The Final Gameplay Livestream is Live!
over 2 years ago – Wed, Aug 18, 2021 at 09:02:25 PM

Hi everyone!

The final gameplay livestream of the Kickstarter campaign is live! You can watch it right here:

I've had a great time watching Zach and Steven learn the game and explore the Valley. I hope you have too! As with the previous livestreams, I'll be in the YouTube chat along with the rest of the team to answer any questions you may have, or just to say hello. We hope to see you there!

Regional Manufacturing Stretch Goal Progress

We've made great progress this week toward unlocking regional manufacturing. As of this morning, the U.S. and Canada were less than 100 backers away from ensuring a print run here in the States. Europe has more of the mountain yet to climb, but the total number of backers in Europe has increased significantly the past couple of days. If we can make a strong enough push here in the last 24 hours, and come close enough to the target, we'll be able to keep climbing that mountain in the pledge manager, and see if we can make a production in Europe happen before it's all said and done.

I will update the numbers in the morning and then again after the campaign concludes tomorrow afternoon. They're looking great!

After nearly three weeks, it feels surreal to be nearing the end of the campaign. Thank you all so much for making it such an amazing and wonderful experience. It's been a lot of fun.

Until tomorrow!

Much love,

Andrew

Add-On Details (plus some new ones!)
over 2 years ago – Wed, Aug 18, 2021 at 08:49:35 PM

Hi everyone!

We've received lots of requests during the campaign for more information about a couple of the add-ons, and I’m here to give it to you. When the pledge manager opens, you’ll have the opportunity to browse at your leisure, but here’s something to tide you over while we get it ready.

Also, as my knowledge of Kickstarter terminology and colloquialisms grows, my understanding of the term “Kickstarter exclusive” has grown as well. In my mind, a Kickstarter exclusive has always meant a piece of content (or a component) that is exclusive to the "core" game. I’ve recently learned, however, that’s not entirely true! The term can also apply to add-ons. As such, please note that there are a few add-ons that will be available only to backers (that’s you!). Please see below (or the updated graphic on the project page) for the full list.

As we enter the last few days of the campaign, I want to thank you all again for your continued support and enthusiasm. After a couple of months of 12 to 15 hour work days, I’m starting to feel it a bit (just a bit!), but the outpouring of support and excitement from you all has been the fuel that’s kept me going. Thank you!

Much love,

Andrew

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Kickstarter Exclusive Add-ons:

• Ranger Playmat
• Valley Playmat
• World of Earthborne Rangers Art & Lore Book
• Valley Trail Map
• Deluxe Ranger Tokens

Non-Exclusive Add-ons:

• Ranger Card Doubler
• Legacy of the Ancestors Campaign Expansion
• Deluxe Energy Tokens

Legacy of the Ancestors Campaign Expansion 

Legacy of the Ancestors features a new story arc that utilizes both the cards and map from the core set as well as the new cards and new maps from the campaign expansion. In it, you’ll journey beyond, above, and below the Valley to explore strange new places and forge new paths.

Contains:

• New Landscape Cards
• New Trail Sets
• New Weather Cards
• New Mission Cards
• New “Pivotal” Location Sets (for both core set and campaign expansion locations)
• New additions to the “Valley” Set (NPCs and animals)
• New Reward Cards
• New Role Cards (for the core set specializations)
• New Campaign Guide (featuring new trail maps)
   

World of Earthborne Rangers Art & Lore Book 

I think I’m just as excited to work on the World of Earthborne Rangers Art & Lore Book as I am the game itself. As you might expect, the World of Earthborne Rangers will feature a lot of full-page artwork. It will also feature several concept sketches so you can get an inside look as to how our early ideas informed the final artwork. You’ll also be treated to several pieces of short fiction, excerpts from in-world documents, and commentary by the Valley’s many colorful characters. Lastly, you can look forward to detailed descriptions of the people, villages, points of interest, flora, fauna, and ruin sites of the Valley. If you're familiar with the writing found in setting sourcebooks for the world’s most popular roleplaying game, you’ll find something very similar in the World of Earthborne Rangers.

New Add-Ons!

Valley Trail Map

Early in the campaign, several backers suggested that we look into making a poster-sized map of the Valley. I thought that sounded like a great idea, so that’s precisely what we did!

