Dwellings of Eldervale

I backed this on Kickstarter mostly off the art previews, and it delivered, this is genuinely amazing artwork, full stop, painterly fantasy landscapes on every board tile and a real sense of place that a lot of worker placement games don’t bother with. The art-direction consistency across factions, buildings, and the monster minis holds together the whole way through, nothing feels like it was farmed out to a different studio partway through production.

Mechanically it’s a lot at once. You’ve got a worker placement core that’s reminiscent of Terra Mystica, layered with faster skirmish combat that plays more like Nexus Ops, plus crazy asymmetric faction powers that push it toward the Rising Sun and Blood Rage side of the genre. That’s a genuinely unusual combo, gate a simple worker placement chassis into something closer to a Bloodborne-style dudes-on-a-map brawl, with an engine-building layer humming underneath the whole time. It shouldn’t hang together this well. Somehow it mostly does, though there are turns where I feel like I’m juggling three different games’ worth of decision space at once, which isn’t for everyone.

The designer’s clearly poured years into this, it comes through in how many small systems interlock, upgrades, dragon allies, elemental resources, and none of it feels like padding once you’ve got a few plays under your belt. The replay value from the faction asymmetry alone is real, I haven’t felt the urge to just play the “best” combo twice in a row yet.

One legitimate complaint from the wider community: the Kickstarter campaign itself was, by more than one account, a disorganized mess, shipping delays and confusing tier communication that soured some backers on the deluxe metal-coin, extra-minis edition before it even arrived. That’s a company problem, not a game problem, but worth knowing if you’re eyeing a future crowdfunded printing. The game itself earns its spot on my shelf either way.