Daniel (@dungeondive) opens his Etherfields coverage with preliminary thoughts after the tutorial mission, and he leads with two heavy frustrations before the praise. First, the board: a portrait-oriented six-fold panel so badly conceived that he’s banished it to the garage, considering cutting it into three pieces — it hangs off his table and pushes the play area out of reach. Second, the onboarding: cards shipped in baffling reverse order, unlabelled dividers, and a rulebook so weak that the community’s four-page quick-start guide does the job better. For a game whose campaign hinges on adding exactly the right cards at the right time, that sloppiness worries him.
And yet — he’s hooked. The tutorial alone did something almost no narrative board game has managed: it gave him pause, veering into unexpectedly metafictional territory. Etherfields is a narrative campaign game where you play dreamers descending into dreamscapes to solve mysteries, unsure even of who you are. It’s deck-construction (not deck-building) across set-collection challenges, with a turn deck dictating the game’s moves, unlockable masks, wisdom cards that teach rules as you play, and a slumber deck of side encounters. His advice: read the rulebook, stumble through the tutorial, read it again — then it clicks.
Have you ever powered through a rough out-of-box experience because the game underneath won you over — or do first impressions tend to settle it for you?