What in the X Files is going on?

The Scythe universe makes a decent effort of doing some world-building. Expeditions moves the setting to Siberia. A massive meteorite has crashed at Tunguska, waking up a load of ancient corruption which was apparently lying dormant. An expedition to investigate it has gone missing so it’s up to you, war heroes from Europa (from Scythe), to head into the frozen wastes to explore and to find fortune and glory.

It’s a pretty cool story, and in some ways it does a good job of sewing the theme into the game’s patchwork quilt. Most of the hex tiles which make up the landscape are face-down and unexplored when you start the game. Once you explore them you’ll find new resources and actions to take, and also churn up some of the aforementioned corruption. My biggest problem with the theme is trying to understand what this corruption actually is. It’s represented by colourful tiles with numbers on them, and by using a Vanquish action you can spend your accrued power and guile to remove them, but I’m still none the wiser as to what I’m actually doing there.

The rulebook tells me I’m “removing ancient evil”, but it’s never explained how, or what’s happening. For me to be complaining about this as a massive fan of beige, arid Euros might come across as hypocritical and stupid, but it matters here. The huge, gorgeous mech minis look so cool. They look like they’re ready to kick ass in a kind of coal-fired Pacific Rim tribute. But nothing happens. I move my green marker 4 steps down a track and remove a green wooden block with a 4 printed on it. It feels like a missed opportunity to add a thick, shiny layer of thematic gloss.

The goal of the game borrows heavily from Scythe. There are milestones on offer, called Glory in Expeditions. If you meet the criteria for one (e.g. solved four quests, collected seven corruption tokens) and take a Boast action, you can place a star on the Basecamp board. The first player to place four glory tokens triggers the end of the game. So you get the same feeling of a race, which I like. I like it when a game’s end is driven by the players, and it works well here.

Decking in the frozen North

Expeditions is a latecomer to the 2020 party of ‘deck-building + another mechanism’ which the likes of Lost Ruins of Arnak and Dune Imperium (review here) championed. During the game you add cards to your deck, which can in turn be played any time you take the appropriate action, and many cards have a boosted action available if you’re able to place a worker of the correct colour on the card.

Workers, along with cards, coins and other resources, find their way onto your board any time you use the Gather action. You gather whatever’s on the hex where your mech is, which is where you need to use your third available action – Move – which shockingly enough lets you move around the map. The action selection is fun, actually. The three actions are represented by squares on your player board, and on your turn you move your little cube from one square to another. The square you cover is blocked, so you get to take the two actions left uncovered. It adds a nice little element of planning. You can take a full refresh turn to get your played cards back into your hand, along with your workers, and you get to do all three actions next time, but it can feel like a wasted turn. If you plan well you can use rescue actions from tiles and cards to move a played card back into your hand, prolonging the time you’re actively doing things in the game.

In a game where you’re racing the other players to be the one to trigger the end, downtime turns can really hurt if you take them too often.

The deckbuilding is the most fun part of the game. Some of the games using these mixtures of mechanisms don’t really feel like true deck-building in the Dominion sense of the word. Even Arnak and Dune Imperium, excellent as they are, don’t let you cycle through your deck very often. Expeditions does it well, and you’ll end up playing some of your cards a lot of times, which is refreshing.

Grit in the gears

As much as I enjoy Expeditions – and let’s be clear here, I do like the game – there are some things which feel a bit disjointed to me. First on the list is the use of coins in the game. You punch out so many coins of different denominations when you first open the box (80 in total) that you assume they’re a big deal. They aren’t. You can play half an hour of the game and take a load of turns without even collecting a coin, and when you do, it’s often one coin at a time. Coins count towards your score at the end of the game, but that’s all you really do with them. What use is money in a game where you can’t spend money?

The other thing is the constant back and forth that happens at different times during the game. The setting of the game makes you feel like as a veteran of war with a huge repurposed mech at your disposal, you’d probably head into the frozen wastelands prepared. But you end up coming all the way back to where you start to grab another worker, or a card, or whatever it might be. It’s like you and the other mechs are all trampling back and forth all over the place like worker ants.

While I’m talking about the mechs, it’s also worth mentioning that there is no combat in Expeditions. If you though the awesome-looking mechs in Scythe were under-used, Expeditions will set a new, lower benchmark. There’s not even any area-control, other than the rule that no two mechs can share a tile. It all just begs the question – why are the mechs even in the game? I can’t help but feel like I should record a full game, then play it back at 10x speed and watch the mechs bimble around to the Benny Hill theme music.

