Etherfields Review - Almost a Sleeper Hit

[Music] oh god that sucks hello and welcome welcome to a world of dreams specifically the dreams of some 32 000 kickstarter backers who pledged to make ether fields a reality ether fields is a big and colorful cooperative story game dripping with gorgeous art where one to four players will represent comprehensively unconscious adventurers and together you will explore a creepy realm of dreams and nightmares your collect items your strength and your character perhaps you will even achieve your personal character's mysterious lucid dreaming state think of it like sonic the hedgehog going supersonic except if sonic was asleep except as creative as etherfield appears like a lot of dreams i think i've seen this before you see fields is actually part of a well-trodden genre of kickstarter games there is no better way to sell your kickstarter than offering an epic experience heaving with components and there's no better way to offer more components than by offering a giant co-operative campaign this was first offered by kingdom death monster then there was seventh continent gloomhaven and the publishers of etherfield's awaken realms previously published tainted grail fall of babylon and next year they'll be kickstarting the enormous sci-fi co-op iss vanguard but here's the catch with the striking exception of gloomhaven myself and my critic friends wouldn't personally spend our money on any of the games in this genre and rather than tell you why perhaps we should just continue with this review of ether fields incidentally this is a review of the ether fields core box only i know there are loads of expansions coming awaken realms did however send us a bunch of the add-ons for etherfields available to kickstarter backers including a neoprene map which is just the board again a fifth player expansion when i wouldn't want to play this game with more than two players let alone five little storage boxes for each character that take up significantly more room than they save a box of extra miniatures that i never opened because miniatures aren't actually important in this game and an ether fields branded 52 card deck which can be incorporated into each fields via a rule that can be effortlessly abused and unbalances the campaign honestly at this point i'm not even angry at awakening realms for selling this stuff i'm angry at backers for buying it stop buying add-ons for games you haven't played your excitement for a board game peaks when you back the kickstarter that's how they get you however now i've got that little initial sprint of complaining out of the way i'm going to talk about some of the many many things in ether fields that are absolutely awesome so when the campaign starts you and your friends will appear in a dream with no idea where you are or who you are or what you're supposed to be doing it'll be many hours of play advancing through dream after dream which is basically level after level until you even figure out what your character with your personal deck does differently to the other characters it'll be many more hours after that until you figure out what your adventuring party is even supposed to be doing here all you know is that you're stuck in the realm of dreams but when i say you and your friends um while this is nominally a game for one to four players i actually agree with the community poll on board game geek that says this is the game for just two players or one player by themselves which is how i played it i can demonstrate why that is with a science chart you see the fun minutes in ether fields are spent taking your turn and unlocking new content the not fun minutes are basically everything else adding more players to etherfield simply means each player spends less time personally playing the game and everyone has to work harder to unlock new content resulting in a stodgier meaner slower adventure anyway as you stumble your way through your very first dream in ether fields you'll be introduced to the basics of the game every player has a hand of cards drawn from their private deck and then you spend those cards to do things in the dream cards can either be played for their text or to pump their coloured intent into a generic action you want to do yellow energy lets you move your character around the dream and interact with stuff that demands cunning red is how you attack things or display tenacity green is how you talk to npcs that you meet in the dream and understand and interpret all of this marvelous nonsense you're encountering credit where credit is view this game makes better use of its theme than anything i've played since i don't know the king's dilemma or too many bones it's not just that the game is evocative you know it's not just that it's overflowing with fabulous fabulous artwork or that each new dream has its own tone and feel it's not even just that ether fields introduces mechanics that you would not expect from the game i actually found one card that instructed me not to speak until the other players had