Aetherspire | Overview | Co-operative Tower Defence

0:00 hi everyone I'm Tom and today I'm going to be showing you ether Spire which is a new Cooperative game where we play as Heroes trying to protect our realm from the elements that are rushing through the rift to destroy us we start out with not much just one little platform to start building up our defenses the aim of the game is to build floors of the same element once we are four floors up it's a 3D game we are building up but it's not a dexterity game you're not judged on your balancing basically there are four elements we want to build four floors of that same element High stack a spire on top of it we can do that four times brilliant on the way to stop us though we will have Invaders round to round we have elemental bosses one of each that are going to surprise us with their scary abilities and I'll show you how it works so this is on Kickstarter right now from phase shift games who you might recognize from games that I've covered before like Dungeon Drop and drop Drive we're not dropping here not intentionally anyway so I've got the game set up for two players here there is a solo mode and special solo Heroes you can play with more but on your turn there is a supply phase so Lily the warden can go first in your supply phase you draw a floor from the supply we have floors in the supply of three different sizes these enormous ones are just going to go on these spaces on the floor and you can kind of see the outlines once we have filled these spaces with pillars we'll be able to put a floor that we've got in our reserve on top of those pillars and then keep building up so we've got our four floors of the same type this floor we start start with and

1:30 the backs of all of the floors is a multi floor so we can count it as any color think so we can start building more from the bottom I am going to choose to add a great big floor to the reserve so I draw the topmost one from the pile this is in our Reserve now possibly to put down on our turn you can then do a redraw so if I wasn't happy with this floor coming out I could put it on the bottom of the stack and draw another one as the game goes on we will end up with more tiles in the reserve so the redraw can give you more to think about that than just the last one that you drew well sometimes you want to redraw that one we then get three shards from the bag so this bag gives us shards to perform spells and abilities with the shards go in their Elemental spaces and you basically spend a pair of shards on your turn to do the spell that's in between them and we get five dice to roll so let's see what Lily's got to work with here some elements that's kind of what we want so then we go to the build phase which is like the action phase it's where most of our stuff is going to happen we have a load of basic actions that anyone can do on their turn and then we have some special actions that only your character can do so we can use dice to place pillars in the Fortress now this multi Flo that we've got out here it's great that for building up it counts as any kind of floor any enemy can go on there but to put pillars down you have to spend a multi- die which otherwise could be any symbol if we needed a different symbol at a multi symbol though I could grab a pillar and pop it on this space when I fill all four spaces we can start building up from that Tower it's it's not empty though at the start of the

3:01 game we have two random Invaders these are also drawn from The Shard bag so the bag is the same for shards or Invaders sometimes bosses will make shards turn into Invaders sometimes you can crystallize Invaders into shards so they just go on here for now blocking our spaces we need to do something about them to get rid of them we've got a token we can reroll any number of our dice once per turn and this is flipped over to remind you that you can't use it again you can put a floor tile from the reserve into the Fortress on ground level or a matching set of pillars so can't do that here yet I've only got one out of four pillars but I could put this one that we grabbed out onto the ground and then hey I've got a water symbol I could spend that to pop a pillar on one of these spaces and start building up from here this in fact is going to build up into another large tile cuz we haven't got any outline of a different shape so I'm going to need to find another big blue tile later on once we've completed the floors we can put spires on and stuff but not yet the other thing you can do is use your shs to cast spells so up here with the shards that I started the game with all I can do is Ice Beam which is not too bad really crystallize two invaders in the same room so I could actually cast that these two go back to the bag to cast it crystallize two invaders in the same room this is a room they're in the same room I can crystallize them they turn into shards and unfortunately they're opposites so I can't use them for any of the other in between spells but what would they do destroy two invaders destroy just put them back in the bag move an Invader to any other SP SP and then place a pillar sometimes

