There’s no hiding it: Earthborne Rangers feels like a gigantic leap forward for a particular niche of card game, a quiet revolution of contextualization and setting that effectively relegates its predecessors to the nursing home. Those predecessors, adventure card titles defined by the release model of Fantasy Flight Games — The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game and Arkham Horror: The Card Game, to name the most durable examples — have been defrocked, shown to possess creaking knees and prosthetic hips.

But while it would be possible to write a thousand words bemoaning the business model that trickled out those games one expansion pack at a time, it’s far more interesting to highlight what Earthborne Rangers gets right.

Tinkering. In the future. The ecofuturist future.

The world changed.

We don’t know the particulars of the former world, although its bones protrude from the ground as sinkholes brimming with ancient technology and genetically engineered “biomelds” that are alternately dangerous and indifferent to human activity. The obvious touchstone is the video game Horizon: Zero Dawn and its sequel Forbidden West; not only because this is an eco-conscious future where humans live in proximity to nature and the trees bristle with neo-Neolithic peril, but also in terms of aesthetic and outlook. More than one character binds chunks of ancient metal and plastic onto their shoulders as makeshift armor, and deftness and avoidance are often better determiners of one’s lifespan than brute strength. Weapons, such as they are, inhabit a secondary role to creeping around threats or, in some cases, connecting with them directly, transforming four-winged vultures and evolved coyotes into puppy dogs that wag their tails and leave you be.

While playing, though, a more obscure reference point niggled at the back of my mind: John Crowley’s 1980 novel Engine Summer, in which the planet’s descendants regard the past with neither nostalgia nor loathing, but a sort of passive curiosity, the way we might feel toward a stonework ruin poking from the grit like an erupting molar. Compared to so many sci-fi novels and films that preoccupy themselves with the fate of the ancients, it’s an outlook that’s both optimistic and fondly self-centered. The past is past, our concerns are here and now, why should we pine for a time and a place that had their chance?

There’s a beauty to this place. The Valley, it’s called, whether a last refuge or one of many bastions for humanity we cannot know, a place of towering plateaus and deep ravines, whitewater rivers and stretches of marsh where only the hardiest hunters venture. We are Rangers, bands or solitary adventurers who rove the Valley and tend to the needs of its inhabitants. Our training has recently concluded. And we’ve been tasked with distributing a basket of biscuits.

Little ecosystems emerge from the card interactions.

Don’t worry. Things get more serious before too long. That initial delivery quest is an overly twee introduction to a grand adventure, one that will compass nearly every inch of the Valley. There’s a reason for Earthborne Rangers’ caution. What’s coming is daunting, even intimidating, and I’m speaking mechanically rather than within the confines of the setting.

If you haven’t played those earlier adventure card games, they worked like this. Every scenario presented a conundrum. Say, your fellowship was traveling along the Anduin River, but orcs were harrying your progress from shore. Or you were investigating a cold case into an occult professor’s mysterious disappearance, but cultists kept popping up with sickles in need of bloodying. These adventures had a certain rhythm to them, one that started long before the game itself began. You would construct a deck, filling it with characters and tools and verbs. Then and only then the story began. Often, however, your deck would prove inadequate to the task. Defeated, you would repeat the loop, fine-tuning your cards, swapping out Merry for Gandalf, preparing with the benefit of hindsight.

As for the scenarios themselves, each one was a bottle, carefully bookended with opening cards and a final objective. There were always wrinkles and scenario-specific hurdles, but each one’s path tended to look much the same. There was a main objective that required a certain number of progress tokens before you could flip to the next goal or finish the scenario, and in the meantime enemies and obstacles appeared from a separate deck, one that didn’t belong to you, to slow your endeavors and wear down your heroes.

It was a good system. Sturdy. And Earthborne Rangers replicates it more or less intact. The big difference being that it takes those bottle episodes, those snippets of narrative, and pumps blood into their veins until they become a living thing, whole and healthy, one that occupies the entire neighborhood rather than lounging in its bed. It puts them on a map, the entire Valley, and asks you to solve the problem. Rather than saying, “Here is the Anduin River; you are traveling down it,” and abstracting the passage of time and miles, it shows you an actual river on a map, gives you a goal to reach some distant waypoint, maybe multiple goals that will take you in contrasting directions, goals that may take many sessions to accomplish, and trusts you to pursue them.

Checking the outcome of my actions.

There are necessary sacrifices. One of them is the whole “build and rebuild your deck ten times” thing, and good riddance. Fussing over the precise composition of my cards was never what I appreciated about those games in the first place.

Constructing a character in Earthborne Rangers is a holistic experience. At the outset of your very first session, you determine your makeup from a handful of traits. Your aspects, basically character stats, clearly and concisely printed on a single card, which will determine the four types of energy you can spend on actions. Your background in early adulthood, providing a handful of general purpose cards. Your ranger specialty, another set of cards, more synergistic and precise this time. Eventually your role, a character-specific ability that’s always available, and an outside interest, a few cards from beyond the confines of your background and specialty to patch any holes.

Put these together and you get a deck of thirty cards. Fifteen cards, really, with two copies of each. This is you. Over the course of the coming sessions, these cards will change. Finding new items or learning new skills lets you swap them out, one pair at a time, gradually becoming a wholler version of yourself. By the end of the campaign, these patchwork alterations won’t result in a full transformation. Your ranger will still be recognizably you, portions of your backstory still intact. But your strengths will be honed, your shortcomings rounded out.

A small portion of the Valley.

