by JomJom

Warning: this article is 8000 words long. Estimated reading time: 40min.
Sections (so you may use ctrl-F):
- Introduction
- First: A Small Overview of the Game
- Critique and Response
- A game with Ambition
- How Does This Ambition Work Out?
- Gameplay Mechanisms
- The Game Rules
- Imagination, Exploration & Fantasy
- Power Creep by Design
- Campaign Expansions
- The Final Verdict

Note:
All text examples mentioned in this review are fictional, to prevent spoilers


My Etherfields content: the core box, the miniatures expansion and 4 extra campaigns (in 3 boxes)

Introduction
Etherfields released about approximately four years ago. The game was one of my first experiences with board game crowdfunding, and I remember well how much hype I felt in anticipation of its arrival at my house. I was very excited about the pictures on the website, and hoped very much that the game could live up to these expectations. All that beautiful artwork, with those unique player powers!

A few days before the delivery of my copy, reviews started to appear online, and I was disappointed to read that many of them were slightly negative about the game. Nevertheless, I teamed up with a friend and we started the adventure. About half a year ago, we finished the last of the six campaigns. In hindsight, I think that those early reviews do not give a complete overview of the game experience, and this is why I am writing this article.

My verdict: Etherfields is not a good game, but it can still be an amazing experience - if you're open for it.

My credentials for having an opinion on this: my game collection is the size of about 24 Standard Kallax Units, and I played all content of Etherfields, except for the Kittenburg stuff and the 5th player Reaper Extension. I played campaigns 1 and 2 (the longest ones) with two players, campaign 3 with 3 players and campaigns 4, 5 and 6 with four players.


First: a small overview of the game
Etherfields describes itself as a 'dream crawler', which is a very vague term. It is a cooperative adventure that consists of multiple quests. The game has an overworld, where you move as a group from place to place and where you can do some shopping and encounter random strangers on the road. From this world map, your team can embark on specific missions. If you start a mission, you are placed together on a new map, each player with their own miniature. Usually one session of play (a few hours) has you start on the overworld, do a bit of movement and preparations, and then you complete one mission.

At the start of the mission you read a briefing in the Big Book Of Stories that explains where you are and what you see. You are given a description of what you need to do, and then you're free to explore. The mission is almost never straightforward like 'kill all enemies' or 'reach the exit', but more like 'We know that there is an octopus in disguise at this gas station. Find it and retrieve its ink.' Or 'Three giants are throwing rocks at each other and a fox in a tailcoat oversees that while smoking a cigar under a lantern'.

During the game, you have a hand of cards and you can decide to use those for their basic values, or you can use the unique text on each card for a special effect, which can be something like 'ignoring damage' or 'moving diagonally on the map'. There are also cards that you can play that give you permanent abilities. Finishing the mission is usually a matter of smart card play, understanding hints in the stories/artwork, solving puzzles together and a bit of luck. You fail the mission of you run out of health, time or cards.


A mysterious card early in the game. What could it mean?

Critique and Response
The developer studio of Etherfields, Awaken Realms, released Etherfields in two waves of content. The reviews of the game appeared after wave 1 was shipped, so they had an opportunity to respond to the critics with wave 2.

Game reviews
My impression is that reviewers of this game were mildly negative in general. The consensus seems to be that the concept of the game has interesting potential, but that the execution has a bunch of mistakes. The game is reviewed to be unpolished: what could be an imaginative and living world is dragged down by repetitive and uninteresting encounters, too many inconsistencies in the rules and a crappy rulebook.

There are also some minor complaints that seem nitpicky but illustrate the problems of the game well: the play map is located in landscape mode on a portrait board, or: if you place the board in horizontally on your table, you look at the artwork from the side. Some people cut their gameboard in two, to compensate for this. Also, the base game comes with a beautiful and inspiring miniature for the boss, but this mini is only used at the very end, and is even then a bit underwhelming. It just seems as if the developers of the game were more busy with selling the game than quality control.

Developer response
The response of Awaken Realms was to acknowledge the reviewers' comments and to implement numerous changes to the game, trying to improve the game. Wave 2 of Etherfields came with a new and revised rulebook and world map, and the boss miniatures of campaigns 3-6 were used much more often during the game, before if would come down to the final encounter. Awaken Realms was keen to show that they take the criticism seriously and that they are committed to delivering an amazing game to the backers. Unfortunately, I've not seen any of the original game reviewers responding to the new changes. I would be curious to know what they think of these efforts.