Final thoughts

Expeditions is a good game. Maybe even a very good game. It has some issues, for sure, which I’ve mentioned above, but I’d still recommend it despite them. The biggest issue is probably the thing which made me the most interested in the game in the first place, and that’s piggybacking on the Scythe theme and name. It didn’t need to be, at all. I would not be remotely surprised to learn that the basic game and its mechanical component parts were designed with a different theme and setting in mind. Maybe even no theme. The whole pickup-and-deliver aspect of completing quests in the game (spend certain things in a certain space) could so easily be applied to any number of other, drier Euro themes.

It’s a big, impressive box with a great insert and those amazing mech minis, but they somehow feel redundant. They all have a slightly asymmetric boost to some actions, but they’re underused. They’re glorified shopping trolleys.

Griping aside, the game itself is great fun to play. I love the race feeling to the game, I love the simple suspense of flipping over a new tile to see what’s on the other side, and I love how simple the game feels to play. It’s obviously had plenty of development done on it, which is exactly what I come to expect from Jamey’s games now, and that professional touch is there on every aspect of the presentation. It’s also surprisingly quick to setup. play, and pack away, which is not what I come to expect of games that come in boxes this big. It’s also easy to teach, much moreso than Scythe.

Now that I write this and think about it, if I wanted to induct a new player to the world of Scythe, I would definitely start with Expeditions before moving on to Scythe. It’s a much smoother, friendlier introduction with a lower rules overhead. If you go into Expeditions expecting more Scythe, you might be disappointed, but if you love the world Scythe is set in, you’ll love to explore more of the lore and characters. I’d still love to see what it would have been if it was in a setting of its own though. A solid, if not outstanding, addition to the Stonemaier family of games.

Review copy kindly provided by Stonemaier Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Expeditions (2023)

Design: Jamey Stegmaier
Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Art: Jakub Rozalski
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Expeditions Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Maybe.

Theme park

Euro games get a bad rap for not carrying their theme too well, and while that’s certainly true in Revive, I can’t help feeling like in some ways it’s actually pretty well done. The story of the game says you’ve been stuck underground since something bad happened to the world, and now your phoenix-like, fledgling tribes are emerging back onto the surface. You’ll try to explore this abandoned world, building and expanding your reach, while your population learn the secrets of their past, uncovering and activating machines to make their new world a better place.

I know – blah, blah, blah. But the way it goes about it is pretty cool. The landscape tiles of the main board are all flipped face-down to begin with, and there’s a decent feeling of venturing forth as each player emerges from the chasm in the middle of the board and spreads out, like ants from a crack in a dry lawn. There’s a mechanism where your citizens have to hibernate to rest, rendering them useless for the next round, and while exploring they can find crates with supplies in. It might not be the most thematic game in the world, but there’s certainly more to it than I initially thought.

The main reason I worried about the game is because of the things I heard about it from those who picked up a copy at Essen. For every post I saw praising the game, I’d see another slating it for just being a Euro mechanism sandbox, with mechanisms seemingly thrown at the game just because they could. The reality for me was much different. There really isn’t that much going on, certainly not as much as I’d feared, and I think a lot of it comes down to the presentation.

When you see these player boards for the first time there’s an undeniable reaction of “Wow, what’s going on here with all of this stuff?”. By the time you’ve got your player board, the tribe board that slots into a notch on the side, and your card areas all around the board, you’re looking at each player having their own area as large as older games in their entirety. The spiderweb of tracks on the – admittedly gorgeous, double-layered – player boards looks more confusing than it really is. The three main tracks could have been laid in a straight line and taken a quarter of the space, but Revive is a game that makes you want to feel special. You’re meant to be leading a tribe here, a nation, and on a subconscious level that’s a feeling you don’t always get if you’ve just got a small cardboard player board like in Hansa Teutonica. You need something bigger, like Gaia Project, and now Revive, to make you feel like you’re in control of something significant.

Checking your balance

Asymmetry in games can be an odd beast. Games like Obsession (review here) or Votes For Women (review here) are both asymmetric, but both feel like the balance is very carefully baked into the game. Some games, such as Tapestry, can feel wildly swingy in comparison, resulting in games with a huge disparity in final scores. The tribes in Revive are asymmetric in nature, so each player ends up with a different unique power that’s for them only. The players also have their own artefact cards, which give them secret end-game scoring conditions, and on top of that, the large corner tiles placed on the main board are randomised too.

