Board game review of Eternitium: Deckbuilder for every era?

Deck building is one of the most popular mechanisms in the board game world. It can be combined in various ways, but unlike many other mechanisms, it also works excellently on its own. Pure deck builders are particularly easy to take with you, usually require little knowledge of the rules and can be played in under 30 minutes. With Eternitium, Ornament Games from Cologne have grabbed just such a compact deck builder, translated it, optimized the material and will be making the game even more attractive. GAME in Essen have in your luggage.

In spring came ChronoFall a large cooperative game about time travel at Ornament Games. During the prototype test games in February they already teased that the next new product would also be related to time travel. At the Spiel Doch! trade fair, a banner with artwork by Eternitium.

In this little deck builder, players try to find the legendary Eternitium Crystal before anyone else. To do this, they use portals to travel to different eras and follow the trail of the crystal until it can finally be found.

Classic deck building

Anyone who is generally familiar with deck builders will have no difficulty in Eternitium to find your way around.

Each turn begins by taking another portal card from the display in addition to the five cards you have in your hand for each turn. There are two cards of each of the four portal shapes per person at the start of the game.

Now you can play as many cards as you like. The portal cards allow you to travel to the corresponding eras. They all have their own stack of eras, the top of which is face up at the beginning of the game. All other cards are face down and can only be turned over with card effects.
If you play a portal with the same shape as the top age card, you can discard that age card. You can also try your luck with a face-down age card, but you run the risk of only being able to draw four cards instead of five at the end of your turn if you play the wrong portal.

Once you have played all the cards you want to play in this round, you throw the rest onto your discard pile. You can now buy a new card from the display. There are advanced and basic technologies. The technologies are "paid for" in the form of age cards, which are placed from the face-up display onto your age pile. The newly acquired technology goes onto your draw pile.

At the end of your turn, you draw new hand cards for the next round and it is the next person's turn.

The game ends as soon as a person has uncovered the Eternitium Crystal on their own player board where the last Age card was discarded. The current round is still completed.

If several people find the crystal in the same round, the person who has acquired the most technologies wins.

Information about Eternitium

Conclusion

There are no real surprises here in terms of game mechanics. With the classic deck building process of simply playing as many cards from your hand as possible, you travel through the ages and hunt for the Eternitium crystal. The small push-your-luck element of playing portals on face-down age cards brings a nice dynamic, especially in larger groups and towards the end, which lightens the atmosphere.

You also have to be willing to play casually. Eternitium is not a "serious" game in which you can easily beat the other players with the perfect tactics. You also need a bit of luck to draw the right cards at the right time and to gamble on an era symbol that is still hidden. With the short playing time of easily under 30 minutes, none of this is a problem. We actually always have several games Eternitium played one after the other. You want to get revenge.

Ornament Games has made many improvements to the rules and game materials during localization. The rules have been made more understandable and clear, the icons on the cards are easier to see (even if this hasn't made them any better in terms of content) and the localization includes an icon overview for all players. In addition, the personal board has been made smaller and a representation of the turn sequence has been added. The smaller board also makes the box at least a third smaller and therefore much easier to transport.

Visually, the game is really nice. The icons are difficult to understand without the game aid, but luckily the game aid is included in the German edition. After a few games, you don't need it anymore. For a beginner-friendly deck builder, however, some text (both card names and effects) would be a more pleasant solution.
The illustrations on the cards are great and thematically appropriate. The player board is also very nicely and, above all, functionally designed, so that everything can be laid out in a very tidy manner in front of you.

The flow of the game is very pleasant. Even if you and/or your fellow players make moves with lots of combos, you never have much downtime. The closer you get to the end, the more the tension increases, especially when several people are equally close to winning.

In the long run, the simplicity becomes noticeable when you play it frequently. You can feel that there aren't very many different technologies in the game. Despite this, the game has become one of my favorite fillers. The game needed some time to unfold and to clear up minor doubts, but then it became more entertaining with each game. I particularly like the different ways of dealing with the face-down cards without relying too heavily on technologies that turn over age cards. After the first few games, you hardly believe the multitude of promising combos is possible.

Interesting solo mode

Solo is also possible Eternitium play wonderfully. Here you have eight rounds to find the crystal. For solo players, the rules remain the same.
You play against or with an AI whose deck is made up of four technologies (nine cards in total).

In the additional sixth step of the turn, you draw the top card of the AI ​​deck and carry out the action. The AI's effects always bring a bit of chaos into your game and don't exactly make the search for the Eternitium Crystal any easier.

There are ten different missions available for solo play, each offering a different challenge and thus adding variety.

Overall is Eternitium a positive surprise for me. After the first few games I was still a bit skeptical, but when you discover the different combo possibilities and work with the technologies, the game becomes very addictive for me, especially in solo mode.

Eternitium*

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Price22,90

Eternitium

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