'Till Decks do us Part

Eternal Decks / Hiroken / 2025

I’m not entirely sure where I first encountered coverage of Eternal Decks… but I do remember seeing an awful lot of complimentary comments posted about it: “This is quite simply the best Co-op ever designed” … “I can’t get it off the gaming table” … “the puzzle is amazing!” … and wondering — hang on, just what IS this co-op game that I’ve never even heard of before?

And then I saw a photo of it being played… and knew I had to lay my hands on a copy!

Note the silk-scarf-style playing surface. Lovely!

Mechanism-wise, I guess the closest comparison that I can make is to Steffen Benndorf’s “The Game”. Players each have a hand of three cards, but aren’t allowed to discuss the specific numbers and colours that they’re holding. On your turn, you play a card to one of the areas of the board. The rules on what can be played where will vary from round to round, but in the picture above, the top row must contain cards of the same number, the second row must have descending numbers, and the third row can only be odd numbers … but the same colours must never be adjacent, and — in rows 2 and 3 — the same numbers can never be adjacent too. That bottom row can take any card … but is rarely a good place to play. Because of … reasons 😊

Anyway… so far so simple? Well! …the moment that a player begins their turn without any cards left in their hand to play, the game ends in failure … and (in a standard 4 player game), each player starts with a deck of only 5 cards (all the same colour, numbered one to five) — which do NOT return to their hand after being played. This means that players will very quickly run out of cards, unless they manage to take an action which puts more cards into their draw deck.

And that action is … place the very last card in one of those rows that I mentioned above. The player who places the final card gets to “wake” one of those little stacks of elemental cards, and then add of its content to the bottom of their own draw deck.

Mrs Shep simply refers to Eternal Decks as … “The witchy game”

Here, for example, is the “Witch” elemental. This stack of cards will add some blue numbers, some purple numbers, and a special “witch” card to the lucky winner’s deck. (And … more importantly … keep the player in the game for another 8 turns or so!)

But… every elemental carries consequences, in the form of an elemental curse. If you put the witch, shown here, into play, nobody is allowed to play “stag” cards (which are wildcards) from that point forward. If you put the skeleton in play (whose icons you can just see peeking on the left corner of the photo), nobody will be allowed to play 2s or 8s from that point forward either. Until … that is … a player discards certain combinations of cards to cancel each elemental’s curse!

And of course… all of those decks start introducing special cards … wildcards …a fifth colour …cards with unusual powers …cards that share two colours… you get the idea.

And that’s the basic framework of the game … it’s a constant co-operative hustle, pretty much from the get-go, to keep the draw pile of each player sufficiently well-stocked to prevent the game from ending … while cancelling out the curses, and trying to fulfil some very specific game-winning conditions…

Oh yes, I should’ve mentioned the theme of the game, shouldn’t I?

Well… there’s a bit of a mystical story behind Eternal Decks, involving the players’ descent through a (somewhat dantes-inferno-esque?) series of levels into the eternal realm…

And each of those levels has a different board configuration and win condition. The levels might involve collecting various tokens through particular card placements … or awakening/defeating specific elementals … or even forming certain geometric shapes and clusters of colour within the grid of cards (that level — the Labyrinth — is a doozy!). There’s a fair old bit to explore here. I think it’ll keep us busy for a while.

Is it really the best co-op ever designed?

Honest answer? No, it isn’t. Pandemic still reigns supreme on that front 😄. Eternal Decks is very good though; bags of tension … and just the right mix of informed-decision-vs-risking-the-odds going on throughout. The difficulty might be a little bit skewed in the wrong direction; I’d hazard a guess that a group of moderately competent, experienced gamers will beat the “standard” levels on most plays, and you might want to consider “expert” mode for a decent challenge … but the standard mode is still pleasingly brain-taxing; Mrs Shep and I have spent many a happy evening noodling our way through the challenges on that level.

But, yeah … it’s an interesting game. It plays differently to anything you’ve likely played before, looks gorgeous … and if this little preview has whetted your appetite, I’d strongly reccomend tracking down a playthrough on YouTube to seal the deal.

Where did you get it?

I picked my copy up via travel-games.co.uk … a friendly little online shop that’s handling UK imports of the game. Copies are also in stock on amazon.co.jp if you want to import it yourself… and I think I read about a boat full of copies currently chugging its way to the North American distributor … but, frankly, by the those get to port, its anybody’s guess what you’ll have to pay Donald to get them into the country. Best of luck with that one! 😉