Sanctuary: The Keepers Era First Impressions

Sanctuary: The Keepers Era is a player vs player card game.

Where seeking sanctuary means going on the offensive.

According to the legends of Elnerth, a powerful mystic energy was flowing dangerously through the world. To avoid catastrophic events, that energy was split into six parts called the Essences.

Sanctuaries are the only way to channel the power of the Essences. Players impersonate the Keepers, each one is attuned to an Essence and rules over a Faction. The Keepers are fighting each other to preserve their Sanctuaries and themselves. The goal of the game is to destroy all the oppponent’s Sanctuaries, to become the only Keeper able to shape the fate of the world through their Essence.

Choose your Faction, each one with its own peculiarity, and dive into the dark and wondrous world of Elnerth.

Sanctuary: The Keepers Era Game Overview

Quick Rules Summary

Players choose a pre-built deck of cards representing their faction. They place their Sanctuaries in a horizontal row and draw a hand of cards.

At the start of the turn, a player gains 2 Essence.

Then they spend essence playing Acolytes to the board, in rows with their Sanctuaries in either defending or attacking positions. They have symbols on them showing you what abilities they have. Players can also play Rituals which are spells to affect the game.

After, your attacking units will attack the opponent’s Sanctuary in its row, reducing the Aegis counter on that Sanctuary equal to the attacker’s attack strength.

If the opponent has placed a defensive unit in front of that Sanctuary, they will deal damage to each other instead.

At the end of the turn, the player’s Sanctuaries decay by 1 point. When a Sanctuary reaches 0 decay, its special power activates.

How do you win?

When a Sanctuary’s Aegis (damage) counter reaches 0 it is destroyed. When a player loses all of their Sanctuaries they lose the game

Main Mechanisms

Hand management is the main one, working out which cards to play but also where to place them.

USP

It’s not unique, but a 2 player card game that is simple to play is a selling point. For those of us who like games like Magic the Gathering, it’s great to be able to go “Here’s some cards, now play”.

Theme

There’s a whole story and world built up behind this and I’m sure it’s very interesting and well-written but I didn’t get a chance to explore it.

Setup

Deck out, cards out, done. You need to put two tokens on each Sanctuary but apart from that there isn’t much to it.

Components & Artwork

The cards are nice and the tokens, especially the essence tokens are nice. However, using the clear tokens on a white table didn’t help!

The art is good, just on the right side of good for me. It’s very busy, I prefer something cleaner.

Ease of Teaching

It’s very easy to teach, especially if you’ve already played a similar game like Magic the Gathering as I mentioned earlier.

Similar Games

Any 2-player PvP card game, from the Pokemon Trading Card Game to Disney Lorcana and everywhere in between.

Sanctuary: The Keepers Era Review

Positives

It’s not collectable, everything is in the box.

The factions play very differently.

It’s simple to play making it easy to teach.

Negatives

It has the weirdest-sized rulebook, it’s too thick to be that small.

There are a lot of these games and it barely does enough to stand out.

Summary

Good fun for the 20 minutes it takes to play.

Jesta ThaRogue