Earthborne Rangers is a cooperative exploration game for 1-4 players: it uses a deck-advancement as a main mechanism (see more discussion below). I was super excited to get my copy, as Earthborne Rangers made the #7 position of my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2022! This game was on Kickstarter back in August 2021 and promised delivery in July 2022. It delivered to my house in late October 2023, so that makes it a year and a few months late. Interestingly, this game has a different reason for being late than most Kickstarters …
To quote the Kickstarter page:
Earthborne Rangers: A sustainably produced customizable, cooperative card game set in the wilderness of the far future for 1 – 4 players.
You’ll notice the game has no plastic! It’s all paper! One of the loftier goals of the Kickstarter was to try to make a game locally, using sustainable components (i.e., all paper, no plastic). The Kickstarter was very good at keeping the backers up-to-date, but they struggled to find manufacturing that was both local and purely sustainable. A few compromises were made (see the Kickstarter updates), so that contributed to the lateness of delivery. This is one of the few “really late” games I think I can forgive because they encountered “unique” manufacturing problems.
As you can see by the back of the box, the game looks gorgeous! It looks like they did a pretty good job!
Before We Begin
Before we begin, we just want to say: we like this game. We are saying that because there is a rocky road ahead! We will have to get grumpy at a few things in the game! We will have to give warnings and helpful tips to keep you on-track, and they might even sound bad. We are trying to help you navigate around the game so you can get the best experience! There are just enough things that could derail you from wanting to play, but with a little forewarning, you can avoid the pitfalls. So, be on the lookout for our warnings and helpful hints! Remember, we like this game!
Basic Unboxing and a Warning!
The Kickstarter version comes with an extra box (more cards to make the deck-building have more choices) and a VERY IMPORTANT envelope!
The envelope contains some components that (ahem) either were missing or were printed wrong. Make sure you get this envelope if you get the game new! (I suspect this will be fixed if they do a second printing).
Basically, the cardholder from the base box (all cardboard, no plastic) is missing several sheets and the punchouts from the base box are misprinted. Really, the punchout misprint is just that they don’t have 3s on the other side: you could probably work with the base, but you might run out of counters. (You can also just punch it out to have more tokens).
A bigger problem is that you really need the cardholder: this game is all about the cards!
Base box components on the left, envelope contents on the right.
Honestly, building the little card holder was kind of fun.
But let’s look inside the main box now!!
The main box contains mostly cards (540 according to the back of the box), a Campaign Box, a Rulebook, tokens, and a Valley Map.
The Valley Guide (above) is a campaign/scenario book. There is a little bit of a “storybook” vibe going on here as the scenario book has text to read and decisions to make. See below for a snapshot of a page within the “Lure of the Valley” book.
In case you were worried there might not be enough content, the scenario book is 56 pages long! And the font is tiny, so there’s quite of bit of text.
The rulebook is a big of a monster at 48 pages. We’ll discuss both of these books more below.
The map shows the valley you are exploring! You will need this to figure out what terrains you will be traversing, what places are important, and where do you want to go! This map is quite important to the ongoing game.
But of course, the showpiece of this game are the cards. They are gorgeous! I love the art!
Overall, this game looks like it was worth the wait! Just make sure you get the envelope if you get the game new!
Uncarding and a STRONG Warning!
One of first things I do when I get a game is to find the Components page (see below: page 6) and try to correlate all of the components to their picture. In this case, it was mostly cards.
Many games aren’t labelled well (like this one *cough*), so you have kind of “immerse” yourself in the components to get a sense of the game/components/labelling. The picture that comes on page 6 seems great! … but seems is the important word!!! GIANT WARNING COMING!
I initially tried to match the cards exactly to the picture on the components page: Warning!! BE VERY CAREFUL! The Components page really doesn’t note that cards are grouped by “sets”, and as you go through trying to correlate the components picture to the cards, you may lose track of cards and what sets they belong to!
For example, notice the Traveller cards above have both Gear and Moments cards in them (see above), but if you tried to sort the cards by Moment cards and Gear cards (as implied by the Components page), you’d really mess up your decks! Keep the sets together! In this case, keep all the Traveller cards together.
Similarly, the role cards seem belong together according to the Components page. . Nope! Each role should stay in in respective Specialty deck (Explorer, Shaper, etc).
Don’t let the Components page fool you. Try to keep the decks sorted by the set (labelled on the left side of the card). I was very grumpy when I realized that although the Components page is “technically” correct in how it counts cards, but it’s NOT how you will store or play with cards.
