like i've been exploring forever and haven't gotten anywhere but the amount of physical time that i've spent in that dream is not overburdening um there were chapters in tainted grail someone right in the middle that seemed to just drag on forever and you were like milling resources so you could keep those um statues going and it just that just dragged on for multiple play sessions and you were still in the same chapter that's not the case in this one um the fact that these are attached to a larger campaign i hope that in the end that campaign is worth it as far as the narrative story that they're telling um but i just really appreciate how each of these dreams is unique and i really look forward to ooh i've gotten the keys i get to unlock a new dream and pulling out those new set of tiles and the new cards and having this secret stack of cards and it gives you this almost like completionist thing that you want to flip over all the cards you want to see what it all looks like and you know somehow sometimes when you put down a card it adds to the world but you put it down kind of cockeyed it's just very unique um very interesting um and each each dream has looked a little different um they're not all gloom and doom some of them have been brighter than others but a lot of them are nightmarish in nature um but again this is just a it's a very unique game this is more of an experience but you have to be willing to put in the time and energy to learn the game to set up the game um and then to play through the game um if you cut corners i feel like you're not going to get the same experience so if you are prepared for that much effort and you are looking for a unique narrative driven experience in a board game then i would say this is definitely the game for you if you don't appreciate reading if you don't appreciate a lot of setup if you don't like having to read a rule book through more than once this is probably not the game for you um run away now if you're waiting on your kickstarter copy find someone to buy it off your hands um but this is a beautiful game it's a unique game and i'm hoping by the end of all of this i'm going to be coming back and saying this is a game with an incredible story to tell my opinion is still out on that one um it's still very ethereal uh in my opinion and i haven't quite grasped where we're going with all this but again i'm only about a third to almost a half of the way through the main campaign so uh we will see um but that is it that is my full and honest review of ether fields uh by awaken realms if you enjoyed this video please consider giving it a thumbs up and if you'd like to be part of more videos like this in the future please consider subscribing to the channel once again thanks for watching have a great day

Channel: The Meeple Marathon

Views: 1,875

Rating: 4.9512196 out of 5

Keywords: Awaken Realms, Review, Etherfields, Board Game, Tabletop Game, Honest

Id: iFVULODjyTY

Length: 28min 9sec (1689 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 05 2021