The simplified gameworld map. Basically: there are locations connected with arrows, and random event cards in between.

My opinion of reviews
And my response to the reviews?
My opinion of these criticisms is that they are completely valid, but that does NOT have to stand in the way of your enjoyment of the game. People who focus on the positive aspects of the game instead of the negative can find that Etherfields still has a lot to offer.
So let's talk about it: what is it like to actually play Etherfields?

A game with ambition
It appears to me that the goal of Etherfields as a project was to create a game that would transcend the limitations of traditional board games. The game is supposed to create an immersive world that can suck players in with strong and original storytelling and artwork and card effects that help to evoke players' fantasy to make everything come alive.


The core box is filled with miniatures, booklets, cards, tiles and a bunch of chits. A big box, filled with content and ambitions!

From a mechanical point, the game certainly tries to innovate on some of the well known principles of board games, and clearly wants to be more than 'playing hand cards, moving figures on a map and reading texts'. Sometimes you use the components to do stuff like leaving the game map, using art on the game box, stacking tokens on top of each other or being forced to speak without using the letter 'i' (examples are fictional).

The artistic design of the game also tries to break away from time-tested principles in fantasy that everyone has heard before. If you would fight with a troll on a bridge in another game, in Etherfields the same guard could be a ninja frog who would only let you pass if you clean the bridge of debris during the battle. A mission to defend a fortress against a goblin attack could translate to one where you defend a pillow fort against vacuum cleaning robots.

I believe that each dream was designed by different people, both the content and the artwork (don't know it for sure though). Every dream
is different and many of them introduce some kind of unique gameplay element that you need in order to solve the mission. You also see a different art style in every dream, to make sure that every play session is different and every adventure is unique.

How does this ambition work out?
As explained in the previous paragraph, the game sets the bar quite high for itself. But does the game meet its own expectations? The short answer is: partially. The long answer follows below.

Unique storytelling
The game endeavours to tell a big and grandiose story, with this big overworld and all the adventures that you experience within it. The idea is something like "you wake up in dreamland and don't know how you got here or why" and during the campaign you slowly figure out that you are special forces on some specific mission. This is actually not an original start to a story at all. But: the campaign can unfold itself in many different ways after such a beginning, so anything can still happen.

But regrettably: the story doesn't actually become that clear during the campaign. Partly, this is due to vagueness of the theme ('dreaming dreams within the dreamy dreamworld and then influencing those dreams for unknown reasons - where does reality end and where do dreams begin?'), and in part it is because the majority of playtime you focus on your specific mission of today. The moments when you start and end a play session, you get some information about the big story but it is difficult to connect everything if the bits of information are separated by a week in between scheduled plays. It is also difficult to focus on the abstract dreamy overworld story when there are so many concrete things to consider: the missions themselves.


Four enemy miniatures, which may be used for a bunch of different encounters.

The dreams that you play in the game are colourful and lively, and it is a joy to explore them. Whenever you are figuring out how you can approach a specific quest, it is easy to forget everything from the story and the previous missions that you did. Although there are sparse connections between them. Think about something like: 'if you have all three special items that you could collect in the previous mission together, you can open this special door'. And some of the entities that you meet in dreams find their way to the overworld, where you can meet them again - and they remember whether you treated them well or not. Also, there are some revelations on meta-level that you can find during the campaign, which are cool to discover.

Sometimes you have to return to a mission that you've done before. Either because you failed the mission the first time (I believe that occurred twice to me in all the campaigns), but there are also a few moments when the game instructs you to find an alternate exit in a previous mission, or to pick something up that you didn't do before. These moments are also a bit dull. In this big fantasy world with all kinds of fantastical creatures, you play the game to explore new things, not revisit old experiences. I have to note: there are exceptions, when the return dream is really different from the original one. But in general: the game focuses much on exploration, and then it is weird when you are instructed to go back to a place you've seen before.

So, there are some links between the missions and the main story. But still: the feeling remains that the missions are a bit disconnected from the main story, so the campaign feels more like a set of distinct adventures covered in dreamy sauce than a cohesive campaign. And it's usually not exciting when you must do a mission again.

