Earthborne Rangers Board Game Review

Gideon’s Perspective

Earthborne Rangers is a 1 to 4 player open-world co-op card-based adventure game about exploring, connecting with, and protecting the land and its people. You do this via a deck of cards that represents your abilities, gear, and expertise as a ranger.

I’ve often said that the best stories a game can tell are the ones that are organically told while you play. I always like to highlight Robinson Crusoe as the type of game that does exactly that. The story it tells of your survivors isn’t told through lengthy prewritten text read-outs, but through the actions you take and the events you encounter as a result of those actions. That type of storytelling is unique to board games and video games and is the kind I like to see embraced.

You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!

Earthborne Rangers, on the other hand, attempts to combine the concepts of a tabletop RPG, a prewritten story, and the type of dynamic storytelling I mentioned earlier, and more often than not, those stacked subsystems tend to step on each other’s toes.

The thing is, Earthborne Rangers has some really neat ideas, and the fact that it’s entirely played with cards and a handful of tokens really expresses how clever the design actually is. When it works well, it works really well, and when it doesn’t, it falls disappointingly flat.

Gideon’s Bias	Earthborne Rangers Information
Review Copy Used: No	Publisher: Earthborne Games
Number of Plays: 10+	Designers: Andrew Fischer, Brooks Flugaur-Leavitt, Andrew Navaro, Adam Sadler, Brady Sadler
Player Counts Played: All	Player Count: 1-4
Fan of Genre: Yes	Genre: Co-op Campaign Card Game
Fan of Weight: Yes	Weight: Medium
Gaming Groups Thoughts: Meh	Price: $100

Presentation

Earthborne Rangers consists of a whole bunch of cards, 2 books, a handful of tokens, and a paper map. It also comes with a bunch of handy dividers that make organizing and playing the game a breeze, which I really appreciate.

The cards feature excellent artwork that is consistent with each other and the game’s theme. The rulebook, however, is a bit disorganized. It does a decent job of teaching you the game, especially if you play through the prologue, but it also assumes you will just instinctively know to not only notice the keywords on a card, but also to reference them. It’s quite easy to miss some key rules, especially during your first few games.

Earthborne Rangers is a sustainably made game, and while I will always admire any attempt to lessen our negative impacts on the planet, I do have a couple of issues with this particular implementation. The first is to acknowledge the fact that board games, in general, have a relatively small footprint when compared to most other products, regardless of how they are made.

Board Games aren’t disposable consumables that are meant to be thrown into a landfill right after use. If you take care of a game, you can still play it 10 or 20 years from now. This longevity dwarfs nearly anything else you can buy.

Secondly, the quality of the cards in Earhborne Rangers is straight-up bad. They are super flimsy, and most of them warped within a couple of days. I have to question the sustainability of a board game that’s likely to need to be replaced within a year due to wear and tear if you want to keep playing it.

Alternatively, in a turn of great irony, you can slap a whole bunch of plastic sleeves on your sustainably made, eco-friendly cards in an attempt to protect them, which is precisely what I did.

Now, this wouldn’t be a problem aside from the fact that Earthborne Rangers appears to cost a premium due to its eco-friendly nature, a nature that I find to be paper-thin, both figuratively and literally. The game is a bunch of poor-quality cards, and its content doesn’t compare to what you would get in most other games for a similar price.

I absolutely hate to be so critical of a company attempting to be eco-friendly, as I generally stand in favor of these things. But in this case, it just feels like an increased cost for almost no meaningful impact.

What I Like About Earthborne Rangers

The Initial Deck Building

When you start playing Earthborne Rangers, you have to create a Ranger deck through an incredibly interesting set of steps. First, you choose an aspect card that dictates the overall strengths and weaknesses of your ranger. Maybe your Ranger is really fit, but lacks the spirit to connect with others, maybe they possess great focus, but poor awareness.

Then you pick a handful of cards that form different parts of your personality. Perhaps you’re Compassionate or Inventive. The thing is, these aren’t just words on a card, but they directly influence how your ranger plays. For example, the Compassionate Card has two heart symbols. Mechanically, this means you can use this card to add two effort during a spirit test. Spirit tests are usually done when socializing or connecting with people and animals. It’s a lovely pairing of theme and mechanics.

Next, you choose from one of four backgrounds and then choose a handful of cards from that background. Maybe you were a Traveler, or a Shepherd?

Finally, you choose from one of four specialties and then pick a handful of cards from it. Maybe you’re a Shaper, which is the game’s world’s version of a spell caster, or maybe you’re an Artificer who uses all kinds of technology.