The same goes for how Earthborne Rangers handles its sessions. Unlike its predecessors, challenges are handled on the fly, constructed from a combination of your location, your ongoing objective, and whatever path you’re traversing. It’s a lot to take in — hence the whole biscuit delivery quest — but once internalized it’s fluid and wide-open.

Let’s say you’re hanging out at Lone Tree Station. Your goal is to reach Spire, a town at least three locations removed. To travel, you need to add a certain number of tokens to your location card. In the meantime, you’re drawing cards from the path deck; these are the creatures and obstacles hampering your progress. After a while, you’ll add enough tokens to depart. Now you’re presented with a decision: should you travel to Boulder Field or Ancestor’s Grove? Both are equidistant from Spire, so it’s really up to you which route is superior. Such decisions aren’t blank; any number of factors can inform them. Maybe you’re shepherding a character who wants to stop at one location over the other. Maybe you haven’t visited a spot and want to see what’s there. Or maybe you’re just sick of traveling through woods, so you opt to go via the route that passes through the old-growth.

Regardless of the reason, the route you choose to travel establishes the path deck for the next leg of your journey. You shuffle the cards for your chosen route with those matching the destination. Maybe the weather or an ongoing quest tosses in another card or two. In some cases, you add a few generic cards to the mix, face-down so you can’t be sure what’s coming.

And then you’re off. On an adventure. One that isn’t quite like any other because it’s cobbled together from multiple sources.

Along the way, something wonderful happens. Two somethings. The first is that Earthborne Rangers feels wild, a stark contrast to the trimmed and hemmed-in scenarios that were its predecessors’ domain. Often, you’ll pursue multiple quests at once. In those instances, you’re given free rein over how to approach your tasks. Why be stuck traveling along the Anduin or investigating an eldritch cold case when you can do both at the same time? I won’t spoil any details, but there were moments in my campaign that had me poring over the map for a route that would deliver so-and-so to her destination, swing past a particular spot to investigate a sinkhole, and still uncover at least one site I had never reached before. By blowing up its decision space to fill an entire map, Earthborne Rangers doesn’t merely expand the scope of its quests. It treats the world like an actual living, breathing place. It rewards curiosity. It makes us care about its locales and familiar faces.

The four-color skill system works great.

Better than that openness, even, is the way those cards merge into something resembling an untamed frontier. Each of the path sets has its own ecosystem, cards that riff on one another. Or hunt one another. Or spring to one another’s defense. In the woods, bucks mark their terrain or grow aggressive if you linger near a doe too long. Along the riverbank, rapids threaten to slow your progress while hooked-tendril plants lurk beneath the surface. Traveling through the grasslands, some cards may be flipped face-down, hidden in the stalks, and must be scouted lest they ambush you. On the mountaintop, birds of prey circle, and may pursue you from one location to the next.

It’s this system’s capacity of surprise that pushes it over the edge. It’s one thing to happen across a floating biomeld that jitters your teeth with its dissonant humming. It’s another entirely when a wayward child from the nearby village appears on that same trail, shuffled at random into the path deck, vulnerable and in need of assistance.

In other words, it isn’t merely that Earthborne Rangers presents an open world to explore; it’s the very nature of that world, the ethos underlying its design, that gives it such texture. To dip again into the realm of video games, it’s the difference between the open-world approaches of titles like Far Cry or Horizon, where enemies and hazards are safely confined to their proper exhibits in the theme park, or the more vibrant approach of a game like S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Fallout: New Vegas, or, fine, Skyrim, where anything might happen, a deadly monster from a later zone intruding into a space that otherwise seemed secure. Some of my favorite moments in Earthborne Rangers had nothing to do with the quests as presented, but rather arose as emergent story beats thanks to those various decks being shuffled together. The predator that followed me into a cavern where I was studying entirely different predators; the huntress who aided me as I evaded spiky biomelds; the ornithoper I bluffed my way onto so I wouldn’t have to hike up the nearby hill; the damsel-in-distress artist who always showed up right when the wolves were closing in. More curated narratives might call these appearances incongruous. That’s precisely what made them special. This is a game that’s at its best when it’s chewing the scenery.

Of course, there are instances when these incongruities stagger into the uncanny. Investing in Earthborne Rangers requires a certain flexibility. While hanging around in the Valley’s safest human settlement, you might find yourself beset by a bear. In a buried ruin, a cyclone bears down on your position. Under pursuit by wolves, backed onto an unstable scree, injured and bleeding and unsure how you’ll come out of this scrape intact, your artist friend suddenly asks if you could pretty please help her paint a landscape. Lady. What are you doing here. Again.

There are other nitpicks. With enough experience and a sufficiently improved character, certain destinations take longer to shuffle together than they do to bypass. Sometimes so many triggers and conditional effects pile together that keeping track of them all becomes truly daunting. Like many campaigns, it’s somewhat long in the tooth. Relatedly, I’m very sick of wandering through the woods.

Things can get cluttered.

But these are a small price to pay for such an experience. Earthborne Rangers isn’t perfect. It’s better than that: it’s experimental and revolutionary and surprisingly smooth despite its newness. There are certain memories that will stick with me long after the main campaign has faded. Taming and then rescuing a stilt-horse from a prowling monster. Declaring a canteen my favorite tool so I wouldn’t collapse from exhaustion. Carving a canoe with my own hands and then racing between locations that were previously so far apart. Rescuing that artist lady. And again. Also once more.

She sure can paint a landscape, though.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)