resolved the thing i mean it was irrelevant because i was playing by myself and wasn't speaking anyway but it did make me think how fun that moment would be if i had had a friend here the point is that ether fields works hard to make this not feel like a generic rpg where instead of fighting a lich you're fighting a sandman and to that end the game has this marvellous sense of flimsiness let me explain the dreams themselves that you're adventuring through are full of not just puzzles and obstacles but red herrings and mazes and all of this irritating stuff that makes them quite satisfying to overcome and defeat but etherfield then gives you the empowered dreamer the tools to break these dreams cards that let you turn around and face the dream's frightening antagonist and just demolish them cards that let you escape a tedious maze by dreaming up an extra staircase or skipping a fetch quest by finding a spare jewel in your pocket my favorite moments in ether fields were stuff like entering a dark dream with special rules for darkness and monsters and riddles in the dark and then turning around and saying yeah okay dream but i've got a flashlight oh i i mean that's what i would have said if i if i was playing with anybody anyway your hugely satisfying reward each time you best one of the game's dreams [Music] get out of town is a splurge of new content into the game now as you'd expect your character gets experience points sorry sorry not experience points ether which you can spend acquiring new cars for your deck on new items but in the designer's own words this isn't just a game where you build your character's deck this is a game where you build every deck completing a dream often sees memories of that dream sort of following you out into the game's hub world sorry not hard world silly me the dream world which your characters will travel around to get to the next dream characters you met enemies you fought riddles you didn't answer doors you didn't go through all enter the game's decks of fate and flaws and the slumber city escape so to begin with exploring ether fields feels like you're poking around in a concept artist's stream but in time as you have more and more adventures and fragments of those adventures sort of follow you back out into the dream world you start to feel like you're playing around in a sort of photo book of your own memories oh yeah we didn't defeat that guy oh yeah we never went through that door here it is again and that is really neat and what's lovely about ether fields is that if you do like it there is crap loads of it at just 75 pounds for the core box plus shipping i think for some people this will be an affordable version of the arkham horror living card game both are games that see you building up your character's deck as you battle your way through spooky campaigns except where with arkham you have to buy sets of scenarios individually for 75 pounds etherfields gives you one absolutely giant adventure with the option of playing more using expansions down the line it is unquestionably better value for money i'll also say this i enjoyed my time spent playing ether fields and i am very hard to please i actually left it permanently set up on my dining table and every day i'd look forward to sitting down to play a new dream but i'm afraid we have reached the high water mark of positivity in this review because not only did i not actually finish the campaign of ether fields not only do i not want to finish it or play it anymore after a week spent playing this game i couldn't even bring myself to play it with the rules as written smith reviews board games he'll be back next week with another board game so let's talk about those rules a little bit learning to play ether fields with the manual provided in the box is an car crash because the game and what you're doing in it is only revealed slowly after the first few hours of play you have no frame of reference for what anything in this wonky manual is talking about it's only by reading the manual being confused playing the game being confused reading the manual again being confused and playing the game again that i became relatively confident that i was playing ether fields if you buy this game here's what i'd do instead first go to board game geek and read the fan made quick start tutorial then read the fan maid getting started with either fields then play the first stream then read the game's manual then well it's not that you'll entirely know how to play because the fact is ether fields isn't sure how you should play either you know how a simple card game can have a two-page manual but if you were to print out the living rules document for magic the gathering it would be the thickness of two novels that's because the more cards that are in a game the more often you're gonna find conflicts when two cards clash that's why it becomes incredibly important in a game like this for all of the rules on all of the cards to be written in very precise legalese but etherfield a game that is almost ceaselessly providing