Etherfields Review - Off-Brand Nightmare

imagine opening a board game and finding this dear lady this bloodborne version of tom waits and this penguin i dubbed sir timothy wadlington the third why does he have a suitcase where is he going what's his deal ether fields is the next game from serial epic over promiser awakened realms they wrote such previous checks as this war of mine the board game and taint and grail the fall of avalon both of which we've reviewed in the past and i'll be honest with you i'm still waiting for those checks to clear in ether fields you'll plunge yourself into a hauntingly bizarre world of dreams thick as treacle and murky as a 6am cup of coffee and each time you wake you're just back here again like a record stuck in a surreal groove if miniatures were ever a successful pitch for a board game ether fields is it it's not just tacky plastic it's an expression of ideas and it just so happens that those ideas are a mystery so then ether fields is a box with a promise somewhere rattling inside is the key the answer to everything and so you open that box and you find [Music] there's nothing quite as intimidating and disappointing as squashed enthusiasm the very first thing you see when you open this box is hundreds and hundreds of cards all in plastic wrappers i know they're not right now that's because i unwrapped them some telling you not to open them and others offering no instructions whatsoever just a bunch of card frames with artwork that doesn't give any clue to their purpose that's where rule books come in right my box in fact had two copies of the rulebook perhaps a manufacturing error or an important of things to come gently taunting me with the idea that one rule book just might not be enough the component list is an assault on your senses and offers no guide how to unpack and store everything further pages plunge you into the quicksand of uncertainty as you try to grapple on a thin branch of cohesion that slides further and further out of reach the more you read imagine being told about concepts like fate decks floor decks turn decks streams slumbers which are not the same as dreams slum map tiles which is not the same as the slumber deck even though the slumber deck does have slumber tiles just not slumber map tiles which do sit in a deck all of these are presented with no context yet with constant reassurance that things in fact are simple and that you shouldn't worry if you don't understand ironically making me more ill at ease because none of this seems simple and all of it looks uncomfortable but afgha you might say isn't there a tutorial that does a fairly good job of explaining the rules why yes although the tutorial and the rule book coexist in a strange symbiosis where the tutorial expects that you've read the rulebook and the rulebook expects that you've played the tutorial no matter which way you slice this game it's chock full of confusion cream in one instance the rule book told me that i will always begin my game on the dream world map yet the very first time you play when you plug in the tutorial you start on the dreamscape rather than the dreamworld map directly contradicting what the rulebook told me is a hard and fast rule and reading this more and more i had the suspicion that this wasn't just incompetence from whoever wrote this manual i started to get a picture of a game that makes the rules deliberately vague because dreams you see and obviously that's just an educated guess i can't prove to you that the designers publishers developers and playtesters all thought that what this game needed was a rulebook that's as confusing as the second season of twin peaks at this stage i felt like the only reason one would have to persevere with etherfields was because you shelled out a lot of money for it all because it was your job sadly in my case it was both i know this isn't a comparison bursting with originality but the more i played ether fields the more i saw it as a take at everything that was gloomhaven but framed through this idea of wandering in an absurdist theme park etherfields is a campaign game where much like in gloomhaven the focus of each evening of play is a scenario in this case called a dream that you'll pick from a smattering that you've unlocked previously but to access that dream you'll first have to bimble around the world map in this case called the dream world frequently encountering mini town scenarios in this case called slumbers except ether fields isn't interested in offering you yet another dungeon crawler experience where you jump in swords blazing to murder goons each dream is a trundle through the vague the abstract and the surreal you'll solve puzzles you'll chase things that are or aren't there you'll step through mirrors to find yourself on the other side the objective of each stream can range from something simple like finding a person or a way out to something completely out there like confronting your inner fears that manifest itself as a gigantic birdman with a scythe this birdman would be what the game calls an entity what's interesting here is that most of the time you can't just fight the entity even if it scares the pajamas off of you the best you can do is chase it away only for it to reappear moments later and from time to time the game will offer ludicrous propositions turning a mad chase for survival into a brisk stroll in the park all you have to do to accept it is slot in a card into the slumber deck of course you don't know what that card is but you know it's not going to be good and here's the kicker unlike dreams which can be replayed but are generally one-time affairs slumbers cycle over and over again so that thing you just slotted into the deck might just be your next recurring nightmare on paper this is immediately so much more interesting than kill the monster of the day if ether fields worked as well as it sounds gloomhaven would go straight into the bin but gloomhaven isn't in the bin so look i'm not putting this game in the bin it's not some sort of a board game death match one of them doesn't have to go in the bin but if one of them had to go in the bin let's talk about ether fields mechanically instead of what do let's explore how do at the start of the campaign you'll be asked to pick a character each of them conforms to an archetype like the gambler who's keen on rerolling dice or the free spirit whose sole response to the rule book is actually i'm not sure that's true each character starts the game with a deck of influence cards each turn you'll draw a number of cards and spend them to generate one or more of the game's resources awareness cunning and wrath in addition to the basic functions