Mandoo Games released Eric Hong's Vale of Eternity in 2023 and it’s fair to say it was received very well within the board gaming community. Most praised it for its clever yet simple ruleset and ability to build an ever-growing tableau of combos. In Vale of Eternity, players are tamers who hunt various monsters and spirits to tame them as minions. These minions provide the tamers with various instantaneous powers and ongoing effects that drive their engine, meaning they score bigger and bigger points. The aim of the game is to get to 60 points but with the Artifacts expansion this has been increased to 80.
In each round, there are three phases. In the Hunting phase, you draft two cards from the game board. Then in the Action phase, you take various actions, including selling cards, taming, or summoning cards; finally, in the Resolution phase you use the active effects of cards you have summoned. Successive rounds are performed until the end of the game is triggered at 60 or 80 points depending if you use the expansion.
One of the interesting mechanics of the game is the currency, the Magic Stones, which come in three varieties valued at 1, 3 and 6, yet you can only ever hold four Magic stones at once. The costs of cards vary between being free up to 10, but you mainly gather those stones by selling the cards that you might wish to gain to your hand, so it ends up leading to some interesting decision spaces about what cards you want to draft during the hunting phase of the game.
The game plays along pretty quickly but has some amazing choices that can hugely impact your strategy and also lead to some great scoring rounds that pay off for all the planning and hard work you put in earlier in the game. The game has to be played tactfully, tho', as your choices can and will change each round, and they'll be affected by the other players' choices. All in all, this leads to a game that is satisfying, and especially rewarding when you manage to pull off those big combos.
Each card comes in one of five families: Fire, Water, Earth, Wind and Dragon, and the cards often work together to create synergies. With this comes one of the first minor criticisms of the game. Those who are familiar with Vale of Eternity will commonly focus on collecting the Water family of cards. With the limited number of cards from the base game (just 70), this can mean the likely pattern of play and choices won’t vary much between the games. When you play Vale of Eternity with a full complement of four players, you're likely to go through the whole deck during the course of the game. The Artifacts expansion ameliorates this by adding 28 creature cards to the deck, with new effects, as well as artifacts that players draft during the hunting phase at the start of each round.
The additional cards are hugely welcome. They are all new cards and help to change up the meta of the game and add new variety. I did notice that with these new cards players have less commonly focused on the Water cards. With the added variety it means that you have to pivot more with your plans, which is always good for this type of game. The main part of this expansion, the Artifacts, adds an extra choice to make at the start of the round. You can never pick the same one from round to round, and choices are made in turn order. There is always one more option than the player count so even if tho' don’t always get what you want, you still do get some choice even if you're the last player to pick. The artifacts often work around a new mechanic where you can Shelter and Retrieve cards. This is where you can grab a random or drafted card and store it in your Shelter, meaning only you can access this card. Later you can then Retrieve these Sheltered cards to add to your hand to summon. I have enjoyed this new rule as it means you can now get a better choice of cards and can try to grab cards before others can.
Overall I think this first expansion does a great job of adding more to the game but without overwhelming players. I would even go so far as to say you can just simply add the new cards with brand-new players. I think it is a must-buy if you enjoyed the base game. Time to summon those minions!
(Review by David Breaker)