4:32 pillars are costly as well so that could be really good roll three dice roll three dice is take them from the available ones so dice you haven't rolled yet di that you've already spent so it's giving you more diyes to use on things the other spell we can do is with any kinds of elements it's just draw a floor tile off one of the stacks you can pay two to do that or if you pay three you can draw a multi FL tile then you can redraw one floor tile tempting as that is I think I'm going to wait and build up our resources and we've seen Crystal eyes hi Marty Marty the cat of course a much more frightening destructive force than any Rift that's all of the basic things but what could Lily our first character do they could discard any Dy to move an Invader well moving isn't as good as crystallizing or destroying but if we still had those Invaders here they would be in the way and we can't build pillars until they're gone they can go on pillars as well and we can't put floors down until they're off the pillars so sometimes moving can be really good she can discard a Flor TI during an Invasion to crystallize an enemy of the same element as the discarded type before it invades we'll see invasion in a minute it will be good to have that and then refract is a passive ability when casting floor crafting which we saw earlier spend two to draw a tile or three to draw a multi Flor tile if you use two of the same color you can draw a multi tile instead of a random one so that could be interesting for giving his options actually I did say I wasn't going to draw but I'm going to do a green and a white so we won't use their ability to get a multitool I want to draw another big big tile and maybe we'll just put that out here because I'm wasting three

6:02 dice otherwise if I don't and I'm just supposed to be doing an overie I'm just doing a play through it I'm excited I want to win so I could put this out as my green floor or do we redraw it so sometimes floors that you get will have abilities on them so you see this has fewer spaces on it which we could only build up from one side of it which seems all right you only need to build up one side of it to win and get your spes out but this could be four spaces that Invaders can come out to later for putting down though you could get a big ability like gain two ether core this is our life essentially when we run out of ether we lose so I think I'll redraw hopefully get a different element and maybe another doubler there we go a big green one so we could always fill this up and then get the other green on top I think this was a green so I could spend this to pop a pillar out on here we we're starting starting small and then the other two dice I haven't got anyone to move so they're just going to have to be wasted in turn one so that's the build phase then in the invasion phase we slide this down if we come across a line connected to an un R boss we reveal the boss it's going to have an ability relating to that kind of invader then we draw this many Invaders from the bag and pop them out so I've got a red and a white here so they would like to go in the highest rooms and if they're all the highest they want to go on top of a pillar cuz that's higher than not they will favor standard rooms so their actual tiles rather than multi rooms but if there's only multis so who came out first we'll say red we'll go on top of the pillar white can go there cuz any Invaders can go on these spaces so they will fill up and block you and you need

7:33 to do stuff to deal with them if there's nowhere for an Invader to go first of all they will destroy the wall of their color and then go back to the bag if another Invader of that color can't be placed again in the future they will deplete an ether core and be put back in the bag again if you have no ether core left you lose the game we've only got two and one wall of each element and then we pass the active player token I they didn't actually use their reroll did they why don't we use our fre roll got two dice they're not using blanks okay there's only a one in eight chance of getting Blanks on the dice now we can have a look at Glenn the slicer so Glenn's special actions can discard a die your other dice with the same face as the discarded one become wild brambles discard three tiles to rebuild a wall and crystallize an enemy an emerald cut discard a leaf or a wild to gain a leaf element to do spells with so let's say we've got we do need more big ones to build up on these or we need a medium to build up on here going to draw another big and see if we can get I have put that other green at the bottom of the pile so I'm going to have to probably find that again there's maybe only two big ones of each color maybe we should have left it out I was hoping for a different element though so we've got this here that basically can't be put out but maybe we'll use it for an ability we could redraw it in a future turn we could redraw it now actually let's do that start working through the pile cuz we need another blue anyway there's another blue or we could be drawing to get the the multis of course an ice Fisher crystallize all Invaders of two elements so that could be be nice we get our three shards for our spells so we could either do lava bomb destroy