I don’t mind a gulf in scores when it represents players simply playing the game better than the rest of the table, but sometimes things just feel unfair from the get-go. You might get dealt an artefact card which rewards something that doubles up with the end-of-game scoring condition on one of the big corner tiles, or maybe meshes well with your tribe’s unique abilities. When that happens it can feel like a one-way street to Loserville – population: you. We played a game of Revive at my local group where one player had a tribe which let them use books (one of the three resource types) as wild resources. They also managed to get some modules which awarded double books, meaning whenever they played a matching card into a slot around their board, they were drowning in books. Now maybe when we’ve all played it more we’ll find a good counter, but at the time it certainly felt very one-sided.

The publishers, Aporta Games, have taken this sort of feedback on board, which is great. One of the designers – Kristian Amundsen Østby – posted this Official Low Luck Variant on BGG, so if that sort of thing bothers you, at least there are options now. Going into Revive without knowing these sorts of things could leave a sour taste in your mouth, which is why I’ve taken the time to go into a little detail here. Revive is so much fun, it’s definitely worth your time.

Tools of the trade

So who’s going to enjoy Revive, and why? Revive is somewhere between a deck-builder and a deck-construction game, combined with tech trees. Half of your actions will involve playing a card into a slot around your board, and the cards are multi-use. Cards played into the top of your board obscure the bottom of the card, and so give you the benefits or resources shown on the top half. Cards in the bottom do the opposite. The resources you gain by playing cards let you play the three other main actions: explore, build, and populate, which translate as flip tiles on the main board, and add buildings and people from your player board to the main board.

This is where the game starts to feel like the one I mentioned above – Gaia Project – and its step-sibling, Terra Mystica. In both of those, there’s an emphasis on getting pieces off of your own board and onto the main board, to expand your influence on the main board while simultaneously unlocking abilities on your board. Revive does this same thing, and it’s very satisfying to do. One of the things I really enjoy in Revive is that none of the actions feel weak, or like “Well, if I want to do this cool thing later, I need to do this lame thing for a while first”. Exploring brings instant victory points and lets you choose the lay of the land, often triggering track advances at the same time. Building nets loads of adjacency bonuses from the main board. Populating is arguably the most satisfying because when a meeple leaves your board, they unlock the action or ability they were covering.

My personal favourite thing is the module mechanism. The card slots around your board have notches next to them where these cardboard ‘modules’ fit nice and snug. Mechanically, all they do is give you some bonus resource when you slot a card of matching colour in, but there’s something very personal about choosing and attaching one. The same goes of advancing around the three tracks on your board. Clear a wooden marker from an indented disc and you get to take a machine disk from the market. All you’re doing is putting a round piece of cardboard into a round hole, but the satisfaction we felt as a two-year-old doing the same thing with a shape sorter must lie dormant, in some kind of lizard part of our brains. It’s just as much fun to do now as it was all the way back then.

Final thoughts

Revive isn’t for everybody. There’s a lot to think about, and fans of lighter fare may struggle with the decision space at any given time. The game is quite generous with the resources given to you, so there’s often an abundance of choice when it comes to what to do next, which some people really don’t like. If you like that feeling of a sandbox, however, with open-ended strategy from turn one, you’ll love it.

The apparent lack of balance can make it feel like the game gets skewed in someone’s favour at times, which can be mightily frustrating if you’re not the one lady luck favours. As I said further up though, there’s an official variant and plenty of house rules if that’s your thing. My job here is to review the out-of-the-box experience, however, so it’s only fair to make you aware of it.

Revive is a ton of fun to play, especially with the way things start to combo as the game goes on. I wondered why the game includes two cubes to track the actions you take (you get two actions per turn), because it doesn’t sound like a difficult thing to keep track of, but later in the game you’ll be thankful for them. The familiar dopamine hit of “Do this thing, which gives me this other thing, then that triggers this. Then I take these free actions…” is ever-present and very satisfying. It just gets hard to keep track of how many actions you’ve taken.

Revive is a beautiful, lavish production which fans of mid-heavy Euro games will lap up. Aporta Games have made a game which feels like a £100+ production in a box which will cost you a little over half of that. The included mini-campaign does a good job of drip-feeding a few additional rules and attempting to build a little more story, but in all honesty, you’re neither going to care about the lore nor worry that you’re missing out on it. If this all sounds like your kind of thing, pick it up, you’ll have a great time with Revive.