such as cunning letting you move awareness letting you contact things and wrath letting you assault things you'll also spend them to trigger events on the dreamscape map for example you might find yourself near some mystical floorboards and the map title is telling me that to investigate those mystical floorboards i would have to spend two wrath per player so i spend four raf in a two player game and then i reach for the book of textual paragraphs and read the prompt indicated on the map tile it turns out that i am in school and i'm not wearing any pants i try to run and we all know what happens next i get one distress distress is one of the things that kills you collect eight and you're dead each time you run out of cards you can reshuffle your deck but you once again either have to take a distress or seal away cards which are now no longer part of your deck run out of cards once again you're dead finally each dream or slumber will tell you how many turns you have left and if you run out of those then the dream or slumber ends but not in a good way let me be frank this system is okay most turns i'll be somewhere and then i'll either have the exact right cards to investigate the prompt in front of me or i won't in which case i'll either go somewhere where i do have the right cards to investigate or i'll simply discard the ones that i don't want keep the ones that i think are useful and then hope that next turn i'll get luckier spicing things up are cards i can place meaning they're no longer circulating in my hand slash deck slash discard pile but instead sit in front of me and provide me with a unique ability like being able to move via diagonals saving me a lot of time but to place this card i have to spend resources and if i haven't drawn those resources in my hand i can either just ignore it making the ability pointless or once again discard the resources i don't want and once again hope that next turn i will get lucky but wait you can get experience points or ether the only indication i've encountered as to why this game is called etherfields making it basically experience fields on your trundles in the dreamworld map you can stumble into shops where you can draw cards from a massive deck of new cards and then buy them for ether each card you purchase you can then add into your deck and that's great we're achieving the basic criteria for a deck builder but i think that we can all agree that what we want from a deck builder is new cards that are interesting and these are just not each new ability offered on new influence cards felt circumstantial like something i'd want to do if i drew it at the right time on the right day if i turned right in the right scenario so naturally purchasing these felt wrong i still did it because what else do you do with ether but i didn't want to on the upshot you do get a campaign game that you can plug any of your friends into midway with a new character or even swap your character yourself meaning that most streams could theoretically be completed with a character fresh out of the box but unlike gloomhaven where all of that is also very much possible there is no scaling so any rewards you get can't be too good because then you'll be too good at the game and that's just too much fun for you to handle this might sound like critique but honestly it isn't i've long believed that these campaign boxes have to lean one way hard either be crunchy mechanical delights with a sprinkling of narrative like gloomhaven or be light and feathery in rules to make room for storytelling like forgotten waters the joy of etherfields is discovering the puzzle behind each stream going around different places and poking the button with your finger to see what story biscuit it throws up if there was a crunchy system getting in the way of that this game would be as pleasant as eating lard the problem is that the quality of the writing and the narrative isn't much of a counterweight to all these fluffy rules some dreams are interesting poignant and funny if a little bit too self-indulgent with on the nose analogies the border on the edge of cynicism and some dreams i just crap and some of the text is also just crap i'll obviously be put in board game jail if i spoil anything so let me summarize condense and paraphrase to give you an idea of what kind of narrative you might encounter oh look it's a turtle that's not a turtle that's a bottle of ketchup don't worry it's okay cause you're in a dream or are you on and on and on etherevilles likes to challenge your assumptions about yourself asking you whether there's something you want it's just an opportunity for this game to trick you and say actually that's not something you want at all the modus operandi here is to tell you hey look at this go do this and then you go do it and it turns out it's something entirely different because dreams and if you're particularly unlucky there'll be a very circular puzzle that'll make you repeat yourself over and over and over and over again i like pulling the rug from under people just as much as the next person heck i like pulling the rug so much i have half a mind to tell you that ether fields is a game of the year and then be like psych and i think you can tell what the problem is this stuff's cute for a while but keep doing it and it gets stale i remember reading on the original kickstarter campaign page that etherfields is a game that will test your emotional intelligence and i thought huh that's a bold claim for a game with these miniatures but you know what they say you can't judge a boob by its cover now that i finally played ether fields i think i understand what it meant early on in the game you'll encounter a scenario where you get attacked by and you have the option to either kill the or try to not kill the and i think that's what passes for emotional intelligence here although if you ask me it's less of a test of emotional intelligence and more just a test to see whether you're accidentally a psychopath because who in their right minds would murder remember when i said that i have a suspicion that the rule book is deliberately vague well that paints a picture of this game as a whole there are a lot of ideas here and it feels like the people who had these ideas thought that they were very cool but i kind of wish that there was a person in the development team whose job it was to just say no to all of this stuff like 50 of the time etherfields is an indulgence but instead of being an indulgence by you the person who shelled out a pretty penny for all these cards or maybe even miniatures and accessories it ends up being an indulgence by the designers and publishers and you're the one who's paying for