The Card Dividers are probably a better way to help you uncard your game. Try to use those (as they are labelled in the appropriate sets), and just use Components page as a guide to what the “kinds” of cards are contained within the game. I’ve never had an uncarding make me so grumpy.
Rulebook and a Helpful Tip!
This is a good rulebook generally. I think it could have done better in a few places, but generally it was good.
The game gets an A- on The Chair Test, it flops over the edges a little, so it almost got a B+, but the font is huge! The sections are well-labelled and colorful ! I could easily see the rules next to me as I was playing, and it was easy to page through: solid A-.
I don’t normally talk too much about the Introduction, but it was pretty heartfelt. It gave me a strong sense of “Hey, these folk really like exploration” and gave me a sense of confidence that maybe they would get exploration right in the game!
This game has both a good Table of Contents (sections in order they appear) and an Index (keywords sorted in alphabetical order with a reference to a page number). Thank you! The Index saved me from searching the rulebook a number of times. See picture below.
The font is big, the sections are well-laid out, and there seem to be a lot of pictures.
There’s even a few good, BIG examples that helped me get through a couple of rules.
My biggest complaint is that Card Anatomy cards didn’t come until halfway through the rules! (Right where the staple is! When you read a lot of rulebooks, you tend to notice stupid things like where the staple is). I wish this picture had been further up, maybe right after or before the Components! This page, once I found it, helped me understand a lot more of the game! Helpful Tip! Find the Card Anatomy pages (24 and 25) to help you understand the rules!
The rulebook does a lot of stuff right, but it looks more dauntingly long (48 pages). At page 33, however, the rules end the “detailed card explanations happen” … so the rules aren’t THAT long. Well, I guess 33 pages of rules is still pretty long.
And the rules end with a nice reference on the back.
Seriously, this is a good rulebook: I would call it great except for the problems with the Components page (see previous section on Uncarding) and having the Card Anatomy later in the rulebook. But, the big font, the great layout, the clean pictures, the well-chosen colors, the decent examples, the good Table of Contents, and great Index make this is a good rulebook.
It is a big long. It might take a you a while to read it. And you need to read the rules. Really.
The Prologue: A Missed Opportunity and a Helpful Tip
Earthborne Rangers includes a Prologue for first play at the start of the Scenario Book. See above.
Unfortunately, there were a lot of problems with it. First, the prologue still requires you to read the entire rulebook … wait, what? I loved how Tamashii (see our review from a few weeks ago) stepped your through the rules as you played: you didn’t have to read the rules all at once … the Prologue sort of “guided” you through the rules. Nope, not Earthborne Ranger. You still have to read all the rules before you play the Prologue!
Secondly, the font for the Scenario book (where the Prologue resides) was way too too small! It was so hard to read and follow the directions of Prologue! And this was after the rulebook was so readable with a big font! I really struggled reading this tiny font! I don’t mind this tiny font for the Scenario book “story parts”: you read the story parts once out loud to people. But a tiny font is terrible for rules: you have to set down the rulebook pick it up, lose your place, reference the rules again. That tiny font made me very grumpy: please don’t use tiny fonts for rules!
Third, the gameplay in the Prologue was poorly described and documented. Many times, it was unclear where you were within a turn (“Wait, did I Refresh? Was I supposed to Travel?”). Because this was a an “abbreviated” version of the game, some rules weren’t there yet, other were, and the turn placement was underspecified. The main problem was that the Prologue was that there were too many “exceptions” from the basic flow of the game: “Wait, is that a rule because I am playing the Prologue and not the main game? What does the main game do?”
After two tries, I got through the Prologue, but I think newcomers should should go ahead and play through the main game normally. This is a huge missed opportunity and a potential turn-off: I think a lot of newer gamers will be completely put-off by this Prologue and not want to play again. The Prologue should have been a way to introduce people to the game! Spoiler: this is a good game! The Prologue just didn’t work. It’s unfortunate, because a Prologue should make me want to play the game! Consider Tainted Grail’s amazing introduction (see here), or Valor and Villainy: LLiudwick’s Labyrinth phenomenal introduction (see here), or even Tamashii: Chronicle of Ascend’s introduction (see here) as examples of good prologues! Earthborne Rangers’ Prologue turned me off: Too many exceptions to the rules, poorly documented gameplay status, tiny font, and still required full reading of the rules.
