Games
How to resolve AdBlock issue? 
Earthborne Rangers is an exploration focused, open-world co-op card game made by a number of former FFG studio members, and by studio members I even mean as high up as former studio head. It has a lot to recommend it, and I do strongly recommend it, but I don’t think it’s as obvious a slam dunk with newer players as it wants to be.
I think that Earthborne Rangers accomplishes its core objective of creating a new genre of exploration-focused adventure co-op card game. Its gameplay is set in sharp relief against the desperate you-vs-the-deck brawl of the Arkham or LOTR LCGs, which otherwise appear superficially similar. All of its mechanical achievements are in the shadow of a ground-breaking commitment to sustainable production that I hope creates space for other projects to follow and learn from. On the other hand, I don’t think the game is entirely successful in its secondary objective, making a beginner friendly card game. The game requires a high-ish level of CCG/LCG experience to operate comfortably, as a downstream effect of its open-world nature. Moreover, it does show some cracks from its small team in terms of player card balance and errata, though I don’t consider these particularly serious issues.
You in the world, not against the world
Earthborne Rangers has you exploring a large, post-apocalyptic (but not like you think) lush valley with a number of different sites and a wide variety of people and things to meet that generate missions and provide player card rewards if accomplished. It also has a meta plot that triggers at certain times to provide propulsion and narrative arc to the many-day campaign. Each session is a day, and players will travel to multiple locations finishing missions and meeting people, or just poking around the world finding fun things. Days end when your ranger is fatigued or when you camp between locations, with your player card deck representing your stamina and only one trip through the deck allowed. The game is mechanically a fusion of a scenario-based co-op card game a la Arkham Horror LCG with a booklet style Tales of the Arabian Nights vignette game. One of the biggest strengths of the game is that the balance of text to mechanics is perfect. The design team keeps the booklet references terse but flavorful. It never has you reading extended text about characters that feel more like the designer’s pet RPG OCs than someone the players are interested in.
The achievement of Earthborne Rangers is making a co-op card game that presents like a typical FFG co-op LCG but plays completely differently via its systemic distinctions. Earthborne Rangers has you drawing cards every turn from a deck, the path deck, representing challenges and encounters and dealing with them via a player deck of capabilities. The path deck is specific to that location and biome (e.g. animals, plants, hazards, other people) and seems like the encounter deck from the previously mentioned games. Fundamentally, though, the nature of this path deck is not strictly confrontational: the players do not have to kill or destroy all in their wake. Instead, players will often be triaging which path cards need to be dealt with by clearing them and which can be left alone or temporarily evaded. This is pitch perfect thematically---your rangers are not murder goblins out in the forest trying to kill everything and the path deck is not filled with “monsters.” Moreover, mechanically, the animals, plants, and hazards of the valley do not automatically fight you or hurt you at the end of the turn in some sort of enemy phase, but are instead triggered haphazardly through a deck you use to resolve actions. Often, animals, plants, and other challenge cards will actually interact with each other without your input, creating a real sense that the world exists without you and you may or may not need to intervene. This is classic design from the best open-world video games, and Earthborne is one of the first times I’ve seen it realized in tabletop. It’s often best to simply attempt to leave a location and hike on even when faced with a directly menacing challenge unless you have a mission which requires you to deal with that challenge in a particular fashion. The gameplay vibe of Earthborne Rangers is just different than almost all its competitors: you can get into serious jams that end your days, but you also can be strategic and judicious about when to intervene with your environment.
It is chill, but is this game friendly to new players?
Earthborne Rangers wants to be an introductory co-op card game players with a taste for exploration. And it accomplishes those goals with some real style. But it inhabits a contradictory space because while the game is breezy and often self-paced, with little punishment, it nevertheless wants high-level co-op card game knowledge to make the game run properly. The player deck creation process is thematic, simplified, and welcoming. The non-timed in-game progression with open ended goals is not punishing to new players. The base box has a rich amount of content for new players, unlike the abominable FFG base sets for Lord of the Rings and Arkham Horror. But paradoxically, I think this introductory game wants a table with an extremely experienced CCG or LCG player at it along with introductory players in order to interpret and run the game smoothly.
The experience of Earthborne Rangers is that it is almost always like playing your first play of a moderate or higher complexity Lord of the Rings/Arkham LCG scenario in terms of understanding how the meshed gears of any given mission fit together, between the card triggers, booklet lookups, booklet branching entries, and on-board play interacting to make a cool situation occur within the rules framework. As long as someone puts these pieces together it has the mechanical magic of a good co-op LCG, simulating something that feels incredibly thematic through the interaction of gameplay and cards. But it’s no coincidence there are so many questions about the first few missions, as even the opening biscuit delivery mission requires a moderately complex scenario understanding of how CCGs/LCGs work along with the booklet to execute as intended.
Leaning on the importance of experience a little bit more, the game shows a slight lack of polish that I think comes from being a big, ambitious game from a small company running on small budgets. The player card balance is all over the place, though no worse than the base set of the FFG co-op LCGs. There are clear bad and good cards in here. Ameliorating this, you don’t really have to have a lock-down efficient deck to finish the game or make satisfying progress---the game is tuned for exploration and self-paced progress rather than a punishing hard timer like an Arkham LCG scenario. So ultimately, I don’t see this as a serious problem. More problematic, depending on what kind of gamer you are, are the multitude of small errors in the campaign book and a couple of errataed cards. It makes very little difference to me and almost none are particularly serious (the online living valley story booklet has all errata incorporated if you use that), but if you are a player this doesn’t work for you know who you are.
A hugely promising start
I did not back this game on Kickstarter due to fears of repetition in the path decks and a similar look to Arkham Horror LCG, which I play religiously. Those fears, after playing the demo and now the physical game itself a fair amount, were unfounded. Earthborne Rangers is a mechanically innovative game creating a different experience from anything on the market at the moment. It isn’t immediately apparent how all these mechanical wrinkles come together to create a vastly different player vibe, but it is a real thing once you are moderately experienced with the game. There are still a fair number of rough edges on the game and I think it requires a capital G gamer at the table to make it work right, but there’s a lot to love about the system. I am quite excited to see where this team goes with their new expansion releases for new campaigns. Underground in the valley is up next, supposedly, and I think they are hitting all the right notes with their player card expansion plans by adding new backgrounds and specialties to build characters rather than overcomplicating character creation by infinitely expanding combinatory options.
Finally, it's impossible to talk about the game without discussing its production. The designers made great pains to try to produce the game sustainably. No plastic components, no plastic in the cardstock mixture, etc. Wood and pulp coming from sustainable certified forests. Picking up this game is pretty weird because of this; the cards do not feel as durable and the packaging generally is not the “made like a tank” standards we generally think of from expensive games like this. The foibles of how difficult it was to source and produce, and the areas where they fell short, is a tale the team has been telling in its podcasts in and of itself. I’m personally happy to see it, I will pay a premium (the game is somewhat expensive), and I hope that they and other environmentally conscious publishers will consult with each other and triangulate to make a viable business ecosystem that doesn’t put every publisher who wants to go this direction through the wringer like the EBG team was.