The core set comes with an 11” x 17” map of the Valley as part of the campaign guide, but for those of you who would like something more substantial and thematic, we are now offering a 16.5” x 24.4” map of the Valley, presented as a trail map similar to one you might receive when you visit a National Park. On one side you’ll find the Valley map, on the other you will find a handy guide to exploring the wilderness, including points of interest as well as notes on the Valley’s many flora and fauna.

Deluxe Ranger Tokens

Many months ago, we began exploring environmentally friendly options for miniatures, but had a difficult time of it, as you might imagine. We explored a number of options from bioplastics, to vegetable-based resins, to recycled plastic, but none of which could be used effectively for miniatures.

Of the workable materials available to us, none came close to adhering to Earthborne's mission save one: pewter. On the plus-side, pewter (an alloy that is primarily made of tin) is imminently reusable. You can melt it down and reuse it over and over again, which is great from the perspective of sustainability. On the negative side, metal mining (like all mining) is unequivocally terrible for the environment. As such, I did not feel comfortable supporting that industry directly by dealing in native metal. I assumed prior to the launch of the campaign that we would need to set the dream of miniatures aside and continue to do more research.

Last week, however, I received some exciting news. Because of the personal relationships between the U.K.-based casting facility with whom I have been speaking and the artisanal metal shops near to them, we were able to strike a deal to purchase reclaimed metal from small craft workshops to create these Ranger miniatures. The metal we’re using is 100% “waste” or "off-cut" material that would otherwise have been discarded. I love that we're able to keep some waste out of the scrapheap and turn it instead into a set of lead-free, pewter Ranger miniatures. I'm looking forward to learning what other "waste" materials are out there, just waiting for new purpose.

The Importance of Solo Play
over 2 years ago – Tue, Aug 17, 2021 at 02:54:26 PM

Hi everyone!

Throughout the first half of the campaign, we’ve received lots of questions about solo play. How good is it? Do I have to play two-handed? Is solo-play an afterthought?

Reading these questions, I realize that I could have done a much better job of communicating the merits of solo play in Earthborne Rangers. Saying that your game is playable 1 – 4 clearly doesn’t instill confidence in the minds of solo players. Perhaps rightly so. Some games have a “solo mode,” a derivation of the primary experience. Others can be played solo. That is, you can play by yourself and control multiple characters. Almost every co-op game falls into this category. But that’s not at all what solo gamers are looking for, at least not this solo gamer.

One of my goals with Earthborne Rangers was to make an adventure card game that could be played solo. Truly solo. One deck--one Ranger out for a walk, alone in the wilderness.

When The Lord of the Rings TCG first released, I was incredibly excited. My youngest son had just been born, and I had no time for gaming. Here was a game -- and an intricate card game at that -- that I could play on my own, at home, whenever I wanted. I could step away to change diapers, then return to my boat on the Anduin, the servants of the Enemy gathering menacingly on the shores. I was in love.

But the more I played, the more I realized that in order to succeed (especially in later scenarios), I couldn’t roll with a single group of heroes. I simply didn’t have the tools that I needed in my deck to overcome the challenges set before me. I need to “two-hand” it. That is, play with two decks at once. Some people enjoy playing this way, but for me it’s just too much to process. After a while I end up forgetting what I’ve done and what I haven’t, and I lose track of the rhythm of the game.

Over the past year-plus of development, I’ve done almost all of my personal playtesting solo. As such, my desire to create an enjoyable solo experience has driven a significant number of revisions to the design and to the card pool.

In Earthborne Rangers it’s very easy to build an effective solo deck while still being able to create a fun and thematic character. Each background and specialization has an array of cards that can help prepare you for any situation, and as you progress through the campaign, you’ll gain access to cards that can shore up any deficiencies that you feel your Ranger may possess. When you play, you should never feel like you need someone else there to help you because you’ll be able to build your deck in such a way that you’ll always have the tools you need to progress.