Helpful Tip: Just read the rules and play a normal game. You’ll struggle a little, but it’s better to struggle with the real rules and real gameplay than to struggle with a Prologue and its abbreviated/incomplete rules.
Gameplay
This is generally an exploration game. You have to explore this world and “do things” in this world. But what you have to do varies from game to game! Sometimes, you’ll be trying to find stuff, sometimes you’ll want to travel, and sometimes you’ll befriend creatures, sometimes other stuff! That’s what so interesting about this game: you are exploring this world, but that means many things! Discovering new Locations! New Gear! New items! New creatures! It’s all about exploration. Earthborne Rangers has a little bit of an “open world” video game feel to it.
Now, I’ve called this game a deck-building game, but it’s really more of a deck-advancement game. We first used that term (deck-advancement) back in our review of Adventure Tactics (see here). Basically, this means your deck is fairly static in the game: new cards only come into your deck at the end of a complete game session (“a day”), and only then available for the next distinct play session.
See above as the Quiet card comes into my hand as a reward. I guess strictly speaking this “could” be a deck-building game because you may choose to swap some newer reward cards during the Camping phase … so, you can “deck-build”, but it’s so much slower! In a normal deck-builder game, you generally get one new card every turn. Here in Earthborne Rangers, you might some new cards every tenth turn (when you get a reward). So, it’s probably better to call this a deck-advancement game with a trickle of deck-building.
Another interesting feature is that the deck is your stamina: kind of like Gloomhaven! As you play cards or suffer ill effects, you place cards either in discard stack (where they can’t generally come back: see left of role card) or fatigue deck (where you can soothe to bring them back, see above discard). If you are ever instructed to remove fatigue and you can’t (because your deck is empty), then the day must end. The deck is your stamina!
You get rewards in the game as you encounter when you succeed at missions you take in. One of my missions in an early game was to deliver biscuits!
Most obstacles in the game (befriend, fight, climb, run, anything) are overcome by doing a test. For the Harvest test (above), I have to spend at least 1 AWAreness, and (REASON: the triangle) and get at least two successes to succeed. The AWAreness can come usually only come from your Aspect card. The REASON can come from discarding any cards.
You can see the two green AWAness energy tokens on my Aspect card (above). In my hand next to it, I have several cards, with a few (blue cards) having the REASON triangle (in the upper left corner).
Once I choose what to commit (cards and tokens), I draw a Challenge Card (above, left). The +1, 0, 0, -1 modify the result depending on whether on the type of test. My AWA test would get +1, but a FOCus based test would get -1! So, if you can equal or beat the challenge level (usually 1, but sometimes harder), you succeed! Every point over may allow you “more success”, which may equate to more tokens/successes/traverses/harms on a card.
I like this mechanism because it’s not too random: you can still take a chance and hope to get lucky, but you always have a pretty good sense of whether or not your test will succeed or fail. Do you want to push your luck and use fewer tokens/cards? Or do you want to go for it? Since your cards are your stamina, it is useful to preserve them …
So, you go around the board, exploring, moving around the map, doing challenges, and occasionally reading from the Story book.
It’s an open-world video game! In card form!
Paper or Plastic?
So, the game’s production really embraces the no plastic/only paper vibe! The cards come wrapped not in plastic, but paper!
There’s no plastic on the outside of the box, only stickers (see above) to hold it together! My only problem with the stickers is that they cover “important” text (see above) … the expansion box has the same problem …(see below).
But, the game definitely stays in that vibe: there’s no plastic anywhere to be seen in the game.
But that brings up two important questions: “Do I sleeve my cards” and “How do I store my tokens?“
Let’s tackle the second question first. How do I store my tokens? I have two plastic baggies left over from a previous different game, so I used those. But, if you don’t have any plastic baggies, the tokens will flop around in the box: you really need some way to store them. I would have preferred if Earthborne Rangers had given me paper baggies for my tokens. I feel kind of guilty using plastic baggies in my game!
On the subject of guilt: It’s a deck-building game, so you have to sleeve it, right? In deck-building games (or deck-advancement games), you constantly cycle through your cards, you constantly touch your cards, and you generally handle the cards a lot. But, somehow it feels wrong to sleeve this game? There were certainly no options for plastic sleeves from the Kickstarter. But, it’s a deck-building game, so you sleeve it, right? But, it’s a game that strives for sustainability, so you can’t sleeve it, right? What do I do?