Review copy kindly provided by my retail partner, Kienda. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

You can buy this game from my retail partner, Kienda. Remember to sign-up for your account at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for a 5% discount on your first order of £60 or more.

Revive (2022)

Design: Helge Meissner, Eilif Svensson, Anna Wermlund, Kristian Amundsen Østby
Publisher: Aporta Games
Art: Gjermund Bohne, Martin Mottet, Dan Roff
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 90-120 mins

The post Revive Review appeared first on Punchboard.

1. You’re a fan of all things Austen, and you can’t believe your luck – there’s a game with this setting.
2. You have a special someone in your life who isn’t as into board games as you are, and you want to know if this game could be the one that lures them into your hobby.

Regardless of which camp you’re in, the answer is a resounding maybe. Obsession is a great game and no mistake. It may just be a little troublesome for someone unaccustomed to a modern board game’s disposition.

The very first moment I beheld him, my heart was irrevocably gone

Despite that opening salvo, I’m not a big Austen fan, nor do I have anyone I think I could necessarily tempt into my cult of cardboard with such a game. I had heard, however, that Obsession is a great Euro game in its own right, so my curiosity was piqued good and proper. There’s no denying that the setting is a very clever twist on the standard Euro fare, and it is gorgeous.

There are plenty of games set in 19th Century England, and some are fantastic. Brass: Birmingham is a great example. All too often these games are very industrial in nature. They’re about the businesses, the resources of the time, and the Industrial Revolution. Few games take on the people of the time, and it’s a gap that Obsession gratefully squeezes itself into.

While you’ll spend time in the game adding to your house’s facilities, Obsession’s roots are planted firmly in the families and guests involved. Your family members are all cards in your deck, as are the various guests you entertain. Some are casual guests you invite into your home, while others are more prestigious, and it’s this sense of gentry, breeding, and society which pervades.

If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more

Obsession’s 19th Century Derbyshire veneer is very nicely applied, but what really matters is the game beneath. It’s a mixture of deck-building and worker-placement, and it’s one which seemed to slip past everyone’s radar when critics were waxing lyrical about other new games using the same combination of mechanisms over the last couple of years. Dune Imperium, Endless Winter, Lost Ruins of Arnak – all of them do the same thing, but poor old Obsession was always the bridesmaid, never the bride.

It’s a crying shame really because I believe Obsession does a better job of working the deck of cards into the game than any of those other games. Each player’s board houses a set of tiles which represent the various rooms and areas of their family’s home, and it’s these same tiles which act as places for your workers to go. Take the example of the Riding Stables tile. You can host any two guests, as long as they’re a gentleman and a lady, and you’ll earn £200 for their afternoon ride.

Of course, being of landed gentry, the very idea that you’d deign to let them ride without sending a servant to escort them is unthinkable. That means you’ve got to move one of your wooden servants from the Available Service box on your board to the tile, but only if you’ve got the correct type available. There’s no use in trying to send a Lady’s Maid off to the stables, they need a Footman.

Obsession, then, is a game of carefully planning your various actions, ensuring you have both the staff (meeples) and the ladies and gentlemen (cards) available to carry them out. There’s a very satisfying feeling of ‘getting stuff’ when you carry out an action, because you not only get the bonus from the tile (money, in the afternoon ride example) but also the bonuses from each of the cards you played. Your money goes towards new tiles to add to your board, giving you more worker spaces, and more combo opportunities. It’s a really nice set of systems.

I have not the pleasure of understanding you

Looping all the way back to the opening of this review then, and me telling you that Obsession is maybe the game that bridges the gap between board game enthusiasts and period drama fans. Obsession is a great game, as I said before, but it’s one that can prove too difficult to explain to someone who has never played a modern board game.

The principles are simple enough to explain. You have to put the matching colour worker on the space you want to use, spend the cards which match the conditions, and if those cards demand workers themselves, spend those workers too. But the planning that goes into making sure you have the cards (guests) you need to visit those tiles, and the servants to go with those tiles and cards on your turn… that’s tricky to get your head around. It can lead to a level of frustration that turns people off.

