I’m a big fan of weird dueling games—Ortus Regni is one of my all timers—and if they allow for multiplayer silliness, all the better. Etherstone manages to be a complete product, thoughtful, novel, and at times, surprisingly clever. If nothing else, it gets props for not just being a blatant money-grab, instead offering a self-contained and compelling game that has a lot of depth.

The conceit

The lore of Etherstone is not that compelling, mainly because the art is so expressive that I don’t really end up caring much about whatever the story is. It’s evoking druids and biopunk—wild and crazy characters collecting various blobs of mana and using them to bring in more characters so you can battle shared threats, etc., etc.

Mechanically, at the beginning of the game you’ll select a leader card from two that you’re dealt randomly. This will give you a starting distribution of resources. From there, you’ll draft seven cards from a large deck. Once you’ve done both of these things, it’s time to duel.

Etherstone captures one of my favorite underutilized mechanisms in gaming—the point buy. Though it’s a standard card draft that you see in many games, the fact that you’re only getting seven cards to play the entire session with…

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