Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
A new Earthborne Rangers campaign? You don’t have to tell me twice. It is hard to get me to play the same game more than a few times, but I will drop any and everything to spend more time in—or, in this case, under—the Valley.
While the base game of Earthborne Rangers—one of the greatest gaming experiences of my life, and an experience with which this review will assume you are familiar—takes place across a wide range of beautiful landscapes, Legacy of the Ancestors sends players into the depths of the Arcology, the ruins of a lost civilization that used to inhabit the Valley. This is the sensible choice, a natural development coming out of the first game. The first campaign leaves the Arcology, a consistent splash of harder sci-fi tech in a sea of solarpunk, barely explained, and the underground tunnels are as strong a contrast in setting as it’s possible to have. No more sweeping vistas for you, no no. Best you can hope for is a spot of bioluminescence.
“We Got Distracted by the Ooze”
The cornerstones of what make Earthborne Rangers great are still here. The caverns of the Arcology teem with life and discoveries. There are more mushrooms than you can shake a stick at. Many of the standout characters from the base game reappear, which I didn’t necessarily expect. But something feels different. To my mind, something feels off, but that may be a matter of preference.
Everything circles back to one core problem: the feeling of open and joyful exploration is diminished. In an early session, while searching for a piece of gear necessary to proceed further into the underground, we got distracted by a trail of ooze. Getting caught up by a new discovery is the ideal Earthborne Rangers experience. I want to follow the ooze, and I want to follow it every time. The ooze led to a discovery that led to a side quest that led to a moment so sweet that it made me tear up. That is the apex of what makes Earthborne so rewarding. 5/5 sticky droplets.
But then the wheels came off. At the beginning of the next session, we remembered that we’d been to the spot where we found the ooze, but we forgot we’d been immediately distracted by said ooze. We thought we’d explored the location thoroughly, so, with nothing to guide us, we headed in the opposite direction. We spent three full sessions stuck in a loop that could not be broken. We covered the same locations over and over, fruitlessly, constantly coming up empty.
Legacy of the Ancestors is inherently more of a linear experience than the first campaign. The structure of the Arcology itself, with its locked doors, requires that kind of writing, but there are tradeoffs that come with that choice. When it goes well, you get the same hit of dopamine that you get from a Roguelike, the knowledge that an area previously inaccessible to you is now open for business. But that means the game runs a risk it never did in the Breath of the Wild-esque open world of the first campaign: you can get stuck. That doesn’t happen in the Earthborne Rangers I know and love. You don’t get “stuck.” You don’t feel like nothing is happening. If anything, the opposite problem is more common. You find yourself with too many boxes to check and not enough time in which to check them. The Valley is full of options and distractions. You inevitably go off course, but when you do, you veer onto a new path instead of into a ditch.
More than that, those sessions stumbling through the dark were, frankly, grueling. The Arcology is difficult. It’s easier to get hurt. The cards in the Path Deck are busier, with more token-based effects and more intra-card combos. I more regularly have to take a second to review what a card does when it comes onto the table. There’s more fiddliness. It’s easier to lose track of an effect, or to miss something. The table gets much more crowded, much more quickly. There’s a lot more sweating. That all adds to the overhead and makes it harder to lose yourself in the story and the world. I don’t mind Legacy of the Ancestors being a more difficult game than its predecessor, but I am thrown by the extent to which it feels more like a game, if you take my meaning.
Legacy of the Ancestors will appeal more to certain types of players than it did to my group. We love Earthborne Rangers for the sense of discovery and exploration, for the ability to travel pleasantly through a valley with the odd sudden explosion of difficulty. The structure and experience of Legacy of the Ancestors feel closer to Arkham Horror: The Card Game, a game in which losing is to be expected. There’s definitely an audience for that. And we still have quite a bit to explore. We’re only halfway through this campaign, and who knows what we’re going to find as we plumb further into the depths.
Here’s what I do know: Across 20-odd sessions of the first Earthborne campaign, it was rare to end a game without both Ryall and myself wanting to immediately start another game. Even if an episode was difficult, even if you went way off track, the game still felt rewarding and exciting. I end most Legacy of the Ancestors sessions having had a good time, but tired and ready to do something else. I recently picked up Spire in Bloom and Shadow of the Storm, the two smaller expansions that add new spaces and events onto the base campaign, and I find myself looking at those boxes with yearning, eager for the day when we finish Legacy and have the time to take the base game for another spin.
This is not, perhaps, the desired result.
Earthborne Rangers remains a best-in-class game. There are so many character builds to explore, and so many things left to achieve. The world on offer in this expansion is just as inventive and absorbing as the Valley, but it gets a little bogged down in mechanics. And while the first game lets you interact with the main story as much or as little as you want—you can intentionally play an entire game leaving the main story as something that happens around you rather than through you—this adventure puts you on more of a track. At least for the first chunk. I’d happily play Earthborne Rangers: Legacy of the Ancestors any time. But first I’d probably try to convince you to play another base campaign instead.