it a lot has been said about the ether fields board most of the action takes place on the dream scale and if i sit at the head of the table then i'll see everything upside down and i can't turn these tiles around because each space has special notation to tell you where to place new tiles if i sit sideways which is where i am right now again i would have to see everything sideways and if i sat at the front of the board which is how i'm intended to sit then i wouldn't be sitting i would be standing and casting a very tired shadow so that's obviously a problem because the awakened realms team put their game so far away from me that the only thing they've awoken is my anger but what really gets to me isn't just that they chose not to make this board modular just so they could sell enough playmat is that they had to print so many of these tile cards to sell their game on kickstarter they need all the content and of course half of the extremes are mediocre nonsense and if they just spend their time concentrating on the good ones we could have had a tremendous game but because they had to print so many of them and if it's so many in the box they're really small and it's very hard to make out the details on them if i tried to sit at a table and play this with friends even if this board was modular i could slice this bit off there would be no place to place it on the table where everyone could see clearly what was going on in fact there's no good space to place anything because this board is gigantic these player boards are gigantic this book of text paragraphs is gigantic these two rule books which i buy now need both of them are also gigantic and because most of the game is held in this mystical pile of cards this box is also gigantic and this is just me trying to play the game by myself and i can't even fit it onto the table could these two giant piles of cards have had their own separate trays so they wouldn't have to sit in the box yes should they have had their own separate tray so they wouldn't have to sit in the box yes awaken realms have built up this image around themselves of selling a premium product but the thing about premium products is not that they're pretty because that's just vanity it's that they are comfortable to use and i've seen more comfort in a festival tent i feel like i wasn't sold a game i was sold a statistical compromise where the driving decision was to fulfill promises listed on the kickstarter campaign and grand visions powered by hubris and finally player experience a distant third if you need more proof let's take another look at slumbers remember i mentioned that your decisions during dreams will change the composition of your slumber deck slumbers being the many encounters you face before the actual dream well that's a really neat idea you know what isn't the slumbers themselves every time you want to play a dream you will take out all available dreams from this envelope and select one and then that will tell you where you need to go on the dream world map except first enter any dream you will also need keys and one of the ways of getting keys are certain spots on the dream world map so you will complete multiple revolutions trundling around except half the spots you stop on you need to complete a slumber and slumbers are not like dreams they're not puzzles you have to solve they're just a tedious slog padding to fill out the playing time turns out some slumbers you can forego all together because hidden at the bottom of these entity cards is this little bit that says skip and hidden in the rulebook there's also a section on skipping slumbers a fact i found out only after i finished my time with etherfields through the happenstance of conversing with another reviewer who also only found out that that's a rule in the game when someone pointed it out to him in the comments section of his review so i don't know what's worse here the fact that the rules in this game are so hidden that two professional board game reviewers couldn't spot it or that awakened realms knows that slumbers are so tedious that they had to work in an extra rule so that players could skip parts of their game altogether i think what disappoints me most is that under all this box checking clutter i kind of see that vision i see what they were getting at and so many of the ideas in ether fields are great they're just buried under a heap so deep that you couldn't even get to it if you house ruled yourself a shovel but the worst part is that whilst i was playing ether fields i couldn't shake the feeling that i've already seen all of this before that i've already explored all these ideas and then i remembered i have coleman odds is a game we reviewed two years ago and not only is it half the cost but it's like a quarter of the rules and with a much better story and sure it had a whole set of its own problems like a core system that meant you could spend like half your turns doing nothing but the narrative payoff was miles beyond anything i've seen in ether fields and frankly anything i've seen in most board games i wanted to love this game but when it exists in a cheaper leaner better form i just don't know why i would etherfields is the story of the boy who cried cake he had cake he ate it and then he told everyone he had a lot of cake and then when you bought the cake the boy gave you an advert called a free gift as if he was bestowing a massive boon upon you but it was just the promise of another cake that you could fund and thus the cycle of kickstarter continues because they produce one of these games a year and no matter how many people they have working on it it's just not enough time to make it good this video is sponsored by skillshare the online learning community that offers thousands of classes on various subjects skillshare is your opportunity to spruce up your knowledge and level up in illustration music videography writing or interior decoration or even board game design it's the jumping off point for your new hobby project or just plain curiosity one of the things i've always been absolutely terrible at is organization thankfully on skillshare i found a tutorial by thomas frank called real productivity habits that last that taught me a lot about managing my projects and not over obsessing with perfectionism and look at me now this video is only three days late and best of all on skillshare there are no adverts and no limits so you can explore your creativity to your heart's content and learn as much as you like and with an annual membership skillshare is less than 10 a month the first 1000 of our subscribers to click the link in the description and get a trial of skillshare premium membership

