Terra Eterna is a dungeon-crawler style adventure tabletop role-playing game (RPG) for 1–4 players. It's card-driven in that each player controls a hero with their own individual story card and deck of starter and character class cards. The story forms a core component of the game, so you can expect the missions you undertake to refer the players to various numbered story cards.
From our initial plays of the preview prototype of Terra Eterna, shown here on Board's Eye View, we've been struck by the versatility of the game. In addition to the choice over whether to play the game as a full coop or as a 'semi-cooperative' game (ie: where players need to work together but are essentially out for themselves), you can choose to play the game over a standard five rounds or in 'blitz' mode for a much shorter two-round game; your choices here affect the set-up.
For each game, players collectively choose the mission card that will be their objective. These are ranked in difficulty but, as you might expect, it's the harder tasks that give you the bigger rewards so you're always tempted to push your luck and go for high risk/high reward objectives. Throughout the game players will be moving out from their city starting location across the modular board, 'liberating' (flipping previously face-down) tiles and encountering monsters that are tied to each hex's terrain type. A custom six-sided die is also rolled to determine whether or not the location spawns additional monsters. Where there are two or more heroes that can be attacked by the monsters, the same die is used to determine which hero they are attacking.
Combat is commendably straightforward. Attackers and defenders roll dice (custom six-sided dice with sides 0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 2) and compare totals to determine whether it's the monster or the hero who takes damage. Cards can also be played to affect the combat; for example, to re-roll. Damage is recorded using standard numbered dice as countdown markers. Any monsters that you fail to defeat flee after a single bout of combat. Restored to full health, they join the Boss Monster so you'll have to face them again when you encounter the Boss; and this time you and the monsters will have to fight to the death...
Every game has a distinct arc: players get access to more cards following a Boss Monster battle and, win or lose against the Boss, there may be an ongoing effect for the rest of the game, but you can also expect more monsters to spawn on unexplored tiles as the game proceeds. Monsters also move towards the city and any in hexes adjacent to it reduce the city's d20 countdown marker by one. If the d20 runs down to zero, it's game over for the heroes... Your hero can be killed during the course of the game but that doesn't mean player elimination as you can play on as a Vengeful Soul, or you can rejoin the game as a new character. If you're playing in cooperative mode, your team mates can also agree to pay an artifact or 1000 gold to revive a dead comrade.
A big plus for Terra Eterna is that it doesn't impose a heavy rules overhead before you can play: this is a game that's commendably quick to learn. In addition to its versatility, the sheer variety of cards in Terra Eterna give it a huge amount of replayability. Tho' there's a lot of dice chucking, this isn't just a game of luck: there's certainly scope for tactical play; for example, in how you make optimal use of your hand of cards and how and where you move on the map. Our one gripe is that the tile-flipping can be fiddly because you're likely to jog adjacent hex tiles when you pick up a tile to flip it. It's not a big deal but a couple of members of our team found it annoying to have to push the tiles back together to properly reform the map after every tile 'liberation'.
Terra Eterna is currently live on the Gamefound crowdfunding platform. Click here to check it out now.
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