Awaken Realms is a company that more or less mastered the art of the Kickstarter board game. They are making games that look awesome on a Kickstarter project page, attracting a lot of funding. I backed Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon (and am still waiting for it to be delivered, having chosen options that resulted in me only getting the game in wave 2 of shipping), and that game got 41,939 backers who pledged £4,940,030, which is a lot of money for a small board game company. I didn't back Etherfields, where 32,582 backers pledged £3,974,362, just because I first wanted my first Awaken Realms game to get delivered before I backed another one. After watching reviews like this or that, I am happy I didn't, although other people clearly liked the game in other reviews and videos.

But instead of just being happy to have dodged a bullet, I ended up reading and watching a lot of content about Etherfields, because I wanted to understand why the game didn't appeal to me, when I am still very much looking forward to Tainted Grail. And for that I have to zoom out a bit, and give the talk that I tend to give to people I introduce into pen & paper role-playing games: These games happen on two levels simultaneously. On the story level, interesting story stuff happens, e.g. your barbarian character chops off the head of an orc with his axe. On the game mechanics level, you as the player roll a d20 and get lucky enough to roll a critical hit. Role-playing games tend to work well when both of these levels are interesting and balanced. They tend to fail if one side of it isn't very good, or is concentrated on to a degree that the other side becomes neglected.

Etherfields is a game in which the story is about dark dreams. Now that already won't appeal to everybody. Even in a fantasy dungeon crawler type of game, the story follows a certain logic, while dreams are illogical. A dream story gives the writer lots of "well, it's a dream" excuses for convoluted story-telling. But with a really good writer, that can end with a good story anyway; I am quite a fan of Alice in Wonderland. So I wasn't immediately against Etherfields because of the setting.

But from the negative reviews and from watching playthroughs of the game, it became quickly apparent that the balance between story and game mechanics was off. Etherfields is designed as an "experience", the fun is discovering and playing through the different dreams. But the developers clearly had the mistaken impression that to enhance a dream-like story, it would be a great idea to have gameplay be equally vague and illogical. Etherfields does not so much have rules that dictate how you play, but rather has a game that plays with the rules. While the game mechanic of "specific rule on a card breaks general rule in the rulebook" is quite a well-established part of board and card games these days, Etherfields pushes this concept further and merges it with the concept of the story that events should be unforeseeable and illogical. That doesn't end very well. The game mutates on the table while you are playing it, but instead of leaving you in wonder of discovery, it leaves you confused and unable to plan ahead, as you don't know what is coming.

There are probably people out there who will be able to just go with that gameplay, and follow the instructions through the game. But for me, learning how to play, and learning how to play the game better, are important parts of any game. And in Etherfields it looks as if one never really gets there. The gameplay mechanics I have seen up to now aren't really clever and fun to figure out. And something is definitively off with the flow of the game, with a grindy part that you need to do to find keys that unlock the actual fun part.

After having looked at it in detail, Etherfields is not a game that I think I would enjoy. For me it is too much of an "experience", rather than an actual game. You follow a sequence of events, and while there are decisions to make that lead to the sequence branching out, you never get the tools to understand the likely consequences of your decisions; making your decisions randomly ends up pretty much with the same result as trying to think and "beat the game". You can't beat Etherfields, you can't win in a meaningful sense of the word, you can only experience it.