On the flip side of all of this, hardcore Euro gamers might find annoyance at the random draw of tiles and guests. There is a rotating storefront of tiles to add to your board, and you can spend reputation to refresh them, but when it comes to guests it’s usually a case of blindly drawing a card, or if you’re lucky, drawing two and keeping one. If you draw a guest who needs to be gone by the end of the game (some reward you with negative points if they’re ne’er-do-wells), it might fly in the face of your strategy. It’s a game of adaptive tactics, rather than strategy. If Terraforming Mars, Everdell, or Ark Nova vex you because of their dependence on lucky shuffles, Obsession might do the same.

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours and laugh at them in our turn?

Those of you who revel in multiplayer-solitaire games will love Obsession. The only real competition is in the scrapping over the buildings on offer, and the odd tile that lets you recruit a worker from another player’s board. Other than that, it’s just you against your own brain. To be honest, that’s just as bad for me, my brain is my own worst enemy. That sort of game should be a natural fit for a good solo game, and guess what – it is.

The solo mode in Obsession works well and is smoothly implemented. There’s a choice of opponents, and the reality of playing it means rolling a D20 and removing the matching tile from the builders’ market. There’s a little more to it than that, but what I want to stress is how easy the solo mode is to run. It’s one of those games which doesn’t alter the goal to make solo gaming fit. You can play using the same ideas and tactics you would if you were playing against real people, and that’s a really nice touch.

Final thoughts

Theme and Euro game aren’t always the best of bedfellows. Some games’ themes are applied like gilding a gearbox – pretty from a distance, but still just a bunch of interlocking cogs and gears. Obsession, on the other hand, is an exemplar when it comes to making a thinky game that’s practically brimming with life and colour. Dan Hallagan – the designer of Obsession – has done a sterling job of finding that balance between a Turing Machine wearing an Easter bonnet and a vacuous box of swooning fan service. Fans of novels like Pride & Prejudice and Sense & Sensibility will absolutely lap it up, as will hobby gamers. Just bear in mind those couple of caveats around perceived difficulty, and Mister Strategy stepping aside for Lady Luck at times.

A special mention has to go to the overall level of presentation throughout. From the portraits on the guest cards to the beautiful boxes included to store the game’s components, everything has had so much attention to detail lavished upon it. Critics might argue that the tiles are bland and uninteresting, but they’re very much about function over form. The clear iconography throughout makes it possible to discern everything you need to know about a card or tile at a glance.

It’s fair to say that Obsession’s position as an outlier when it comes to board game themes may well have helped it climb the rankings over on BGG (it’s #107 overall at the time of writing), but it’s the game itself which is keeping it there, four years after its release. It’s a fantastic game which I think would go down a storm with people who like games like Castles of Burgundy. People who like games with a fast gameplay loop once learned, but with room for a lot of tactical, reactive play, with a strong focus on your own little world.

Obsession was recently released on Board Game Arena (play it here), so you can try it out right now before spending any money. If you enjoy it, I encourage you to pick up a copy, because it’s a beautiful thing to own, and a game which you’ll play time and again.

Review copy kindly provided by Kienda.co.uk. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

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Obsession (2018)

Designer: Dan Hallagan
Publisher: Kayenta Games
Art: Dan Hallagan
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 30-90 mins

The post Obsession Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Interestingly, the two people who lent their names to SchilMil Games – Julia Schiller and Amanda Milne – are also the game’s designers. I think it’s fair to say that Manifest is a game which is aimed at the same kind of space as Ticket To Ride. It’s pretty, has tactile pieces, a nice insert, and a thin rulebook. The board isn’t plastered with icons and reminders, like the lid of a teenager’s laptop. Instead, it’s clean and clear and lets the Art Deco typeface and artwork take centre stage.

Boarding pass at the ready

I like how streamlined the gameplay is in Manifest. You’ve each got a hand of cards, and on your turn, you play them for either their movement value, their money, or the effects written on them. I always find myself reminded of Ticket To Ride when I play Manifest, even though they’re two mechanically different games. I think it’s because of the contract cards, which ask you to take something from one place to another, and the further apart the start and end are, the more points you score by completing them.

There’s a great touch to the way contracts are handled too. As well as your own privately-held, secret contracts, there are also public contracts on offer on the board. They’re up for grabs, and it’s first-come-first-served. It just adds a little something to that feeling that TTR gives you, where it feels like you’re racing to complete contracts, but only ever guessing what the other players are going for.

