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.

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