The end result is a mechanically flexible and very thematic character creation system that actually does a decent job of emulating an RPG. The card combinations that make up your 30-card deck, taken from personality traits, background, and specialty, not only dictate how your deck plays from a gameplay standpoint, but who your Ranger is as a person, what they value, and what they are good at. It’s a clever system.

That said, it is entirely possible to build a bad deck, and since Earthborne Rangers has a somewhat unique playstyle, it’s not always obvious that you screwed up until you’re in the thick of it. You aren’t really supposed to change your base deck after a campaign begins, but you may have to bend those rules a little if you find your card combinations are ineffective.

The Cards Tell a Story

The main gameplay loop of Earthborne Rangers uses your deck and your aspects’ energy tokens to interact with cards that represent locations, people, and hazards. This is primarily done through tests. You have four basic tests that are always available, but cards, be they yours or from the Path Deck may give you other options.

A simple example of a test would be to connect with a villager. You have to spend one spirit energy to perform the test, though you may spend more to add extra effort. You may also discard cards with the heart symbol to add that much more effort. Then you flip a challenge card, which can modify your effort number, and if your effort meets or exceeds the challenge, in this case, the villager’s presence rating. You add that much progress to them. Once you have enough progress on a card, it clears, and something happens.

The cool thing about this is how the cards tell a story that’s unique to you, all on their own. For example, maybe the location is White Sky, but there is a Tributary Stream in the way. The stream has the obstacle keyword, which means as long as it’s in the way, I can’t interact with the location.

To get through the stream, I could use spirit and connection to soak my feet, or I could use focus and exploration to follow the stream and bypass it. However, I’ve run into Ar Tel the Angler. I could simply use the connection action to connect with him and clear him, which would have some kind of benefit. However, I decide to go fishing with him instead since the stream has the water keyword. I use the fishing action on Ar Tel’s card that uses Focus and Conflict.

If I succeed, Ar Tel clears some of my fatigue by giving me back some cards I had lost earlier, and adds a token to a food card, such as my Trail Mix card. Afterwards, I then decide to soak my feet, soothing even more fatigue and clearing the stream. Ar Tel is still here, however, so for now, he is traveling with me.

Mechanically, I just did various actions to get some lost cards back, get more tokens on a card, and then remove an obstacle. But those actions told a story about how I met a friendly fisherman by a stream and relaxed with him through a bit of fishing. I used the fish we caught to replenish my food supplies before soothing my aching feet and saying goodbye to the stream as we moved on.

Maybe later, Ar Tel gets attacked by a predator, and I have to protect him, or after connecting with him, I find that he wants to fish across the lake, and I can either take on a quest to bring him there or say no. This is the type of storytelling that I believe games excel at, and I really wish it were the only kind Earthborne Rangers featured.

What I Dislike About Earthborne Rangers

The Intrusive Story Text

While the cards tell a story through game mechanics, Earthborne Rangers also tries to tell a story through an extensive amount of writing, before, during, and after any given session. It’s similar to a section book in Frosthaven or Gloomhaven, but much more intrusive. It grinds the gameplay to a halt.

If we go to my earlier example, I would read any story text that may be relevant at the start of the game. This is often several paragraphs worth of flowery descriptions and dialogue. As I pull out the White Sky Location, I have to stop, find its section number, and read the flowery intro. When I pull Ar Tel from the path deck. I have to stop, find his section, and read his intro, where he talks about how the fishing here sucks. If I clear Ar Tel, I stop, find his section, read the description of what he says, and then continue.

If I, or another player, pulls any other path cards during this time that also have a book icon, we stop, find the sections, and read those too. It can make the game much slower than it needs to be, and also constantly interrupts the players’ thought processes while they are trying to decide what to do.

You can’t really ignore it either, as reading those sections can give important information, such as side quests or soothing fatigue. But all the information I really need or want is that Ar Tel wants to go to the Golden Shore. I get that Earthborne Rangers is trying to be immersive, but even if you meet the game where it stands, it kind of falls apart.

For example, the campaign isn’t linear. You are likely to run into Ar Tel several times, but he is always going to say the same paragraph of text over and over again. At some point, you’re going to ignore it and let the cards tell their own story anyway. That’s the thing about prewritten scripts, they are prewritten.

Furthermore, the writing is flowery. This means you slow down the game even further by passing the book around so everyone can read, or one player has to be not only be a narrator, but a good narrator who adds different inflections to their speech so the other players can clearly visualize the details and understand which character is speaking at any given time. Unless you’re playing solo, of course.