9:04 two invaders Firestorm move an Invader and place a pillar and then our dice so we all a lot of the same thing we could be making them all wild here okay so we've got again a wild we start building up this so I know that the first boss to come out is going to be a water element so maybe we want to like try and get cracking on Water I do want to work on leaves spreading itself out a little bit but it's it's early on I don't have any use for these elements yet so I think use me roll and see what we get oh a couple of leaves and a wild that would be lovely we've nearly filled in the leaves here I'll use the wild to pop down a green pillar this wild could be anything we just have to have the actual wild symbol to fill in the multi rooms and then let's move an Invader to put him in here can be in the wrong room just won't go in the wrong room when they're placed in The Invasion phase to place a pillar as soon as I get a green floor now I could pop it down on here I do have two things if I want to just spend them I could draw a new tile is there a new green on the way let's risk it it wouldn't be bad to have more things in the reserve as well so we draw and it's a fire tile I don't really want that right now so let's redraw and we get oh another green and this is this separates into some smaller floors so I think we'll place that as action there's no harm in doing that sometimes you might want to wait for certain abilities and things but we have now got I know Bird's ey view is not the best way of showing this we have now got two floors here sandwich in these pillars and so that is halfway towards doing it it's not exactly halfway because we need to fill this up find another green floor or or a

10:38 multi one could go on there let's say this one so we'd want to fill this up with pillars get a green floor out of the TI and put that up there fill this up with pillars all the while Invaders are messing about with us and getting in the way and then put a multi or green small room on top that's four you don't have to put anything in this room and in fact you can't put anything in this room if you want it to count that's four greens so then as an action on your turn you could place the spire on top excuse the Prototype paper spes they're going to be all fancy in your version and they've had to come all the way from America they got a bit crushed up sorry spes you pop the spire on whether it's been revealed or not you destroy the boss of that element and you get a bonus so you can choose from rebuild all the walls draw two floor tiles roll four dice or Draw three shards and you need to do this four times with four different elements of the game you also get to remove five of the tokens of that color from the bag so they'll be less likely to come out as Invaders but also that means they are less likely to come out as shards that's basically what we're looking to do in the future but we've got like a second floor on there nothing remaining so going to have to build those back up then we would move down and we get to look at our first boss so it's the water boss so water Invaders cannot be destroyed so they can be moved they can be crystallized they can't be destroyed though until that boss is defeated we get two invaders and they're two Blues as well so they want to go on the pillar preferably and then on a blue spot so

12:08 they're going to get in the way I can't destroy them so I'd probably then draw a medium tile I'd redraw it could we are going to need blue later all right keep it out get three shards or they're all blue but we could get a multi tile with two of the same for Lily's turn and she gets her dice she got a couple of wilds and she got a blue start working over here so as soon as we get this done that's destroyed so you start to see early on there are only a couple of Invaders coming out they're not too much of a problem but you start to Define these things and eventually we're going to want to split this up so that you know we have a wild on here so we can start to change the color and then you need four of that color this can be your first one of whatever color you're turning it into you know we're going to want to change this color like you can just put a different floor's color on there you don't have to stay matching you want to match so that you can put spes on top but yeah I'm going to want to turn this into a different color not only to keep doing the spires this will be my first of a new color or I could do a multi floor of course counting as one of me first color cuz I need to do this spire eventually but also I want somewhere for all of the Invaders to go like multi flors are nice but they're small and they'll get covered up eventually remember when there's no space for the Invaders to come in they'll start destroying the walls and then eventually destroying your eore and defeating you and as the game goes on not only are all of these Powers going to start to be revealed like Earth Invaders can only be on pillars so that means hey I've got loads of Earth spaces too bad if I draw a load of greens they can't go on those spaces I have to have pillars on there first for it to matter so any green I drew right now would go straight into knocking this down and defeating me Terror Wing here in the supply step roll one fewer die for every

13:39 air Invader in the Fortress so every white Invader we had and then the Fire Boss Ferno after the invasion destroy all pillars that are under Fire invad us so they're going to be knocking me back this is just the starting setup there are loads of other bosses and powers to be using you'll have one of each element in your game like after the inv if any fire Invaders enter discard a floor from The Reserve only the air Spire may be completed so whatever happened you'd have to suddenly shift your focus to air after the invasion destroy all pillars in rooms with two or more fire Invaders there's some scary things that can happen with them so you have to balance up what's coming out here what spells have I got available from the shards what space have I got on these tiles and what ability has just come out because you can see like you can see from the back which element is going to come out in which order so you can see oh Blue's coming out first maybe I want a to try and do blue cuz it's going to be activated the longest but is it going to be the worst Power for how you're going to be playing this there are loads just in this prototype as well of different Heroes with special abilities as well we've got the pyromancer when they place a Spire they destroy all of the Invaders on the board so sometimes it might be worth not putting that Spire down right away waiting for it to become summers's turn so she can destroy them all but they might get in the way of you placing that Spire as the turns go on Violet can discard a die to reroll all of the other dyes uh Scarlet can discard two dice to get a random Shard or discard two wild dice to get a multi Flo the corona maner passes their unused dice to the next player that get rerolled along with their normal dice for the turn there's

