Vale of Eternity Review – Mythical Monsters and Creatures Galore!

Disclaimer: Vale of Eternity was provided for free by Let’s Play Games, a Australian and New Zealand board game distributor. They’re also putting Aussie board gamers in touch with their local board game stores through the website Local Game Stores. As always, all opinions in this review are my own.

After two weeks of work travel and prepping for a long-overdue colonoscopy (getting old is a thrill), I needed a serious escape. What better way than diving into Vale of Eternity, one of Dude Take Your Turn’s Best New Games of 2024.

Huge thanks to Let’s Play Games for the copy. They’re an Australian board game distributor that does fantastic work promoting games and supporting local shops. Definitely worth checking out!

How to play

Vale of Eternity plays out over 10 rounds, during which you’ll tame, sell, or summon mythical creatures from the Japanese Kappa to the Greek Medusa. Along the way, you’ll collect and spend magical stones, trigger card effects and earn victory points.

Each round starts with a drafting phase where players “hunt” for creatures. Except it’s less of a hunt and more of a casual stroll down the mythical creature aisle at the local supermarket.

You draw and place two creature cards per player in the centre of the table. Then, starting with the first player, everyone places a token on a creature. Once everyone has placed one token, the process repeats in reverse order.

After this draft, players take turns performing any combination of these actions:

• Sell – Trade a creature for magical stones, with its value based on on its elemental type.
• Tame – Keep the creature in your hand for later summoning.
• Summon – Pay its magical stone cost to bring it into your play area.
• Remove – Pay magical stones to discard a creature already in your area.

Each creature has its own abilities that activate when summoned. Some of these activations are immediate effects, others offer passive bonuses, and some trigger at the end of each round during the resolution phase.

A quirky restriction within Vale of Eternity is its currency system. There are only three denominations of magic stones (1, 3, and 6), and you can never hold more than four stones at a time. Whether that’s four value-one stones, or four value-six stones, it doesn’t matter.

On top of that, summoning a creature is a no-change transaction. So if you only have value-six stones, then you’re going to have to spend one even if your creature only costs three. Whoever’s running this summoning ritual is definitely skimming off the top.

After 10 rounds, the player with the most impressive (and point-packed) mythical menagerie wins.

Building a better beast machine

The difference between a good engine builder and a forgettable one is how well it sparks your imagination. The best ones let you glance at a random spread of cards and immediately start seeing the potential. Picturing combos, chaining effects, and dreaming up ways to squeeze out every last point.

In this regard, Vale of Eternity smashes it.

During our first game, every new card that hit the table had me rethinking my strategy. I stumbled into a devastatingly effective combo. A creature that flooded me with low-value magic stones and another that rewarded me with points for each one I played. It clicked immediately, and from that moment, I was hooked.

Each of the five elemental creature types comes with its own distinct abilities and art style. One of the coolest touches of Vale of Eternity is how each element is illustrated by a different artist. The artwork remains cohesive, but subtle stylistic differences between elements give them even more personality beyond their mechanics.

But you’re not here to look at cards, you’re here to put them together in fun and surprising ways to get those darn victory points! Now I’m used to low-interaction tableau builders, where you get a set of cards and have to make the best of what you’re dealt.

Here, though, you’re drafting cards alongside other players, which means they can—either through strategic brilliance or sheer dumb luck—snatch away the key pieces of your grand plan. This forces you to do some serious prioritisation, weighing which cards you must grab versus the ones you hope will still be there after everyone has picked through them.

This drafting is a great addition to the genre, and it scales well with different player counts. The more players, the more choices, and the more chances for heartbreak.

That first game left me buzzing, and after several more plays, that excitement hasn’t faded. But it has evolved. Vale of Eternity adds some interesting restrictions—like a cap on the number of creatures you can summon and a strict four-stone limit on your magical currency. These little constraints force you to adapt and rethink your approach. For some, this will make the puzzle all the more satisfying, others will run into frustration.

The joy (and frustration) of limits

Every board game is a system of rules you agree to play within, and winning means mastering those constraints. Vale of Eternity adds more restrictions than your typical engine builder, and whether you enjoy these extra limitations will determine if this game is right for you.

Personally, I found them to be both a refreshing change on tableau-building and an occasional source of frustration.

In most engine builders, my first priority is setting up a steady income and using that economy to buy powerful, point-scoring cards. But here, since you can sell creatures directly from the market, the game hands you an economy right from the start. You just have to be willing to part with the creatures you’ve drafted. A surprisingly difficult decision made harder because everything synergises so well that letting go of a card feels like shutting the door on an opportunity.

This shifted how I approached the game. In my first few playthroughs, I stubbornly tried to build an engine, focusing on creatures that generated magic stones each turn. By contrast, in my last play, I was ruthlessly selling creatures left and right, cashing in on one-time effects that chained together in unexpectedly satisfying ways.

Now it’s not just about selling your creatures, it’s about selling the right creatures at the right time. Selling a fire creature, for example, gives you four single-value stones, while selling a dragon nets you a single six-value stone. With a hard cap of four stones at any given time, managing which stones you acquire is just as critical as deciding what to sell.

I enjoyed this puzzle and again, it’s a something I hadn’t seen before but worked surprisingly well. The game’s other major restriction—the cap on summoned creatures—was a much tougher pill to swallow.

In about half of my games, my economy outpaced the number of creatures I could summon. So I’d find myself sitting on a pile of magic stones with no way to use them efficiently. Sure, careful planning could avoid this, but when it happened, it severely diminished the back half of the game.

This was especially noticeable because most engine builders reward you for getting your economy humming by letting you go all-in on powerful late-game plays. Vale of Eternity, on the other hand, slams the brakes just as your engine is revving up—one or two turns before you’d expect to cash in big.

That said, Vale of Eternity remains a stand out entry in the tableau-building genre, offering satisfying combos within a visually stunning theme. It’s easy to see why it landed on Dave’s Top 10 of 2024. If you embrace its unique restrictions, the pay-off is worth it. If not… well, frustration may just be part of the experience.