The Repetition

While Earthborne Rangers has a lot of cards, they are split apart into a variety of categories, with only a handful of cards per category. When you travel to a location, you mix the terrain type of the path you took and a couple of location cards together to form a deck of around 15 to 17 cards. This makes up the path deck, a deck of things you encounter, be they people, animals, or obstacles.

You end up seeing and encountering a lot of the same things all the time, and taken alone, that’s not inherently a problem. However, Earthborne Rangers is a campaign game, and after you make your initial Ranger deck, you change it very, very slowly.

You earn rewards at a snail’s pace that you can swap into your deck at camp, but for the most part, you’re approaching the same set of problems with the same set of solutions very frequently. At that point, both the gameplay and storytelling can feel redundant and dry.

Furthermore, there can be severe down periods where you don’t actually have many options and are just killing time until you draw the correct path card you need to progress. This can lead to multiple rounds where players are just resting because there isn’t anything meaningful they can do with their current cards and board state.

I just think the variety of cards for the path deck is too small at any given time, and the longer you play, the more apparent that becomes.

The Unbalanced Player Count

Earthborne Rangers is a game that is definitely best played solo or at two players for a couple of reasons. First of all, the more players you add, the thinner the deckbuilding becomes. That’s probably why Earthborne Games themselves recommend buying a card doubler for 4 players.

Secondly, the path deck is too thin to support higher player counts. Every time the refresh phase comes around, each player draws a path card. The path deck only has around 15 to 17 cards at any given time, and higher player counts cycle through the whole thing fast. You might spend a bunch of effort to remove an obstacle or clear a predator, only for it to pop out again as fast as you got rid of it.

The thresholds for clearing cards scale with the number of players, and while that makes sense, it also compounds the issue. It makes cards take so long to clear that once you clear one obstacle, you’re likely to cycle back into it again by the time you clear the next obstacle. It’s such a problem that I strongly believe the box should say 1 to 2 players, not 1 to 4.

What I’m Mixed On

The Open World

One of the things that attracted me to Earthborne Rangers was the open-world aspect. The game claims and encourages you to go anywhere and do anything, and at times, that aspect really shines. But then the game once again gets in its own way.

I had a lot of fun helping Ar Tel get to the Golden Shore, where he rewarded me with his vaulting rod. I then helped a Village elder lure out a large predator cat, and then I had the option of killing it or connecting with it. After successfully connecting with the creature, it became my friend, an ally I could add to my deck.

After dealing with an annoying kid, he had given me a rumor about some treasure in a Swamp. The swamp is at the bottom of the map, a long way from where I was, but I was excited and prepared to make the trip.

But then I got hit with a time limit. On day 4, the main quest kicked in and prompted me to help save some land and people from flooding, and I had only a couple of in-game days to do it. I begrudgingly sidelined my initial swamp adventure plans and addressed the flood, only to be hit with another part of the main quest and another time limit to go with it as soon as I finished.

Now, I could have shirked my ranger duty to go investigate the swamps anyway, and while there would be consequences, it’s not like I would be faced with a game-over screen. But doing so doesn’t really make much sense in the immersive thematic context that the game so desperately wants to shine with. Yet, following those time limited bread crumbs makes the game feel much less open world and much more of a multiple choice choose your own adventure game.

I found Earthborne Rangers was once again at odds with itself because neither choice felt satisfying. Tossing aside my ranger duty to explore the open world felt bad, but so did being railroaded into following the main quest’s whims.

It’s like Earthborne Rangers dipped its toes into being an open-world game, but was too scared to fully commit, and panic dumped its prewritten storyline onto players’ laps.

Verdict

Earthborne Rangers is a clever game that does some neat things. It comes exceptionally close to having the kind of organic storytelling that really shines in a board game, but it constantly interrupts itself with a novel’s worth of lore dumping. The way cards interact is really interesting, but the lack of variety can become quite repetitive.

The open world concept is intriguing, but the game seems almost afraid of it, as it jerks you aside with a main quest and time limits that simply don’t make thematic sense to ignore while you explore.

There are definitely folks who enjoy reading prewritten storylines a lot more than I do, and they will find a lot more to love in Earthborne Rangers than I did. But for me, I look to movies and books for that kind of thing, not games.

Ultimately, I want to like Earthborne Rangers a lot more than I do. It comes close for me in some ways, and I did genuinely have a great time at certain points, but those times were often contrasted by frustration, irritation, or boredom.