Introduction:
Sanctuary: The Keepers Era is an interesting standalone card battling game with a heavy emphasis on positioning. It borrows a lot from similar existing games while still bringing enough to the table that Sanctuary is worth a look on it’s own merits.
The ‘Lands of Dusk’ box contains three of the six factions available in the game, ‘Molran’ ‘Rul’ and ‘Kras’.
What’s in the box:
Lands of Dusk contains three prebuilt decks, one for each of the factions, which are comprised of ‘Acolyte’ and ‘Ritual’ cards. Acolytes being creatures you can play onto the field, and rituals being cards that affect the board in some way. Each faction also gets one ‘Champion’ card, which is a powerful creature you can summon onto the field at any time (Though if it dies it’s gone for good). There are also four ‘Sanctuary’ cards per faction, which both grant powerful effects if allowed to remain on the battlefield for long enough, and act as a win/loss condition.
Also contained in the box are several plastic ‘essence crystals’, a number of push out tokens for tracking damage and effects, and a very sweet little rulebook the same size as the cards.
Presentation:
This set is very nice to look at. To start with, the box is about the size of your average TCG deck box, and while it’s made of fairly thin cardboard it’s not exactly fragile. Due to its size the box is easy to carry around, and if you were going to store the game somewhere else it’s good enough quality you could even use it as a deck box for a different game.
Secondly, the card art is also excellent, and while playing the game the battlefield comes to life with weird and wonderful creatures, sanctuaries and effect cards.This makes for a very pretty board. The cards are also good quality stock and quite durable so you don’t need to worry about scuffing them while playing. I particularly liked the Kras faction which is all about necromancy and dark magic.
The ‘essence crystals’ and tokens are a little lackluster but still nice, the former being basically just irregularly shaped clear plastic which sparkles quite nicely. Similar games have been known to use glass beads for something like this which I think would have been much more aesthetically satisfying but probably would have raised the price a little so you can see why Tabula Games might have gone with plastic. The push out tokens are thick cardboard, and quite small. While they work well in gameplay there is always a risk of losing tokens when playing tabletop games and these ones are so small it’s unlikely you’d ever find them if one slipped down the back of the sofa for example.
Lastly the rules are in a very cute little card sized book, a really nice little production with some more great art. However whatever glue was used to bind it is clearly not up to the job as halfway through my first game several of the pages had started to fall out despite the fact I wasn’t being rough with it at all. As of time of writing this it’s even worse, and you have probably noticed in the picture I’m having to use a bulldog clip to hold it together. While it’s clear they produced it like this so that it looked more appealing, the old folded page stapled affair seen in many other games would probably have been more durable.
Also the rulebook’s size proves to be a little problematic sometimes, as not only are some aspects of gameplay not properly addressed, there’s only so much text you can fit on any one of the little pages. This means that when you are learning the game you have to flick backwards and forwards repeatedly to find related rules that in any other book would be on the same page, only adding to the wear and tear on the poor binding.
The Gameplay:
Sanctuary can be played either solo or against another person. The game functions in a similar way in both modes, with only a few minor differences.
The player versus player game takes place in four lanes, one for each of your ‘Sanctuary’ cards, and has a strong focus on positioning and canon. The game utilises forward ‘attack’ and rear ‘defence’ positions in each of the lanes to assail your opponent’s sanctuaries and protect your own, however the gameplay is far from the sedate tug of war this might make you envision. While the cards might look similar to something like Magic (and the game does bear other similarities to magic in gameplay), the actual meat of the game is more similar to something like Yu-Gi-Oh, where victory mainly lies in bouncing effects off one another repeatedly to pull off crazy combos. In mid to late game it’s quite normal for you to completely wipe your opponent’s board of creatures during your turn and then for them to do the same to you in theirs, leading to a fierce back and forth where your main goal in your summoning phase is to effectively detonate a giant comedy bomb under your opponent’s feet while preventing them from doing the same to you. This amount of damaging effects and creatures with instant kill abilities is both somewhat funny and also incredibly frustrating, as there’s almost nothing you can do to keep anything on the board.
This gameplay style is not bad, but it’s definitely not for everyone. The game is quite well balanced, and the fact that all of the decks are preset and there is no deckbuilding means that everyone is on roughly the same level at the start of the game, avoiding some of the problems similar effect centric TCGs suffer from. The Molran faction does feel much weaker than the other two, as it lacks a lot of the board clearing potential of the Wul or Kras, and its combat card related playstyle isn’t quite able to keep up. This isn’t helped by the fact that the Molran rely on big creatures, and due to the abundance of creatures with abilities that instant kill, big creatures don’t really last.
The three decks all have fairly unique playstyles, and this is helped a lot by the unique ‘Sanctuary’ cards each faction gets, which offer powerful game warping effects if you can only keep them alive for long enough. They are also one of the most interesting unique parts of the game, as rather than each player having a health pool like so many other card games do, you lose the game when all four of your sanctuaries have been destroyed. However, once a sanctuary is destroyed, there isn’t really a reason to defend it any more, and your opponent has no need to attack in that lane either, so if both sanctuaries in a lane are dead the lane becomes pretty much dead also.
Due to the large board clear potential of the decks, at least half the games I played ended due to timeout, when you run out of cards in your deck one of your sanctuaries of your choice is destroyed whenever you would otherwise redraw your hand. This means a lot of games come down to the wire, you and your opponent simply trying to cling on for long enough that the other player dies by losing all their sanctuaries passively. This isn’t really very fun mechanically, even though how you play earlier in the game still very much affects how good your end position is.
The solo play mode is much the same, however the enemy deck removes it’s ritual cards and also gains access to unique ‘corruptor’ and ‘construct’ creatures that wreak havoc on the player. It also takes place over only three lanes rather than four, the enemy deck being ‘automated’ and the player having to respond as best they can. It’s a lot of fun, but personally I feel it’s a little lacking in replayability. However, it does of course add to the versatility of the box as a whole, and for some will probably be the very game you have been looking for, as solo tactical card games are few and far between.
In Conclusion:
Sanctuary: The Keepers Era, Lands of Dusk is a fun little card battling game that is easily able to be enjoyed by everyone. The first game I played was with a friend who does not play card battlers, and they said that they had no problem understanding (And in fact winning) the game, likewise understanding its rules and the general flow of the turn. While there is an issue in component quality in regards to the rulebook, the game is well made otherwise and fairly well balanced in play. There’s little fuss getting into a game as the decks are prebuilt and the setup is very easy. I’d definitely recommend this game to anyone who enjoys a good quick fire card game, or to the casual card game fan who wants to try something different.