Channel: No Pun Included

Views: 41,017

Rating: 4.7073169 out of 5

Keywords: no pun included, board game, review, npi, boardgames, boardgamegeeks, brettspiel, brettspiele, jeuxdesociete, tabletop, games, juego de mesa, gamenight, 2020, awaken realms, gamefound, kickstarter, etherfields, campaign

Id: mrI77_q7uYA

Length: 22min 59sec (1379 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/hmmpainter]

I think a new genre of board gaming is emerging. I call it experience gaming, for lack of a better term. It's a product, that uses the framework of a board game to loosely connect a bunch of stuff into a kind of exploration through a particular vision. It's like me buying rpg source books i know I will never play with anyone and just enjoy perusing instead. Etherfields strikes me the same way. It's a bunch of content that interacts together if you want it to, but many of us may just want to paint the miniatures, play parts of the game, or just look through the artwork. Being a balanced cohesive game is almost besides the point. I'm fine with it. Etherfields is definitely not my bag, but if it were, I'd be hyped about all the shit that comes in the box, regardless of how it actually plays.

[u/bondafong]

I love Tainted Grail as a Solo experience. Like an alternative to a book or a computer rpg game. It got me into painting again as well.

On a side note, some people think these games are for people that don’t like other type of board games. But for me it just fills a very different hole. On my top ten are ‘normal’ games such as Terraforming Mars and Rising Sun/Blood Rage.

But Tainted Grail is also on there, but I would NEVER play it 3 or 4 ppl. Each game in my collection have its purpose, and TG’s purpose is relaxation by myself without a computer.

I wasn’t into Etherfield because of the theme, ut I’m All-In on ISS Vanguard as well.

[u/EccentricOwl]

Loved this review. I’m away game for NPI to discuss something I was interested in. I backed Ankh and whether they like it or not I want to hear their thoughts on it, especially after seeing all these Kickstarter reviews.

It’s not about justifying their purchase; I have disagreed with NPI in the past. But a good review always tells me WHO I want to play a game with.

For example, do I want to play Rising Sun with my Eurogame friends? NO. Do I want to play Sprawolopilis with them? Maybe! Do I want to play Project Elite with them? Also, weirdly, maybe yes!

Love this sort of video.

[u/DuckDrunkLove]

But games like this, Horizon Zero Dawn and ISS Vanguard will still pull in a few million dollars on Kickstarter. I guess if people keep paying for these games, they have no reason to not just churn out this stuff.