In addition to the card abilities at your disposal, because of how the narrative actions are constructed (ENERGY + APPROACH), you’ll have a lot of ways that you can prepare your deck as a solo player. When you play, you’ll always have access to at least one energy token of every type, and since the approach icons are peppered throughout the card pool, you can smooth out the approach icon curve of your deck with any number of cards. Having a good spread of approach icons can put you in a position where you can be within striking distance of succeeding at any test regardless of your aspect spread.

There are a few cards that are particularly good in solo play that you’ll almost certainly be tempted to include, but you won’t get lost in the woods without them. You’ll have the freedom to create the solo-Ranger you want to create without relying on solo “auto-includes.” As you play, you’ll find that there are no deadends--the game will never stop you dead in your tracks simply because you find yourself without the tools you need.

There may be some trails that will be more difficult to follow, or some mysteries that are more difficult to uncover, but it all feels very true to the solo experience. If in life, you find yourself wandering alone in the wilderness, with only yourself to rely upon, your journey would almost certainly be more difficult than if you were travelling with a group of friends. More difficult, yes,  but not definitely not impossible.

Until Monday!

Much love,

Andrew

Delivering the Narrative
over 2 years ago – Tue, Aug 17, 2021 at 10:51:18 AM

Hello, and welcome back to the Valley! Today's update is from Sam Gregor-Stewart, one of the co-developers of the Earthborne setting and the lead writer for the narrative elements of the campaign and game. Today he's going to talk about the supplementary narrative that forms the story of Earthborne Rangers.

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The year is 4439 C.R., though few know the ancient calendars well enough to keep the count.

On a continent once known as North America, in the foothills of a mountain range once known as the Rockies, your forebears settled in a place they called the Valley. The land would be unrecognizable to the people who lived there so long ago. New mountains rise in the distance. To the east, a vast inland sea floods the plains. Just beyond the Valley’s mouth, the unbroken expanse of the Verdessa swallows the ancient deserts. Strange and terrifying creatures stalk amongst the trees. And everywhere you look, the time-worn edifices of your ancestor’s Generational Projects dot the land, waiting to be explored.

The Valley (and the rest of the world of Earthborne) has been something that I’ve been developing with Andrew for over a year and a half now. While my talented colleagues have been focusing on making Earthborne Rangers into the best possible game, my focus has been to help Andrew turn the campaign into an equally compelling story.

That work resulted in absolute loads of background material, enough to fill a book! And while creating exactly that sort of setting guide is certainly in our plans, we didn’t want to overwhelm players with loads of information before they ever got to draw their first hand of cards. So early on, we decided that our setting would be introduced slowly and organically, over the course of the campaign.

As you play Earthborne Rangers, you will be immersed in the setting in three ways. The first is mechanical. The team has already spent plenty of time showing off the game mechanics, so you’ve seen how the gameplay really emphasizes the idea of traveling through the Valley, exploring new locales, and engaging with challenges with a variety of approaches. It even shows up in the minor details, like how most card actions include a sentence to say what you’re doing in the narrative, rather than just what mechanical action you take to accomplish a task.

The second is through simple flavor text. Card real estate is always at a premium, so any flavor text we include has to be short and impactful. Flavor text appears most often on Ranger cards, so we wanted to make sure that it defines your character’s actions and personality as well as give you more information about the setting.

In some cards, like Balance, we want to use evocative language to describe your character’s actions. The words we choose are used to convey a mood; in this case focus and peace with your surroundings. In other cards, like Trail Mix, we describe the items your character carries with them. Food may not seem like a big deal, but if we just left the card without a description, how many people would think of trail mix as the peanuts, raisins, and M&M candies you buy in a store, with maybe an energy bar and an apple? Instead, we present some of the food that people in the Valley eat, and it can tell you a lot about your character’s lifestyle. Pemmican takes time and effort to prepare, but it remains edible for months (or even years) without artificial preservatives. At the same time, fruits like moss cherries and vegetables like starpeas remind you that many things are unfamiliar in this world.

The third is through the use of the accompanying campaign documents.

In the right corner Sil Belai’s card is a reference to a read aloud entry in the campaign document. These entries give us leeway to do a bit more writing than would fit in the card, explaining your character’s actions and describing what they see. They also explain what you can do with the card you’ve just encountered.

150 - Sil Belai, Artist

As you follow the path, you see a middle-aged woman in a green dress and wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat perched on a rock a few meters above the trail. She sees you at the same time and waves.