new rule new raw new rule here have a new rule the card writing is actually quite sloppy and i'll give you a glaring example this card says add a card to the turn deck but that doesn't tell you where to take a turn card from it doesn't tell you whether to add it to the top or bottom of the turn deck it doesn't tell you whether to shuffle the turn deck and these questions can be really important when you're trying to win a scenario and these questions are everywhere i get that ether fields is a game about having to try and understand dreams that should not additionally include trying to understand whatever the designers were dreaming up when they wrote each card and these situations where the game just stops and you have to try and figure out how a certain item interacts with the scenario how an enemy interacts with the car in your deck they're annoying enough if you have all of the rules to hand but all of etherfield's rules aren't just in this giant manual as you progress through the campaign and unlock extra rules and thematic richness you get extra rules that are on cards and you quickly run out of splice to store them which means you get rules scattered in all of the discard piles in all of the game i was playing i played like five dreams before i realized the dream setup cards had more text on the other side i still don't fully understand how the awakening system works how the awakening system works how the awakening system works oh oh it was all a dream but it's not just etherfield's rules that reveal it as having some sloppy usability this board this piece of cardboard is sloppier than someone holding a wine glass with all five fingers let me ask you the most fundamental question of board game boards which is where do you think you sit around this board and with the ideal answer being you can sit anywhere well with etherfield you'll notice that the board orients all the cards and tiles so the text runs left to right so you'd think you'd sit here right at the head of the table so you can read everything right way up except the actual dream which is to say the game is there i ended up sitting here as close to the dream as possible and then rotating all of the other components so they were upside down except this wasn't ideal either because then i was looking at everything sideways and nothing right way up but i could have forgiven etherfield for all of these fricative moments for all the time spent thumbing through one book or the other or googling rules for all the many occasions which etherfield sent me rummaging to collect one card from here one card from here one card from here like i'm thumbing my way through my boss's overstuffed rolodex but the real problem with etherfields is that after about the fifth or sixth dream when it introduced a whole sheet worth of extra mechanics and i was starting to get to grips with the rhythm of the campaign with what the game really was etherfield's finally revealed itself should just not be a very good game say what you want about the arkham horror living card game but it comes from a studio that understands card games the same is to a gloomhaven it's not just a great campaign it has a great gameplay loop under the hood where simply bashing a monster is a delight ether feels has just as many moving parts as those games but the parts don't fit together half as snugly either field is so extraordinarily distracting with its constant strip feeding of new content and beautiful art that it'll probably be quite a while until you realize that a lot of turns in ether fields go the same way you look at the dream and see what thing written down there is probably going to be your best bet for getting a cool reward or progressing through the dream then you look at your cards to see if you have the energy to do that if not then look at your mask then look and think about your special powers and abilities and one-shot discard items and they might let you do it if not do something else but absent from all of that thing that i just described is an interesting decision etherfields reminds me at times of how they paint you know forests and castles on the walls of children's hospitals it looks like an adventure but actually they're not fooling anyone this is a procedure admittedly this is often a fun procedure figuring out which card to spend to most efficiently glide through the dream is pretty neat but it doesn't justify pouring a ton of energy into collaborating perfectly with your teammates most dreams and ether fields you play something that's approximately efficient and that'll get you through and believe it or not this is the good half of ether fields between dreams you're going to be performing increasingly secure test laps around this hub world collecting keys that will unlock the entrance to the next dream up here but along the way as you do laps you will be having random encounters and these random encounters are rubbish um sorry they're called slumbers but basically they see you encountering a random monster or person always on the same