15:11 just loads and loads of different things in here there's loads of abilities on the floors themselves some floors need more than one die to put a pillar on there some of these floors you'll want these for the top because you can't actually put anything else on them including Invaders there's no invaders or more pillars on these but you can destroy more Invaders draw more floors they can be present on the other floors as well but be careful it warned you in the rule book as well about getting too many of these because that's fewer spaces for you to be building on and placing Invaders on so difficulty one is this kind of setup and you will have starting Heroes to use as well in difficulty two you can use any of the heroes and you get a random setup if you want of one of each elements or the protot rule book as well does have like setups that change the game like they want to break through your walls diminishes the power of St I and multi rooms with certain setups of sets of bosses at difficulty three there are going to be Spire adaptation tiles placed next to each boss so as well as the Cards doing different abilities they're going to have different requirements for the spes to be built like one example in the rule book is that this boss needs the base floor to have at least 18 pillars above it so if that came out for say the blue boss you might not want to be straight away restricting yourself to one very small Tower cuz you're going to need 18 pillars Above It Like These are probably pretty good ways of going about that you'll get extra immediate or persistent bonuses for building that Spire with those restrictions on it though and then for higher difficulties you can start out with fewer Health start out further down this track and that's ether Spire I hope you've enjoyed this video and it's giving you an idea of what the game is

16:43 like this is all just a prototype it in crowdfunding there there is a link in the description to go to that campaign page see all of the final stuff what it's going to include how to get hold of it and make it happen and hopefully I'll be back in the future with the final version to do a playthrough of it if you would like to know what I think about the game I am going to turn the camera on and start chatting now if you're not interested in that part and just want the facts thank you very much for watching and I'll see you for the next game everyone but if he still here I assume that you don't mind hearing my thoughts mind this was a sponsored overview hello I've appeared so yeah ether Spire I saw this in Essen I was really intrigued by like any kind of Co-op really it's the main thing that me and my wife play uh and so I am always hungry for more and I think this does a Lot of Things Different both like visually and kind of I want to say tactically but it's not is it tactile tactilely like it's got a wonderful table presence of building up this stuff and it's easy to mistake it for a dexterity game when you just see pictures of it it does look kind of explicitly say in the rules like the there's no balancing and stuff in this if you knock stuff over just try and make it back the way it was that you don't have to worry about that kind of thing we are building things up vertically and it really matters as well for not just the trying to get four floors of the same color in a row and put us spire on top that's your main goal but also for where these Invaders are going to come especially when you are placing the wild floors as well they want to go on Floors of their type but failing that they want to they'll go on the multis they want to go on the highest floor though if there's a pillar

18:14 that's higher up so they'll block off those spaces they get in your way in really interesting ways and it's got the lovely C ramp up of you know you're only getting a couple of these things at the start and there's no bosses to worry about just do do what you can build up and start doing things but then as you start to put these spies down and get stronger and get these abilities start to build up hopefully some shards and some flaws and things in your reserve and start to like get a handle on the game it starts ramping up with those Powers getting increased more and more as I was saying in the overview you can see the order of the elements that are going to come out but you don't know what their actual power is going to be so you can kind of get an order based on what's going to come out from the floor tiles what bosses are about to come out maybe the water's first let's start to work on water you're also kind of at the at the mercy of dice a bit there's a lot of scope around that you've got to free reroll every turn and I think all of the characters essentially have got like either useful elements that they can spend or they can kind of discard like one or three dice to do varying things with them whether it's like completely redrawing your floors crystallizing enemies all sorts of things like that so the 3D aspect of it is great for you know its table presence anyone walking past someone kind of Midway through a game with this with all the various Siz Towers going on uh it's definitely going to make an impression but yeah it's it's important for where those enemies are going to go it's important for seeing how close you are to being able to put the spers down and actually try and win the game and that's good as well that like once you've finished the Spire you can get a big bonus straight away you

