You Have to Stay Flexible in The Vale of Eternity

I’ve reviewed games for Paste for 10 years now, with nearly 400 reviews between here and my personal blog, and if one thing has changed over that period, it’s that I have really come to crave the new and interesting. I don’t need another game of forest creatures or another Wingspan knock-off about birds, or another table-hog of space exploration, or another deckbuilder with the same old action/buying mechanics. I’ve gotten more than a little jaded, unfortunately, because there’s so much sameness in the field. Of course, this is a long-winded way of getting into a review of a game that does something I haven’t seen before: The Vale of Eternity, a light engine-builder with a novel way of having you buy and play your cards, that came out around February of this year in the U.S. In each round of The Vale of Eternity, players will claim two cards in the market via a snake draft, and then choose whether to “tame” the cards into their hands for free or sell them for their listed sale value. Then each player chooses cards to “summon” to their play area by paying the summoning cost, which differs from the sale price, but the number of cards you may have in front of you is limited to the round number—thus in round six you can have a maximum of six cards in front of you, even if you can afford to summon more. So you can claim a card in one round with the intention of playing it much later in the game, once you have the gems to buy it and its point value may be much higher. Cards in your play area then have powers that you either activate once upon summoning, every round after the tame/sell/summon phase, or that just provide ongoing benefits. There’s another action type called recovering, where you can take a card from your tableau back into your hand; if you pay its summoning cost, you can play it again and thus reactivate that one-time power. For example, there’s one card that gives you two value-1 gems when summoned, but that also allows you to recover it in the activation phase, so if you have the room on your tableau, you can summon it in every round, take two gems, and then put it back in your hand. (It’s not as powerful as it sounds.) The payment system is the one quirk in the game that I don’t really get, as it seems designed to frustrate you—although I also see that it becomes a necessary part of the planning within the game. The gems that form the currency in the game come in denominations of one, three, and six, and when you summon a card, you must pay gems equal to or greater than its summoning value … but this store does not give you change, so if you pay a purple gem (value six) for a card with a summoning cost of four, you lose that extra value. You’re also limited to four gems at any time, with the option to discard a gem if you get to replace it with a higher-valued one. The twist here is that there are cards that let you bend these rules—expanding your gem limit to six, making your value-three gems worth six and your value-six gems worth three, and so on—if you’re lucky enough to get them. For example, the card Charybdis lets you discard a blue gem, with a purchasing power of three, to gain five points. The card itself costs five to summon. In one game I played, I tamed Charybdis into my hand in round one, then in round two, I sold two cards from the market, gaining a value-six purple gem and a value-three blue gem. I used the purple gem to summon Charybdis, and then activated it to discard the blue gem for those 5 points—and did so every turn from there on out except one because I couldn’t sell anything for a blue gem in that round. In the last round, I tamed Undine Queen, which gives you a blue gem for free in every round; had I gotten that earlier, I would have generated 5 points for free in every round. It felt a little like money laundering, but with gems, and victory points, and no threat of prosecution. And that’s kind of the crux of the game: There’s a good bit of luck involved that can easily mess with your strategy, so you have to keep your strategy flexible to adjust to the cards that are available to you. There are certain card combinations that are quite powerful, allowing you to generate more points each round as you activate them in the right sequence. There are even some cards that let you steal a point from an opponent, or force one opponent to discard a card they’ve already played, which gives the game a little more interaction after the card draft. The game ends after 10 rounds, or once one player has reached 60 points, so it plays in a half hour, and the fantasy-like art helps give it the veneer of a simpler game. It’s got a much higher cognitive load than that; it requires you to think on your feet about your options, sometimes even shifting your plans multiple times in a turn because another player claimed the card you thought you were getting. It’s frustrating, but mostly in a good way, because it’s so tight, and when you build something that works, it’s extremely satisfying.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.