Manifest could have been a much simpler game, but instead gives each player two ships to control, and thus, two ships to worry about. Your movement and money are split between them and force you to make some tricky decisions at times. For example, movement on one card cannot be split between ships. Not being able to use the change left over from one card on a different ship means you might have to decide whether to risk waiting a turn, leaving that juicy four-point public contract just out of reach for now. How confident are you someone else won’t take it this turn?

Rough waters ahead

It’s not all smooth sailing – pun absolutely intended. There are plenty of spicy little touches to keep you on your toes. Pirates are a good example. Not a good example of life choices, just of bad things that can happen in Manifest. Some of the most convenient routes around the Caribbean, South China Sea, and Suez Canal are patrolled by pirates. If you choose to negotiate those stretches, you roll dice which can lead to pirates stealing cargo and passengers.

Much like anything else in the game, there are cards which negate hazardous pieces of game design, but it’s a case of having the correct card in your hand when you need it. Perfect planning, people. Perfect planning. Combat’s not just limited to pirates either, and player vs player naval fisticuffs are on the table too. It’s a nice layer of interactivity to prevent Manifest from being just a straightforward race to the finish line.

Some of the included optional modules keep things interesting too. Interesting in the same way that cutting the brake cable on your bike and going for a fast ride is interesting. Fun, but anything but a smooth ride home. Company advantage cards give players unique per-turn powers, and there’s a pirate ship variant which sees anyone losing cargo to piracy being able to act as the pirate the next time someone else risks it. It’s the Expert version of the game that I like best though.

Deck building deck-building. Like, deck on a boat. Geddit?

Once you’ve played the basic version once or twice, the deck-building ‘Expert’ version of the game is where it’s at. Like all good deck-builders, you start with a basic set of cards you’ll cycle through, and there’s a card market too. Some of the powers on offer on the market cards are really interesting, and anything which helps prevent a game from going stale quickly is a good thing in my book.

Cheaper basic card upgrades, being able to use the values of a card face-up in the market, and even whirlpools to move anybody’s ship around the map. The new cards give you more to think about, for sure, and there’s the added problem that money spent on cards isn’t being spent on cargo. There are only a couple of cards that let you draw extra cards into your hand, so don’t expect Dominion-esque combos that go on forever. The deck-building in Manifest has a much more subtle effect on the flow of the game.

I mean, the basic game is fine with newbies, or with family who don’t play games often, but if you know your Carcassonne from your Carrom, you really ought to be using the Expert rules when you play.

Final thoughts

Manifest is a really decent game. I hadn’t heard of it when I was given the chance to review it, but one look at the ’20s stylings had me hooked – shallow man that I am! Luckily, the game is good too. I’ve mentioned Ticket To Ride too many times already in this review, and I really don’t want anyone to directly compare the games, because they’re so different. It really does give me that same feeling of accessibility, ease of play, and family-friendly play that TTR does. It sits on my ‘Games I could play with the family at Christmas’ shelf.

If you can, I recommend playing it with at least three players. It’s fine with two, but you can spend most of the game on opposite sides of the planet, doing your own thing. More fun comes from the risk of bumping into others mid-ocean, and the race for the public contracts. The game states that it’s aimed at 13+ years of age, but honestly, my nearly-ten-year-old had no trouble picking up the idea of the basic game.

It’s not going to scratch your heavy euro itch, nor sate your appetite for the pirate stylings of something like Merchants & Marauders. What it is, is a solid pick-up-and-deliver game which often results in a madcap race to get the last few points needed to win, and it’s beautifully produced. It even caters to those of you who don’t like the Greenwich Meridian running through the centre of the map. Flip the board over and you’ve got the Pacific there instead, with the Americas on the right, and the rest of the world on the left. Small touches like that just add that Mr Sheen shine to the whole package.

Review copy kindly provided by SchilMil Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Manifest (2014)

Designers: Julia Schiller, Amanda Milne
Publisher: SchilMil Games
Art: Amanda Milne, Franz Vohwinkel
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 45-90 mins

The post Manifest Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Jungle is massive

The Quest for El Dorado drops you into the roles of expedition leaders. Each is trying to negotiate their way through the jungles, deserts, and lakes, searching for the golden treasure. That landscape is a collection of big, hex tiles, joined at the edges. There are several layouts shown in the rulebook, but there’s nothing to stop you from creating something which fits on your table better. Despite the hexes not being too big, by the time they’re linked, and the card market is on the table, it takes up quite a lot of space.

