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Neil and I have been huge Eternal fans for a while now. Dire Wolf Digital’s trading card game can be found on Steam and has been going strong for a number of years. When they announced a tabletop version of the game we couldn’t wait to review Eternal: Chronicles of the Throne for you all.
Publisher: Renegade Games
Game Name: Eternal: Chronicles of the Throne – Base Game
Year Published: 2019
Player Count: 2-4
Play Time: 30 – 45 Minutes
Description (From Publisher):
The Eternal Throne sits empty as scions of the royal family struggle for control. Dispatch those who oppose you by recruiting allies to your cause, researching powerful spells, and acquiring valuable relics!
From the makers of the award-winning Clank! A Deck-Building Adventure, Eternal: Chronicles of the Throne combines deck-building games and strategy card battlers into an intense strategic experience. Summon powerful allies to attack your opponents, or build an unbreakable defense. Will you exhibit patience and seek the power of the Eternal Throne, or forgo such a risky path? The decisions are yours in Eternal: Chronicles of the Throne!
Now I’ve played an absolute ton of deck builders. From Dominion, Legendary, Star Realms, Hero Realms, Shards of Infinity, and on and on and on. These days deck builder games are a dime a dozen. For those of you readers who maybe don’t know what a deck builder is, there is a fundamental differentiator between them and traditional trading card games. In a deck builder, traditionally each player starts with an identical set of ten cards. They then “build” their deck by purchasing additional cards from a market, or trade row.
Dominion was one of the earliest deck builders and it provided players with perfect information. The “market row” was never randomized and players all had an equal opportunity to purchase cards from the row, and it truly became an engine builder game where the player capable of making the most efficient purchase would win. In many ways, this was like playing a game of chess. All the pieces were in front of you, it was up to you to figure out how they fit together best.
Sometime later, the deck builders started to emerge that felt more like a traditional Rochester draft mode of a trading card game. The “trade row” was now becoming randomized and it helped simulate the “best pick of the pack” that is found when drafting a trading card game. This obviously increased the amount of variability in the game and introduced some level of luck as well.
Star Realms was potentially one of the first deck builders to achieve mainstream success, with a variable trade row, and also be a competitive game. Up to the point of its release, many deck builders felt like a solitaire exercise for each player that made the experience somewhat bland.
Star Realms helped create a player vs. player experience. Now the players were trying to buy cards to directly defeat their opponent’s health pool. This is a common mechanic from trading card games and its no surprise that this idea came from the brain of two Hall of Fame Magic players.
Star Realms also started playing around with the idea of permanency. Bases in Star Realms after being played would remain on the Battlefield until their opponent defeated them. This particular approach has been replicated since Star Realms was released and can be found in almost every deck builder.
Eternal has taken the idea of permanency and upped the ante completely. During the course of a game, a player plays a unit from their hand, that unit remains in play through their opponent’s turn. Those units can either defend you from an opponent’s attacks or attack your opponent. This additional layer brings a level of interactivity to deck builders that even Star Realms failed on from time to time.
Eternal much like every other deck builder starts the game with a fixed distribution of cards. The basic cards give each player the same amount of trade row buying power, and additional power. The basic cards create the foundation for any deck builder and they are not missing from this game. There is one fundamental difference with Eternal compared to other deck builders. There are only 9 basic cards found in each starting deck.
The tenth and final card in a starting deck is a starter unit. These units offer a couple of very unique options that help make Eternal – Chronicles of the Throne different. First, you will notice on the upper left-hand corner of each unit there are different symbols that represent the “factions” in the world of eternal. These symbols help turn on synergies within your deck. So when I play a Time and Justice Awakened Student and follow it up with another time-based card there can be additional power and benefits from the synergy.
These opening units help us make buying decisions, but I will also say that there were many games when I pivoted away from whatever my starting factions were because the trade row just didn’t help support the unit I had in my deck. After multiple plays, I can also indicate that some of the starting units are just simply more powerful than the others. I’m looking at you Noble Firemane!
While doing our review of Eternal Chronicles of the Throne we started playing around with some house rules on this portion of the game. While we didn’t necessarily find any one particular unit broken, it does offer some value on the setup of the game. We would ultimately decide the first player, and then the second player would pick their starting unit before the first player would. I will touch base more on the first player advantage a bit layer in this review.
Part of the trade row setup includes setting up The Eternal Throne card and a number of Seek Power cards equal to two times the number of players in the game. In a two-player game that will put 4 seek powers on top of The Eternal Throne. These cards are purchased in much the same way you would acquire other trade row cards.
The fundamental difference is that once all the Seek Power cards have been purchased, cards with throne abilities get powered up. These are traditionally very powerful abilities that can have dramatic impacts on the end game. There is a very interesting tug of war between, wanting to add Seek Power’s to your deck and not wanting to turn on your opponent’s cards by purchasing the last seek power.
Eternal adds an additional strategic element to cards from the trade row with the Warp mechanism. Warp allows a player to spend one of their two warp tokens to purchase a card and play it immediately. Normally, the card would go into the player’s discard pile. Not all cards can be warped, and only cards with an orange fire ring around its cost can be paid for with warp.
Additionally, one of the starting cards in a player’s deck, Refresh, allows players to regain their warp tokens if the throne is revealed. It’s a nice touch when a card is dead at the beginning of the game and turns on later. This is traditionally different from many deck builders where players are actively trying to get starting cards out of their decks.
Because Eternal: Chronicles of the Throne is all about defeating your opponent, your units will be attacking and defending throughout the game. Fortunately, the attack and defense mechanisms are pretty simple to understand. However, for this long-time card gamer, the timing of attacks and defense did take a few games to get used too, and the rules were somewhat unclear, so our early games had units lasting forever. This is something that could easily be fixed with some better learn to play videos or a rules supplement.
Ultimately, when it’s your turn, your opponent’s units will be attacking you. You may choose to either defend them or take the damage directly. Defending is simply a process of whether or not your unit’s power is equal to or higher than the power of the attacking unit. No matter the separation, both units will die in the exchange. Additionally, any attacking units will also die at the end of the player’s turn.
Dire Wolf Digital supplies a fair amount of tokens, and the game does rely heavily on these tokens to track things such as defense increases, power increases, added abilities to cards, and token units. Overall these tokens are fairly adequate and my only complaint has to do with power and defense tokens. Many times a unit would get a buff to its defense that would not affect its power, and the token that tracks power was the same as the one that tracks defense. It’s just a simple generic +1 token. This left us coming up with a way to distinguish the +1 attack from the +1 defense.
This did lead us to some confusing game states, and while not a huge deal it would have been nice to have separate tracking tokens for them. It is easily remedied with dice or any other tracker, but we would have liked to see some
Eternal: Chronicles of the Throne is a nice addition to anyone’s collection that likes random trade row deck builders. The inclusion of an attack and defense step, while awkward at first, really blossoms after multiple plays. Playing the game with more than two players drastically increases the length of the game, but even as a four-player experience, I never felt the game overextended its welcome.
If you are a fan of the random trade row flavor of deckbuilder games, then you really owe it to yourself to give Eternal a try. It also comes with a free pack for the digital TCG which is a nice teaser for fans of the digital game, or fans that are thinking about getting into the game.