At the moment, I haven’t sleeved it. I could say that’s it because I am so enlightened, but I think it might just be just because I’m lazy: there’s 540 cards here.
What I Wished Were Different
The Location cards are not sorted Alphabetically if you use the natural order of the cards (by the card number within he Locations: see above). I suppose I could just sort my deck alphabetically. It just makes it easier to find a Location card when you are looking.
These Location cards are beautiful! See above! I adore the art: I wish they were fully double-sized or even larger cards so I could enjoy the art that much more. It feels like the art is a little under appreciated at the smaller size.
I wish the cards were better labelled. The back of the cards are not labelled so I don’t know what’s what. The Components section of the rulebook (grrr) would have been done better to show the front and the backs of the cards. Those orange backed cards? Those are Path Cards: you can see me trying to figure that out when I was sorting my cards! The rulebook refers to them as Path Cards, but the cards themselves do NOT label themselves with that! There are quite a number of examples of “unlabelled cards” in the game. After some time, you get familiar with the cards, and then you maybe don’t need the labels. But I prefer labels: if I come back to this game in 3 months, I want to be able to just jump back in!
What I Like
The art and layout and readability are just great! Let me emphasize: I love the art!
I think it does a good job making the game feel like we are exploring.
I like how you can customize your character deck by choosing Background, Specialty, and Personalities: every character deck is VERY different! Your deck is what you want it to be! That level of customization really draws you into the game: “I made this! This is my character!” It really helps immerse you in the game by giving you that sense of ownership.
I like the story that comes out as you play. The story doesn’t come out every turn, but every so often, a little bit of story comes out and enhances the gameplay that much more. I actually kind of like that the story only occasionally comes out … sometimes, I get tired of reading the entire games (sometimes I like that: Agents of SMERSH was a great Storybook game with lots of reading, but you know what you are getting into).
What I Don’t Like
The Components page. Grr.
The Prologue. Grr.
The amount of rules. There’s a lot of rules. I think they are all necessary, but there are a lot of rules. The 48 page rulebook belies the number of rules.
Solo Play
So, thank you to Earthborne Rangers for following Saunders’ Law and having a viable solo mode! The solo mode is a true solo mode: you play exactly one character (you do not have to play multiple characters). You play one Ranger and explore the world!
The balance is kept in the game by scaling most of the tests to be based on the number of Rangers (in the solo game, there’s just one Ranger: you!): This is denoted by an “R” next to the challenge. For example, to traverse away from the Ancestor’s Grove Location (see above), you need 4 traverse tokens PER Ranger to move away: Notice the 4R on the lower right of the card.
The solo game still takes up a lot of space. You’ll notice my solo game uses the right half of the table for the main play space …
.. and I have to use the left side of the table for the Storybook, tokens, and rest of the cards. It’s even worse, because I have to have the rulebook on the chair next to me … and finally the campaign sheet (more discussion below) to my right! Whew! This game takes up a lot of space!
As implied by everything on the table, there is a fair bit of maintenance per turn to get keep the game going. The biggest maintenance hits seem to be when you travel: you have to prepare a new Path Deck, sorting old cards, then shuffling and combining decks to make the new deck! Whew! There was quite a bit of maintenance, and it can be a tad overwhelming. After a 2.5 hour game, I was wiped! Luckily, you can either (a) leave the game set-up and continue later or (b) choose to end the day (choose to camp) and end the game session, putting it back in the box.
Putting the game away with your chosen cards isn’t too bad: the dividers that come with the game help keep the cards sorted pretty well.
I do like the solo game and I want to play it again. I feel a little like I am playing a solo video game, exploring a world and having adventures! The only downside is how much maintenance you do as you play. Some of this overhead goes away as you become so familiar with the game, but there’s sort of an incompressible amount of maintenance per game and it’s substantial. Just be aware that there will b a lot of maintenance to keep the game going for a solo player.
Cooperative Play
Even after investing 10 hours into the game and playing the game solo multiple times, I still found I was learning rules when I was teaching my friends! There is a lot to unpack in the game!
My first thought was that maaayyyyybeeee we could do simultaneous play when we played cooperatively to move the game forward quicker (like we did with Tamashii: see a few weeks ago). The game has a lot of turns that could be overlapping. Nope! Basically, I had to be the rules shepherd to make sure I was available to answer questions, so it was not really possible to play simultaneously, at least in our first cooperative play. In general, we tended to play our turns solo without too much interaction, so it seemed like simultaneous play might be a useful thing here. I think it will be in future games, once we ALL have internalized the game.