“Hullo, rangers!” she calls out. You ask her what she’s doing, and she holds up a sketchbook and charcoal sticks. “I’m trying to paint as much of the valley as I can. This view is beautiful, but I could really use a person in it to help with scale. Do you think you could just stand...right...there? For a minute? Now...try and look...adventurous.”

None of the entries are very long, since you’re going to be reading multiple entries over the course of the game and we don’t want to bog down the experience. However, those multiple entries paint a picture of the Valley, its inhabitants, and its wonders and dangers that’s almost as evocative as one of Sil Belai’s paintings.

The other reason that we use a campaign document rather than a card is that it allows us to change the story as your adventure progresses. First, some entries may redirect you to different descriptions depending on what you’ve written down in your campaign logbook. If you’ve helped characters in the past, they may respond to you differently when you encounter them again. They may even ask new favors of you, or give you some sort of reward for your efforts.

In addition, it allows us to change the story in the long term. As this campaign plays out over multiple acts, the journal entry numbers on the cards remain the same, but the entries themselves can change from encounter to encounter or mission to mission. It might be as simple as Sil Belai recognizing you as notable rangers the next time she sees you, or greeting you as old friends. Or perhaps she tells you about a strange encounter she had earlier, that sets the course on an entirely new adventure.

Design Notes – Complexity and Cognitive Load
over 2 years ago – Tue, Aug 17, 2021 at 10:38:44 AM

Hi everyone!

Andrew Fischer here again to talk about some elements of the game's design. Today's update gets a bit in the weeds on some of the design side of things, so I hope you'll indulge me this more technical article.

Before we dive in though, we have today's updates to the regional manufacturing stretch goal numbers! 

We're closing in on U.S. production run! You'll also notice that we decided to merge the EU and UK productions together. After talking with all of you and considering it, we've decided that combining those two groups gives us the best shot of being able to achieve the numbers we need to do a printing in Europe.

We'll continue updating you on these numbers in each update. With that, let's talk a bit about how we approached complexity in Earthborne Rangers.

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I’d like to start of today’s update with a screenshot from one of the recent streams of the game where Team Covenant got a lot of cards on the board:

Woah! That’s a lot of words on the board!

Earthborne Rangers can look a bit intimidating when you first sit down to play it. There are a lot of words on each individual card. Taken as a whole, a collection of cards like the picture above can seem like a lot. Based on that, I’ve gotten a lot of questions from people asking how complex the game is, and a lot of raised eyebrows when I answer “pretty simple actually.”

Let me explain.

To best talk about complexity in Earthborne Rangers, I am going to borrow a few terms that were coined by Mark Rosewater, lead designer of Magic the Gathering, and used by him over the years in discussing the game. (Both this article and this article touch on the subject if you’re curious). These terms are comprehension complexity, board complexity, and strategic complexity

Comprehension complexity refers to the measure of how complex an individual card is in isolation from the rest of the game. When a player reads through a card’s text, how easy is it for them to understand what the card does at face value? How easy would it be for them to remember that? How intuitive are the effects?

Board complexity is the measure of how complex the state of the entire game board is with lots of cards in play. This metric looks at how many different potential interactions and overlapping effects there are. It is the measure of the cognitive load that players need to keep in their head to correctly process the game state on the table.

Strategic complexity is how difficult it is to understand the optimal strategic use of your cards and choices in the game. It is a measure of how much calculation and different considerations there are to know what cards to put in your deck, when to play them vs when to wait, and how to approach the game for the best chance of winning.

Let’s take a look at Earthborne Rangers through the lens of Mark’s three types of complexity and talk about why we made the decisions we did about where our complexity sits.

Comprehension Complexity in EBR  

As you probably guessed from the opening to this update, the path cards in Earthborne Rangers have higher-than-average comprehension complexity. There is a lot of text to read when you put out a new card, and a lot of the path cards have 3 different abilities on them between actions you can perform and challenge effects that can trigger. The ranger cards that players are looking at their hands are designed with a considerably lower comprehension complexity on average, but we designed path cards to be a bit more complicated. This is a deliberate choice to achieve a couple goals, and we made sure to approach it carefully to avoid letting it get too overwhelming.

