Dwellings of Eldervale

The table presence on this one is genuinely great, wooden dwelling pieces, real weight to the box, the kind of production that makes a new player lean in before a single rule’s been explained. The asymmetry between races is the other strong point, each side plays with real structural differences rather than a reskinned ability list, and that alone is enough to make a second and third playthrough feel worth doing.

Where I landed cooler than I expected is the battle system. Losing a fight kicks you out of the spot entirely and you can’t rebuild a dwelling there next turn, and because so much of the scoring runs through where you’re allowed to build, that one system ends up gatekeeping most of the rest of the game’s decisions. I wanted more of the magic card and race-ability interplay to drive my sessions, and instead I kept finding myself making choices purely around not losing a battle rather than around the parts of the design that actually got me excited to back this.

It also runs into a symbols-versus-text friction for new players, there’s a lot riding on remembering what a given icon on a race card unlocks, and unlike some of the more text-forward games in this genre, Eldervale expects you to internalize its vocabulary fast. I don’t think it’s a bad game, more a game whose best ideas get a little crowded out by its most dominant system. Worth playing, worth owning if the components alone do it for you, but don’t go in expecting the race asymmetry to be the star of every session, because the battles will keep pulling focus whether you want them to or not.