The Eternal Artifacts – Vale of Eternity: Artifacts Review

Sometimes game expansions add some much-needed variety to a game that enhances it, maybe fixing something that players have found wrong or missing in the base game.

Other times, an expansion adds some unnecessary junk that makes a game more complicated or less enjoyable due to more and more things you need to keep track of.

The Vale of Eternity: Artifacts expansion is a little bit of both (without the “things found wrong in the base game” aspect, which didn’t really need fixing).

The Artifacts expansion for The Vale of Eternity was designed by Eric Hong and Mathieu Rivero, with artwork by Jacqui Davis, Jiahui Eva Gao, Gautier Maia, Stefano Martinuz and Erica Tormen. It was published by Mandoo Games in 2024.

It adds a load of new cards to the game, enhancing that “building your tableau” feeling to even greater heights.

But it also adds valuable artifacts to the game, items that you can use during your turn (or at the beginning of it) to enhance your play.

It also bumps the endgame threshold to 80 points instead of 60, something that I’m not sure is needed though more plays may help determine that.

In my estimation (so maybe I’m wrong), that bump was made because of the strength of the artifacts and the new cards made it too easy to hit 60 points in 5-6 rounds.

In our three plays of it for this review, we didn’t experience that much, if at all.

We played this game exclusively at lunch at our office, so while we could go a bit beyond 60 minutes, we couldn’t go much beyond it.

The base game was finished in that amount of time easily, but two of our three plays with the expansion had to end early because we ran out of time.

Not by much. It probably would only need one more round, but we were already over time.

Thus, the first strike against it is that it seems to drastically increase play time.

But the cards that it adds are very cool.

Ostensibly, many of them are designed to get points faster, so maybe we were playing it badly?

Many of the cards are designed to give you points based on criteria in your tableau, from the Banshee above counting your families to other cards that encourage you to concentrate on one specific family of cards.

That’s why I think the card additions to the game are great.

The possibe combinations in the game increase almost exponentially with these types of cards, though adding more cards to the deck may make it harder to actually get them efficiently.

I do like the effects on some of these cards!

Thalassa encourages you to gain at least one 3 crystal on your turn because then you get to Recover it and play it again (spending that 3 and another 1, so your money flow may not be optimal for getting it played again).

It also encourages you to invest in water cards.

I do like some of the other effects as well.

Spending a point to upgrade a stone can actually be very handy! Especially when it costs 0 and is always Recovered during the Resolution Phase.

You just have to make sure that your point income offsets losing multiple points for this.

I would add these cards to the game with no problem, and I do appreciate that the Artifacts expansion is modular.

Because none of the cards interact with the other aspect of the expansion, which I don’t particularly care for as much.

This expansion adds two other things: artifact tiles and shelters, and the shelters only have to do with artifacts.

Artifacts are drafted at the beginning of each round, and you cannot draft the artifact that you had last round.

These can do anything from allowing you to shelter cards to draw another card for the cards available for purchase and then place one of those cards in your shelter, to discarding cards to gain stones and many other things.

The one artifact that is universally useful is the one that allows you to pay 3 to gain a new “area.” This area allows you to have one more card in your tableau (typically you can only have cards equal to the round number in your play area).

You can do this twice, giving you more room in your tableau, especially if you’re playing cheap cards that can do something for you.

Others can be helpful but are kind of underwhelming.

They add to the playtime of the game without really adding much of substance, in our opinion.

Sure, sheltering a card can be useful because it reserves it for you to later retrieve and then maybe play.

If the card is really powerful, it may be a good thing to keep away from the other players!

Artifacts can certainly be used effectively, but they add to the thinking time of the game and I’m not sure that the good things they add are worth that.

Essentially, they make the game much more fiddly, with lots of moving things around the table, making sure player markers are placed properly, and just general upkeep.

It is too bad that the “new Area” thing is only available through the artifacts, because that certainly does add to your tactical opportunities when buying and playing cards.

Having the option to have 1-2 more cards than the round number played can be very consequential.

Depending on your strategy.

And the new cards are so amazing!

Look at Akhlut above. You get to choose any Dragon from the discard pile and summon it for free! That’s how I got Boulder out in that picture.

I think cards like that are why they bumped the endgame threshold to 80 points, and with more plays, we’ll probably be hitting that more often.

But I don’t think artifacts will help us do that.

The new cards are must-adds into the game if you have the expansion.

The artifacts and shelters, I can take or leave.

Whether that makes the expansion worth buying is up to you, but I’m glad I do have it.

Even if we may not use all of it much.

(This review was written after 3 plays with all of the expansion content)