map with all of the context removed and you're just supposed to enjoy the game's combat system i guess except it turns out that when you're playing ether fields without the carrot of new content unlocks being dangled in front of you and the stick of having to finish dreams within the time limit it is it's pretty awful i can't tell you how dull and repetitive these encounters are because yeah playing cards yourself is fun but having to run the monsters ai and having to punish yourself and seal your cards and take damage from an encounter you don't even want to be in the first place and it was probably my third 10-15 minute encounter with the same monster that i didn't even want to fight the first time where my experience with either feels like to come off the rails because i just decided i wasn't going to do this i was having an absolutely horrible time with these random encounters and so i just decided to skip them i decided i won't give myself any xp i'll give myself a random scattering of damage and i will just move on the game equivalent of mashing the forward 15 seconds button on a podcast but this seemingly inconsequential decision was like a pebble that rolled down a mountain and led to an avalanche of me not caring about anything in the entire game now let me tell you what happened next i discovered that the penalty for failing a dream one of the big exciting levels for when you fail it whether because you take too many wounds or you run out of time you simply reset the game not to the start of the dream but to the start of the hub world and every player gets a flaw in their deck which you have to remove by spending experience points so i have to travel all through the hub world again doing all those horrible encounters again and then in a game where all the fun is seeing dreams for the first time reading secrets in the secret book for the first time you have to do the entire dream again representing the loss of hours of progress let me tell you what that meant for me i didn't fail dreams in ether fields like andy bernard from the office i either won or i cheated because they were unfair that's right about eight hours into my campaign when for the first time i realized i might fail a dream i cheated until i succeeded that's right i got filthy i'd look at dice rolls that were really unlucky and decide that i'm just changing my campaign started to feature more fudging than the books of a crooked accountant working at a failing fudge factory on double fudge friday and after that my whole campaign deflated like a failed souffle i didn't care about collecting new cards or hoarding cool items because let me remind you i was never going to fail a scenario and expose myself to that kind of radioactive anti-fun and almost instantly after that i stopped caring about exploring dreams fully because i didn't need the rewards i stopped caring about taking damage because i couldn't die now i'll fully admit that in choosing to cheat at etherfield i torpedoed my own experience i started cheating at about the 10-hour mark and had lost all interest in the campaign by the 12-hour mark but if i hadn't done that i promise you i just would have stopped at the 10-hour mark because this experience had so many repulsive elements and what breaks my heart is that ether feels did not have to be this way if it had just been designed with less padding in mind i could have even seen myself recommending ether fields but as it is no so there's your review either field is a game that i started off enjoying in spite of some really poor usability because the art and ambition behind this project was just so amazing but my happiness was quickly suffocated by a couple of huge problems one the moment-to-moment card play of this game simply not being particularly exciting and two the structure of the campaign forcing you to replay those moments over and over and over again when they were barely good enough the first time this huge beautiful miniature maybe summarizes etherfields better than i can it's gorgeous obviously and miniatures like this one are what sold this kickstarter and i have absolutely no idea who she is or what she's for because i didn't get that far into the campaign and i have no desire to if you were looking for a spooktacular deck building adventure the arkham horror living card game has significantly more polish than etherfields if you're looking for a big box campaign experience we will always recommend gloomhaven or you could wait for frosthaven or if you were looking for a surreal one-player adventure it's 2020. you might well have a machine that plays video games and if so disco elysium is one of the best games to come out in recent years in any format shut up and sit down recommending a video game i must be dreaming i must be dreaming it was all a dream that was a close one huh well i'm exhausted night night everybody [Music] you're laughing could have sworn i heard laughing bloody neighbors with their christmas cheer while i sleep in the barks it definitely sounded like there was laughing