The later campaigns improve on this, by the way. Campaigns 3 to 6 are much shorter than campaign 1 (and 2), which makes it easier to remember the campaign story. They also do something else well: they introduce the antagonist of the team early in the campaign. Since these miniatures and figures are very easily rememberable, it makes it easier for the players to make sense of all the vagueness in the world. "Remember that last week we saw that creepy figure which wouldn't let us pass if we didn't offer something that could contain soup? And now we see this musketeer who is very sick and could use something as a remedy - maybe those figures are related?"

But in those later campaigns, the story still remained a bit superficial (at least for my group). We had a much better understanding of what was happening in the story, but our decisions were still based on simple considerations like "we chose to be on the team of the machine gun polar bears and we're sticking to that decision" or "damn this fruit juice salesman, he screws us over all the time".

Unique game rules
I also mentioned that the game is ambitious in breaking boundaries with the game mechanics. From time to time, the game shows very original ideas on how to approach a board game, and the developers clearly had some brainstorm sessions about 'creative things to do within the Etherfields rules system'. Fictional examples: matching artwork on different cards for unique rewards, moving figures on the overworld map that influence the state of the specific mission, or relocating and spinning one card on a map to simulate a floating raft.

Many dreams have unique rules. Sometimes they are something small, like 'a green cross resembles an oil spill which you cannot traverse'. Sometimes the unique rules are big, where the big enemies have special movement rules or where the push of a button will have all objective markers slide towards the east until they meet a wall. At these times, you really need to study those with the group and talk about what they do before you set out on the mission. And even during the mission, you can still have remembered the rules differently than other group members, so you have to go back to the cards with the rules to study these again. This does slow down the experience, because you're encouraged to plan your actions ahead for a bit before you do anything.

Sometimes the special rules of the mission form a challenge that you need to overcome as a group, such as getting your enemy to stand on a specific place and then opening the trap door underneath it. It can be a puzzle to find out the most efficient way to do this, in which case you find yourself and the rest of the group staring at the map board. If one player then 'solves' the puzzle and explains it to the rest of the group, the complicated part is over and you 'just need to execute it'. For some people it can be off-putting if one player can solve a puzzle on behalf of the entire group. If this is you: be warned.

Despite the unique mission rules, the core game system is the same throughout the entire campaign. And many missions in the game have the same start: look at the map and make a list of all the things that you could do here. "I see a lever that somebody can pull, there is also an old man who sells cheese and we can talk to him, and there are rat people playing poker in the corner, we can join their game. Okay, who is going to do which task?" It does not matter how many unique rules the game provides you with, if you as players end up doing the same thing over and over: making a shopping list of available tasks and then checking off everything.


At the start of a mission, you can count all possible interactions to try out.

The quality of the unique rules of each dream does also vary. Some dreams invite the players to explore stuff and make educated guesses on what to do, and others are just a load of work that needs to be done. In some missions, the challenge is to figure out how to move all players over the map with special movement rules and to make sure that everybody reaches the end safely, which is cool. But there are also missions that are like: "Here are 50 locations that you can try to find the treasure. Now go dig everywhere and have fun." Note: I had less fun in those missions.

summary
So, summarizing my thoughts about the ambitions of the game: it is clear that the developers wanted to create an unprecedented board game experience. There are moments when the game is indeed novel and surprising, but there are also times when those fresh ideas just don't work out well. And where the goal was to create a big unparalleled fantastical story in the dreamworld, the campaigns are more 'collections of individual stories' than 'one big epic campaign'.


Gameplay Mechanisms
Let's also discuss the core mechanics of the game, regardless of how ambitious the developers are. How does it work out? The system is essentially quite simple:
* players draw cards and play as much of them as they want to
* monster turn
* repeat
I'll start the analysis with discussing how well the monster rules work, and then focus on the player rules. First, the player cards and deckbuilding, progress cards, flaws, masks, items and Lucid Cards.

Monster rules
Monsters can do three different unique actions (and move). These actions are described on its overview card, as well as additional special rules. Every monster really feels unique and characteristic because of this. Some monsters may dig tunnels towards a specific target player, others could be invulnerable unless attacked by weapon cards with animals on them. The monster actions are quick and easy, and that leaves players with much room to think about their own actions, which is fun.

What the monsters are going to do is announced at the start of the round by a random turn card. There are enough of these cards to make sure that the monster behaviour is unpredictable. So players can freely discuss where everybody sh

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