Blog Archives
Gleaning Aidalon
I suspect there’s some wordplay behind Hubworld: Aidalon, the forthcoming card game by Michael Boggs and Cory DeVore. In ancient Greek literature, an eidolon is an image-spirit, a sort of displaced hologram that allows a character to be present without actually, you know, being present. In his drama Helen, for example, the Athenian tragedian Euripides contends that Helen of Troy had been whisked away to Egypt prior to the great war. There she languished, replaced by a phantom who launched a thousand ships in her name.
As references go, it’s a subtle but fitting nod. Hubworld: Aidalon is itself an eidolon, an image-spirit of Android: Netrunner that may perhaps launch a thousand icebreaker runs in that game’s absence. Certainly it’s already launched a couple dozen such runs on my table. Coming soon to Gamefound, Earthborne Games is offering two decks for the cost of shipping while supplies last. And I’m pleased to report that this early peek is as promising as they come, not only burning the afterimage of Netrunner into our retinas, but in some ways offering a fuller and more exciting take on the concept.
Chewing the Scenery
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.