Earthborne Ranger is a card game, but it’s also a roleplaying game. We want to create a world for players to explore that feels real, and reality is messy and complicated. A simple card may create an elegant mechanical experience, but it doesn’t really model the complexity of a human being. In path card design, we’ve really prioritized theme-first card design (what Mark calls “top-down” design). We are trying to create cards that actually feel like the thing they are modeling, and a bit of complexity for the sake of theme helps make them feel more alive and multi-dimensional.

In addition to trying to make each card feel realistic, one of our main goals for the project was to evoke the feeling of a living, breathing ecosystem on the board. We wanted predators to hunt other beings, herbivores to graze on plants, and rockslides and other natural events to interact with it all. We could have put these interactions in the core rules or on the landscapes, but then they would be dependable, and take away from the feeling of discovery. By putting them onto the cards themselves, we allow for emergent interactions to emerge as you see different cars paired against each other each time you play.

Finally, we’ve done a lot of work to help make this comprehension complexity easily digestible by the player. In Mark’s Lenticular Design article that I linked at the beginning, one of his rules on tackling complexity is that “Players Will Try to Use the Cards to Match Their Perceived Function.” This means that players will try to interact with a card based on how they understand that object to work in real life. We lean into this hard with our theme-first cards. Our goal is for people to get done reading any given card in the game and say “oh yeah, it makes sense that a [insert card name here] would work like that.” That kind of intuitive theme-first function can help with comprehension.

Board Complexity in EBR  

When I tell people that Earthborne Rangers is a relatively simple game, the board complexity is really where I think that simplicity shines. That is not to say that our board doesn’t have a lot of potential (as mentioned above when talking about the living ecology), but we employ a couple key techniques to keep the cognitive load on the players as low as possible so that they can focus on what their ranger wants to do and having a relaxing time in the Valley.

First and foremost, almost every section of rules text on path cards are used at contextually triggered moments. What this means is that we try to avoid having a lot of state-based, passive rules affecting everything on the board that players have to keep in their mind. Instead, almost every ability is either an action that players can perform on their turn, or a challenge effect that fires when a player takes a test. Each ability is also marked with distinct graphic design to make them easily identifiable from “table height” without reading every card.

The result of this is that players only need to worry about a percentage of the total rules text based on what they are doing, and it’s easy to see which text they need to care about. Performing an action? Pursue your options around the board. Executing challenge effects? Look for everything labeled with a mountain and a blue background. This way, players can put those abilities to the back of their mind until they come up, greatly reducing their cognitive load during play.

Secondly, we use consistent theming and styling to make these abilities intuitively learnable over time. Red crest challenge effects on predators will always do the same “flavor” of ability, and actions that use certain aspects will often do similar types of effects. This, paired with the theme-first card designs mentioned above, means that after only a session or two, players can build an intuitive expectation of what the board is going to be doing, which greatly streamlines the experience for them.

Strategic Complexity in EBR  

Finally, we come to strategic complexity. This type of complexity is not as intimidating as the others, and most games strive for it. This is an area that I think our game has in spades. Learning how to use your ranger deck to best manipulate this changing environment, and trying to learn all the different path deck combinations and their emergent behaviors is something that will take an entire campaign, if not more.

While our approach to board complexity allows for players to put certain effects out of their minds as their learning, as they become more experienced, they can start taking on more and more of the cognitive load of remembering all the different effects on the board. Once an Earthborne Rangers player is experienced, they will start planning ahead based on their knowledge of the type of terrain their hiking and playing elements of the environment off of each other to make their travels run more smoothly. One really fun thing about working with emergent systems like these is that even we as the designers are sometimes surprised and delighted by an interaction we didn’t anticipate showing up during testing.

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Thank you for joining me for this deeper dive into some of the design ethos behind the game. I hope it has given you a bit of appreciation for why we feel that more text-heavy path cards serve the experience we are trying to create, and how we are designing the board state to reduce the cognitive load on players.

I know that design topics surrounding complexity and elegance can often be controversial, so I’m more than happy to chat more about it with you all in the comments! Leave your questions or comments down below and I'll jump in to discuss when I have time.