19:45 knock that boss out of the game potentially even before it's been revealed if you want to do it that way uh but you also reduce them from the bag so you take half of their tokens out of the bag which means that that color isn't as likely to come out to invade which is good because possibly depending on how things have gone your spaces of that color might have all been built up in getting that spy because that blocks off that top spot you know in this case we'd still have these green spaces but somewhere a space is going to have to have you know our fourth color this multi can only have one Tower built up on it are we going to go for you know the next Blue is going to have a big ability on it which means that it's going to have less and less space on it nothing can be built on this in the future cuz no pillars can be placed here it's a really nice balance on these uh floors as well of like your tempted by all of these you're tempted by what's coming out of the piles in the first place although you've got plenty of scope to redraw and do floor crafting here to get more stuff and from the special abilities of the characters yeah it's always very tempting to do quite a powerful thing but at the cost of uh less freedom to put these Invaders down on spaces and you haven't really like if you start to get into a jam of not being able to put many out you can clear them out quite well from the abilities and through crystallizing and building up over a few turns you will end up with uh good scope to do a lot of these spells but yeah by getting those abilities and things you are limiting your space and you haven't really got much space you've got one kind of Health in terms of the walls for each of the elements but then you've only got two Health in the base

21:16 game difficulty before you are destroyed and out of it and so yeah there's a lovely balance between like that that's kind of ramps it up as well not only are the Invaders increasing over the course of the game you are decreasing the space available for them by building up and building up so the tension is always being ratcheted up as the game goes on especially like when you get the reveal of those boss powers and they're suddenly in effect you might have made loads of space for those green Invaders but now they've all got to be on pillars so does our Focus have to shift on these so we've got a load of pillars available and that will help us hopefully just get this thing done so we can get that boss out of there but then all of the others are starting to mess with you as well on what should our priority be there's loads of powers as well that interact with the other players like depending on the the heroes that you're playing to they've got very different powers like I like being able to pass the dice onto the next player that you didn't use cuz like you've you've got the roll you've got a spell that you can do to get extra dice as well so it's and as if you have kind of not necessarily plan things out right but you yeah you've got to keep your options open to have those Invaders on Spaces but also to try and make every element useful because these Wilds are great for putting Invaders on or there's not as many spaces and they count as a wild floor but you've got to have wild tokens so that's the only I think are there two spaces on the dice that can be Wilds so one in four chance of that happening if you're building up all of the elements hopefully all of those colors will be useful maybe more useful based on the special abilities that your characters have got but deciding when to use those when to use these spells as well it's always very tempting as soon

22:46 as you have got uh two colors next to each other to activate that spell but will it be more important on another players's turn will we want to crystallize these things once more problematic things have come out once enemies that are more of a problem have come out will it be better to you know wait till we've got more shs and then we could move a different Invader in so we could crystallize some things that would be able to chain another spell on here I really like this uh system and there are ways to crystallize and stuff with our hero abilities with the flaw powers that come out as well and even at difficulty one you know with basic Heroes and just this setup of the bosses it's still like tricky to win it will depend on a lot of cooperation between you and coordination to try and get these things built while everything is working against you but once you do get used to that and want to take it up there are so many different bosses just in this prototype that I've got that's all I can speak about right now but loads of different Heroes loads of bosses of each type and and the final game is going to have even more difficulties where it's got like complications where the spies have got requirements and things yeah there's there's just so much scope for more and more in this it feels like a very different kind of carop in a really kind of fun and imaginative kind of way and yeah I I've really really enjoyed it and I'm hoping that I'll be coming back in in the future and I'll be able to show you a playthrough of it that' be good wouldn't it for now though it is on Kickstarter you can help to make it happen if you would like to the link is in the description to the campaign page and that'll have all of the final stuff on it what you can get stretch goals anything like that if you'd like to see more from me I've got hundreds of videos

24:16 on this channel loads of playthroughs hey maybe the ones I did for Dungeon Drop and drop drive from the same publisher for now though thank you very much for watching and I'll see you for the next game bye