The best way to describe the game is a mixture of deck-building and racing. Some deck-builders can feel like a race. Dominion, for example, is basically a race to amass points before the last Province card is taken. The Quest for El Dorado, however, is a traditional race. Our intrepid explorers have to play cards that allow them to cut their way through the jungle, aiming to be the first to make it to the gold – and with it, glory. Something like that, anyway.

If we’re honest, the most satisfying bit of a deck-builder is crafting your deck. As in Moonrakers, Aeon’s End, and just about every other deck-building game ever, there’s a card market to visit. In an attempt to keep things thematic, your trips to card-Tesco in El Dorado result in you hiring more people to come on your trip. You might be hiring a Scout to lead your group, but in reality, all you need to know is that he’s a green card with a power of two. You might look at the card art and think about what each card represents, but that’s quickly replaced with a need to just glance at colour and value. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad thing necessarily, it’s just how deck-builders work.

Lean, mean, exploring machine

There are two distinct phases to most peoples’ introduction to deck-building. Phase one is when you buy all the cards, and revel in your glorious collection, like some kind of card magnate. Phase two is when you try to play with all the cards, and realise they don’t work together. It’s this natural turning point that leads inquisitive minds to think “What if I take cards out of my deck, so the cards I want come out more often…?”.

Trimming the fat. Separating the wheat from the chaff. Skimming off the cream. It doesn’t matter which analogy you choose, the result is the same. In El Dorado you’ll inevitably find some value in thinning your deck, and there’s a mechanism for doing exactly that. Visiting a base camp on the map lets you bin some of your cards permanently, but in typical Knizia fashion, it’s a calculated risk. Getting to a base camp means straying off the beaten path. In other words, your deck gets more useful, but it means you’ll often have to travel further.

Decisions, decisions.

The way Reiner has balanced The Quest for El Dorado is fantastic. I love the way you can plan your route long in advance, and then try to craft your deck along the way. If you’ve played the more-recent Cubitos, you’ll be familiar with the agony of choice you’re given, between the most direct route and the best bonuses. It’s a light game, in terms of complexity, but I’d still probably point newcomers towards Dominion first. Learning how to build a deck while planning a route can prove tricky for younger players. Any mistakes made during crafting your deck feel amplified by your lack of progress in the race.

Final thoughts

I’m a sucker for jungley, adventurey, Indiana-Jonesy themes in games. I loved Escape: The Curse of the Temple, and The Quest for El Dorado conjures up the same feelings for me. On a mechanical level it’s just about growing a stronger deck of cards to cope with more difficult movement requirements. As you’d expect from a Reiner Knizia game, the mathematics behind all of this feel very nicely balanced. As long as you follow the official map layouts or use the principles in the rulebook (or these awesome fan-made maps), you’ll be able to create some unique and varied jungles.

This is a real keeper of a game. It’s not one of those that sits on your shelves for months between plays (I’m sorry, On Mars. I still love you). You could easily play it several evenings in a week and not get tired of it, thanks to the variable setup. I keep harking back to Dominion, I know, but El Dorado offers the same simplicity in rules and mechanical overhead as its forebear. Once you know how to play it, each time it lands on the table it becomes a game of figuring out what you want to do, not how to play, and that’s what all good games should do.

If you’re all about the heavy, brain-burning games, The Quest for El Dorado probably isn’t for you. As a svelte, accessible mix of racing and deck-building though, it’s fantastic. Even though Knizia has created hundreds of games, there aren’t many that I’d consider must-haves. El Dorado, along with Tigris and Euphrates, is a game that I think everyone should have in their collection. Dominion is still on my shelf after 13 years, and I expect The Quest for El Dorado to still be there in another 13. It’s brilliant.

Review copy kindly provided by Ravensburger UK. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

The Quest for El Dorado (2017)

Designer: Reiner Knizia
Publisher: Ravensburger
Art: Vincent Dutrait, Franz Vohwinkel
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 30-60 mins

The post The Quest for El Dorado Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Semi-cooperative is an interesting concept. When it’s done well, it’s genius. Battlestar Galactica (now re-imagined as Unfathomable) and Nemesis are brilliant examples. Despite knowing this, I tend to wear my ‘hmm, dubious’ face when I learn that a game is using it. Even though I haven’t played a truly bad example. Games with a hidden traitor lend themselves to the concept really well, but a deck-builder? Dominion with negotiation?

Dominion in spaaaaaaaace!

