Board Game: Eschaton

Plans for Predation laid low yesterday, so we played a board game (well, a card game. I mean, it has a board. Y'know) instead. 

The Game: Eschaton
The Publisher: Archon Games
Time: This game took us a few hours; if everyone knew it it'd go a little quicker, but not much
Players: Me, Travis, Gus, Megan, Jenn

Game Play: Eschaton is a deck-building game. The premise is that all the players are heads of cults, preparing for the return of the Dark Lord. You recruit cultists and get relics and monsters and so on to build up enough Favor to be the right hand of said Sauron-like guy. 

Like most deck-builders, you start with a small deck with enough oomph to get you started, and you deal yourself five cards every turn. Cultist cards (which make up the bulk of your deck) give you some amount of Zeal (which lets you draw more cards, cycling your deck faster), Divination (letting you draw from an Arcana deck, which gives you magic and creatures and so on), Influence (which lets you recruit more cultists, but also throw around plagues and curses) and Aggression (which lets you put troops on the board and move them around). You can also sacrifice your cards, meaning they don't come up in your deck anymore but they're still counted at the end of the game, which is a great way to get rid of cards that are useful early on but aren't so much as the game progresses.

Game board, conclave of cultists, etc.

Play proceeds in rounds (every player taking a turn = 1 round), and at the beginning of a new round you draw a card from the Event deck. This either gives you an Event (which are actually often beneficial and give you stuff) or an Omen (which gives you a task to complete before the next Omen arrives). Towards the bottom of the Event deck is Armageddon, at which point the game ends and you total your points. 

Deadly cultist leaders

My arch-nemesis

Like a lot of deck-builders, there are multiple approaches to strategy. You can build up your deck with relics and so on that give you points, which means focusing on Divination. You can try and conquer the board, which requires Aggression. You can send plagues (which kill off troops on the board) and curses (which reduce an opponent's Influence), but that costs your Influence, which means you won't have as much to spend on cultists. In our game, Travis won, but only because he'd picked up an Aura that doubled the point rewards for Relics and he'd picked up a shitload of Relics. If I'd been able to dispel that aura, I'd have won, and my strategy was chasing Omens. 

Opinions: So, I think the consensus was that the game has potential, but it's lacking in a lot of areas. For one thing, the player area boards are just shit.

So there's a space for your deck, and then the bigger space is the sacrificial pyre and a space for Auras and curses and so on. But no space for your discard pile, and the whole thing is two separate pieces, which does nothing to help organization. 

Also, the game is just so damn grey. The only bits of color are the cubes, and the board has some design elements that matter (borders between territories) and a bunch more that don't (roads within and across territories, mountains, forests, etc.). Color would have done wonders toward differentiating them, and would have made the map, like, interesting to look at. Likewise, the font on the cards is really hard to read (it's not critical because of the way the cards are laid out, it's just annoying). 

Rules-wise...I dunno, I think it's fine. It's a solid enough deck-builder and I didn't feel while playing it that the result was arbitrary. There's always some first-time fumbles and it'd be interesting to play again with the same group and see if knowing the game improves it at all. I've played much worse deck-builders, but I've also played much better ones. 

Keep? Sure, for the moment.