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 217,491

Rating: 4.9093428 out of 5

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Matt Lees, Tom Brewster

Id: Bm8qfrjtJbI

Length: 21min 57sec (1317 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/QuiGonJinandTonic]

Sometimes I worry that Quinns is being a little too positive in his reviews. And then I watch one like this.

[u/QuantumFeline]

Quinns getting a lot of mileage out of that cardboad box.

[u/TheGreatPiata]

I think this is a chronic problem for these massive solo/co-op games.

The primary gameplay loop becomes a bit grindy, failure means repeating a bunch of content which blunts the most interesting part of these games (discovery of new things), leading you to cheat and slowly undermine the challenge of the game.

I'm saying this as someone that loved 7th Continent and might even consider it my favourite game. This genre is full of possibilities but I don't think anyone has done it flawlessly yet (Gloomhaven I'd consider a dungeon crawler).

I'm curious how Sleeping Gods is going to fare when it launches.

[u/mrquinns]

Hi everyone! Quinns here. I just wrote and pinned this comment over on YouTube and thought y'all might find it interesting too:

"Hey all! I'd like to reply to the folks who pointed out that you can, in fact, skip Slumbers, and that there are rules for it in the manual. I also saw some people asking if I had unlocked the "Deliverance" mechanic that lets you permanently remove Slumbers from the game.

"Mea culpa: I did miss the rule about skipping encounters! I'm sure it was just one of several rules that I missed. However, on investigating my copy of the game I found that (a) only some Slumber encounters feature an option to skip them, and (b) the penalty you get for skipping combat encounters is hellacious. In the case of the first monster in the game, your deck permanently gains TWO flaw cards each time you skip it. So that's no good at all and it certainly doesn't change my review.

"As for Deliverance, I did indeed unlock this feature of the game. However, Deliverance is not the panacea that I, too, hoped it would be when I unlocked it.

"Deliverance gives you the option of fighting a lengthened, more painful battle with a creature to try and remove it from the game forever. However, this involves trying to pick the right Deliverance card from 5 options, and if you're wrong you might just make the battle harder, or, in one encounter, you permanently replace the monster encounter with an /even more powerful monster/. This happened to me. It was one of the moments that made me happy to write a review that was so negative."

[u/F-b]

I won't contribute that much but Quinns is so right in his recommendation of Disco Elysium. Even if you despise video games, it's like reading an excellent graphic novel, and it is actually one of the best RPG ever written.

[u/escheriv]

Thumbing through my boss's rolodex

Quinns's desire for an office job, and lack of experience with the reality of one, is showing through.

[u/omgitsblake]

That analogy with the art on walls in a children's hospital was so genius.

[u/mieiri]

God dammit /u/mrquinns, Disco Elysium is now OOP.

[u/PlanetaryEcologist]

Great review, even though I don't necessarily agree entirely. I think he nailed all of the positives of this game as well as a lot of the issues. As a kickstarter backer whose played about the same amount of time as Quinns but has a much more favorable overall opinion, here's how I feel about his criticisms:

1. Scaling poorly. I've only played solo and a little 2 player, but yeah it doesn't seem like more players would add much except more downtime.
2. Terrible rulebook. Mostly agreed. Everything is in there but it is laid out in such a confusing way that it makes it a terrible experience trying to use it to actually learn the game. Definitely recommend the BGG user-made guides for getting started.
3. Ambiguous rules. I think this is pretty exaggerated and haven't really had any problems figuring out how cards are supposed to work. For instance, the situation he used as a "glaring example" of an ambiguous card (Add 1 Turn) is explicitly addressed in the rules on page 10: "When the game asks you to Add 1 Turn, take the bottom card of the Turn discard pile and place it at the bottom of the Turn deck. Awaken Realms has been very active on their forum answering people's rules questions as well.
4. Terrible board. Yeah I honestly don't know what they were thinking. Like he says, everything you need is either sideways, upside down, or at the other side of the table no matter where you sit. It's so bad that people are cutting up the board to make it actually practical to use while playing.
5. Cardplay is dull. This one is pretty subjective. It's definitely less brain-burning than something like Gloomhaven, but I still think there are a lot of interesting decisions to make and it keeps me engaged. Feels a bit like a simpler version of Mage Knight.
6. Slumbers (the encounters in-between story levels) are boring and repetitive. I definitely see how if you don't enjoy the cardplay you would loathe the slumbers. Personally, I enjoy them but I do agree that they go on a bit too long and are too frequent. One thing that's worth mentioning is that at a certain point (which Quinns may not have reached depending on what order he did things) you get the ability to interact with Slumbers in a different way that imo makes them much more interesting and rewarding.
7. Death is terrible and sets you back hours. Fair, I guess, but this is kind of an issue with every campaign game. Yes, you do have to re-gather keys and replay the entire dream again, but most of the dreams are way easier and quicker the second time because half of the challenge is figuring out what you're supposed to be doing.