Game of the Month: Eternal Decks

What is TTL's Game of the Month?
Think of it as our tiny neighborhood version of a movie premier. There are so many new fascinating board games being released it can be a little overwhelming. So this is our little way of shining a spotlight on something we think the community should give a try. Sometimes GOTM will feature tournaments or talks, but often it will just be just a nudge to play a game with your fellow TTL members.

Last week I found myself standing in the soon to be finished front lobby of Tabletop Library trying to explain what a co-op game is to a new player. And they couldn’t help but ask repeatedly “but wait, who are you playing against?”

And of course that is the first and most important trick a co-operative game has to do. It’s you and your friends against the game, and a designer needs to find a way to create tension. Eternal Decks solves tension in such a unique and elegant way that Dice Tower’s Mike Delisio instantly gave it the Seal of Excellence, and for us it is an easy choice for game of the month.

For twenty years the standard way to threaten a co-op has been to make the group flip a card and flinch at what was written on it. Pandemic (2008) is the most popular variety, as you turn over infection cards until a city boils over. Others roll dice, run a doom track, spawn monsters. It works, but as board games have gotten deeper, a lot of this machinery keeps getting heavier: more decks to feed, more triggers to track, more bookkeeping between the good parts. Eternal Decks throws all of that legacy out for innovative simplicity. If you can't play a card on your turn, everyone loses. That's the whole engine.

You start with a thin deck and three cards, attempting to discard one of those cards into one of three rows. Each row has a simple rule about whether you can put a card there. These rules can be as simple as Uno’s match a color, but they’ve also made room for complexity as you get deeper. Shed enough cards to finish a row and you unlock its Eternal, which pours a fresh deck straight into your hand. It’s that refill from the Eternal that keeps you from an empty-handed death.

Sounds simple enough, but Eternal Decks then twists the knife. Every Eternal you open to stay alive bolts a new restriction onto the table. Suddenly you can’t play fives, or red cards. The engine keeping you breathing is the same engine tightening around your throat. You can buy relief by spending cards for jewels, except that empties your hand faster, which is the one thing actively trying to kill you.

So you spend the whole game racing a clock that is your own hand, shedding cards into a puzzle that gets harder every time you beat it. "Timing is critically important," as Oliver Kinne wrote at Tabletop Games Blog. The skill isn't finishing rows. It's finishing them at the exact moment, for the exact player, who was about to run dry. You are the timer. You are also the bomb. Adam Richards, reviewing it at Punchboard, called the push and pull of it "infuriating and delicious at the same time," which is exactly right. It’s five minutes to teach, a then a whole evening trying to survive as a group.

It isn't frictionless. Every co-op has to also solve the problem of quarterbacking, where one overeager player starts saying things like "Play the blue five. No, the blue five. Trust me." Eternal Decks solves this by having players keep what is in their hand secret. This hidden information trick, similar to games like The Crew or Sky Team, mostly works but sometimes a very experienced player at the table can drive the game a bit too much. It’s a small toll for what you get though.
There's one more reason it's the pick, and it has nothing to do with the rules. Eternal Decks is the work of basically two people: Hiroken, who designed it, and Mujunsha, who drew it. The cards look like the scratch-off crayon art you made as a kid, neon scraped out from under black. It came out of Japan, climbed to number one on BoardGameGeek's Hotness, and cracked the site's top 500 strategy games. For a long stretch the only way to get a copy in the States was Portland Game Collective, a tiny retailer you've probably never heard of, on a backorder measured in months. Richards paid fifty pounds for his copy.

We mostly live in a world of abundance entertainment where you can stream virtually everything you want at a moments notice, or get Amazon to deliver it to you tomorrow. Board games are one of the last corners of culture where the hottest thing in the hobby might simply not be for sale. A strange little game about spirits lands on everyone's must-have list and then vanishes for a year. It’s the nature of a market that still has such a very strong indy creator culture to it that we love. But it also often means some of the best games only get a single print run.

Which makes finally getting it to the table feel like an accomplishment on its own, and a perfect example of why a place like Tabletop Library is around.