There was a mechanism to try to help foster cooperation: the Ranger tokens: see the rules above. Unfortunately, that’s the only elaboration of the rules! And, also unfortunately, the rules seemed poorly specified: how often could you move The Ranger Token? Just once per turn? Does it have stay on the card you put it until the card goes away? We chose to allow only one move per round. It helped foster cooperation a little more, but not hugely.
We played almost three hours in our first cooperative game, and we barely scratched the surface of the game. We ended up ending the Day early: not because we ran out of cards, but because everyone had to leave!! The real problem is that the game seems to really drag as you wait for your turn to come around: there is a lot of thinking each player needs to do (and looking up rules), so each player’s turn took some time. I think, as players internalize the game more, that you can do some simultaneous play to move the game forward. But, even after three hours of living in this world, my players still wanted to take turns in sequence because they still had questions for me.
The general cooperative consensus was that people liked the game, but felt it had too many rules. Everyone was willing to play again: they liked a lot of the ideas, but it felt a little grindy.
I do want to mention that the game has an interesting way to help each other (to cooperate): you can actually do actions on other Ranger’s area! So, if a player is really stuck on a card, other players can help! So, if you have any cards in front of you, you have to bypass them to help you fellow Ranger … and each card will cause Fatigue. I wanted to point this out, because I thought this was a unique way to allow cooperation! There is a penalty if you are “dealing with your own stuff” (active cards in front of you), but you can still make the choice to help your fellow Rangers if they are really floundering! This mechanism feels unique.
Campaign
This game is a campaign game. As a deck-advancement game, you are always upgrading your hand at the end of each “day” (game session), and putting your newly augmented deck back in the box for your next game!
Unlike most campaign games, the goals in Earthborne Rangers aren’t dramatic or overwhelming: it seems like most missions I have encountered so far feel more like “Side Quests”. Remember, this is an exploration game! So, taking on a bunch of missions is okay … you just may defer them to later sessions …
In the end, I think the campaign will be “fairly easy” to come back to. It’s pretty easy to put away your cards and come back another day. The only hard part would be remembering the story and what you have seen … I think I wish there were more mechanisms for “noting” what cards and entries in the storybook you have seen so you can “remind” yourself what you’ve seen. Oh wait! That’s what the campaign sheet is for!!
Writing
A quick note about the writing and the campaign. I like the writing! The writing seems to bring out the personalities of different people you encounter, and there are some points of humour as you play. The world you inhabit in Earthborne Rangers feels … fleshed out. I think this is a different kind of game, and that’s good! It’s not a “dungeon dweller”, it’s not a “beat up all the bad guys”, it’s more of a “hey, let’s explore this world!” And part of that exploration is the people you meet along the way: these people have personality that comes through.
Conclusion
It was a bit of a rough road to get though the first few games of Earthborne Rangers: there were some stumbling blocks along the way, but hopefully we’ve pointed them out so you can deal with them appropriately in your own journey …if you wish to pursue Earthborne Rangers.
After struggling to get through a number of solo games, I do like the game! The overhead to set-up, the maintenance while playing, and the work to tear-down is significant enough that it will dampen your enthusiasm for the solo game. Having said that, I do like the solo game quite a bit: I like the sense of exploration and wonder of the game (highly augmented by the amazing art)! I’d give the solo game an 8 or 8.5/10.0 I think. I think I was able to get a point where I had internalized most of the rules, so I could move forward and enjoy the world despite the huge number of rules.
The cooperative game reduces a lot of the set-up/maintenance/tear-down issues by sharing the load, and the game seems to scale well. Unfortunately, the game seems to bog down more in the cooperative mode, as you seem to be always waiting for your compatriots. I’d give it a solid 7/10.0 for a cooperative game. If your players can internalize the game to embrace some simultaneous play more, I think the game will open up a little more to maybe a 7.5/10 or even higher!! Unfortunately, even after 3 hours of playing cooperatively with a rules shepherd, the game still felt a little grindy because of all the rules questions and waiting for other players.
Build your character, explore the world: Earthborne Rangers reminds me very much of an open-world video game with tons of exploration! This is a really fun game: Just be aware there is steep learning curve which may or may not scare you away.
coopgestalt 