I am so. damn. glad. that I hate minis.

There's a lot of different things that will draw me to a board game and make me overlook issues with a game because it has a thing I like. But if minis was one of those things, I would be fucking broke.

Efka seemed really bummed out in this review. Not sure if it's because he had high expectations for this, or if he's just kinda sick of these bloated Kickstarter games.

[u/TheAerouge]

This review (and the one by SUSD) combined with the thoughts of the King of Average AND the Man vs. Meeple disclaimer that it took 3 hours to teach the basics of ISS Vanguard finally convinced me to not back the next AR Kickstarter. Sure the people voting their games a 10 ahead of delivery boost their charts on BGG but I am with Efka on this one. Nearly all of their games (while not bad) could have needed a few extra months in the designroom.

Shigeru Miyamoto: A rushed game is forever bad

[u/tgcleric]

Only thing I will say is that they have different teams and designers on these games - its not that they are making them one a year. ISS Vanguard for example is gonna be about 3 years in development since Tainted Grail (same writer/team etc)

I ended up enjoying Tainted Grail for a few hours, and then fell off it hard. Lovely miniatures to paint, and the initial experience made it worth my while (especially Solo in quarantine)

That said, I really like Etherfields. A lot. I don't know if its an eastern European thing, but Portal Games, Awaken Realms reminds me of the world of Stalker/Metro and CDPR (YIKES CYBERPUNK) Its a certain rough around the edges, ambitious, but weirdly grounded and unique style.

I do get tired of the Kickstarter rants though. Like, yes there are problems with kickstarter games. But there are also problems with the dozens of polished to a dull marble, designed by committee, placed into the same generic theme, dime a dozen euros that come out not on kickstarter. Take any publisher, Queen Games, Czech, Fantasy Flight, Renegade, etc, and you will find more of there games miss than hit.

They may have refined rules, but they are generic and boring.

Kickstarter games often have gorgeous productions with unique art and interesting ideas, but rough around the edges.

Its always special when games from either production pipelines hit all the marks. Some of my favorites game I've ever played, and still play, not only were made on kickstarter but could have ONLY happed on kickstarter.

[u/ShelfClutter]

Havent backed a single AR game yet, they seem to be great at making minis, artwork, and hype... but the games always seemed over-ambitious and tedious without enough refinement. Both tainted grail and etherfields seem to prove that concern.
I am feeling more confident with ISS Vanguard but its hard to pull the trigger with their track record.

[u/sluffmo]

All they had to do to make this game more fun was to:

Have permanent items to unlock dreams (Need a blue key that you keep instead of 2 keys you lose).

Instead of making slumbers a constant thing make them things that pop up on the board or get added to the fate deck for failing a dream or something and they block your path.

Combine the fate and slumber deck and convert the entity battles into optional challenges (Pay X to skip, fight and remove the card forever, etc etc)

This game is fun to play, but the problem is the slog between fun parts and it grows as the game goes on. If this were a video game where it didn't take up a ton of table space and require constant pausing it would have been even better. So, maybe an optional app would have been good as well.

[u/lesslucid]

Theory: any game that has been playtested to completion 200 times or so in development will have had all the major problems ironed out. Doesn't guarantee it'll be good, doesn't guarantee you'll like it, but big, glaring issues will have rubbed against the delicate sensitivities of the playtesters enough that they will have come up with suggested changes and improvements. The worst problems are basically guaranteed not to survive this process.

If you design a game like Fuji Flush or Medici, those 200 games can probably completed by a dedicated team in less than a month, maybe quite a bit less.

If you design a massive campaign game with multiple interlocking systems and scenarios that affect the capabilities you will have in other scenarios etc, there's basically no economically feasible way to "play a complete game" 200 times. I guess maybe you could write a computerised simulation of your game? Realistically, though, you're just going to do way fewer playtests of a game that probably could benefit from more because the greater complexity creates greater potential for unexpected issues.

Complex computer games deal with this via Early Access and multiple iterations of patches and collecting feedback. Hearts of Iron 4 is vastly changed from the game it was first released as, for example. But boardgames... well, thinking about it, it makes me wonder how Gloomhaven managed to turn out so well. Maybe the designer is some kind of singular genius? I guess we'll know more once Frosthaven arrives...