I’m going to cut to the chase here, and say that the way Moonrakers plays has a lot in common with the original and best* deck-builder, Dominion. Each reactor card gives you another two actions, thruster cards let you draw more cards from your deck… sound familiar? if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. The difference comes with the additional cards you might have, like shields and damage. These don’t give you anything extra, but you need a certain combination of cards in order to fulfil contracts.

So what’s a contract? At the start of your turn, you choose a contract to attempt. Contracts award you with different bonuses, but the ones you’re most interested in are money and victory points (VPs). Some of the contracts need a lot of cards to be played in order to complete them, and it’s not the sort of thing you can do by yourself. This is where we talk about the co-operative part of the game.

Let’s say that I’ve got a really tough contract to fulfil. I can do some of it myself, but I can’t get the number of damage I need. I can open it up to the table, and ask if anyone wants to join the contract with me, if they’ve got damage to contribute, in return for some kind of reward. We get to decide the terms of the deal ourselves, so it might be that I suggest I take the VPs for the contract, while you take the money. Sounds good to you? Mutually beneficial? Good, good. Negotiation in action.

* Dominion is the best pure deck-builder, and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise.

Only those you trust can betray you

The aim of Moonrakers is to be the first to 10 Presitge (VPs). So while I might need you to help me complete a contract, you might decide that it’s in your best interests to let me fail. So you tell me “Sure Adam, I’ve got a handful of damage cards here, I’ll help you”. We start the contract, then you decide to reveal that in fact, you have none. You just wanted me to commit to a contract I couldn’t fulfil, in the hope I take damage from the hazard dice I had to roll, and didn’t have the shield cards to mitigate them.

If this reminds you of games like Cosmic Encounter, then you’re on the right track. Knowing who you can and cannot trust is a big deal, and even then you’ll sometimes get screwed over by someone you thought never, ever would. This can be a problem for some groups. If you have players who are sensitive, or others who find it very hard to leave what happens at the table, at the table. You might find need to house-rule it. Make deals binding, something like that. Otherwise, this probably isn’t the game for you.

Non-binding agreements happen to be something I really like in games. As much as I like the mechanical dryness of a decent, crunchy Euro game, sometimes you just want something which gets the table talking and interacting more. Moonrakers hits a nice 50/50 balance between the game developing on the table, and the meta taking place above the table.

Rocket engines

Directly comparing Moonrakers to the base game of Dominion does it a disservice, as there’s a lot more going on. As well as carefully constructing your deck of cards, there are hidden objectives for each player to chase, and a player board to consider. When it comes to the buy phase of your turn, as well as purchasing crew cards to add to your deck (which can be very powerful), you can also buy the small, square, ship part cards. You add the ship parts to your player board which give you ongoing or instant effects, and usually more of the basic cards into your deck.

This kind of limited engine-building is really clever. It doesn’t feel as important as the main part of the game, but in a game in which you’re trying to get to ten points, every little thing you can do to swing things in your favour is important. It could be that getting that third ship part manufactured by that one company is enough to complete an objective, earning you a final point, and with it, victory. It’s another of those really clever, very subtle things that Moonrakers does so well. Showing you most of how people are scoring, but not everything.

Final thoughts

Fans of deck-building haven’t had many truly great options recently. Aeon’s End and Thunderstone Quest do a good job, but there aren’t many more that spring to mind. That’s what makes me really glad that Moonrakers exists. It’s nice to have a new game that keeps the core mechanisms of classic deck-building intact, but adds enough new things to make it feel fresh. The engine-building and negotiation don’t feel forced, or disjointed. It all melds together nicely.

I found that playing the game with people you don’t normally have in your group, can make the first few rounds feel a little stilted. It’s hard to gauge what kind of deals to propose with people, and even harder to know how people will react to having an agreement torn out from under them. Tread with care for your first few rounds. Once you get into the swing of things, however, it’s really good fun seeing who is desperate enough to help you in a deal that’s massively unbalanced in your favour.

I don’t usually talk too much about component quality in my reviews, but the bits in the box with Moonrakers are fantastic. The metal coins, little plastic ships, and even the cardstock is gorgeous. The same goes for the artwork and graphic design, it’s excellent throughout. The base game feels like a Kickstarter deluxe versoin. There’s even a comic in the box, explaining the backstory to the game. At its best with three or four players, Moonrakers is a fantastic example of a classic deck-builder with a modern twist.

Review copy provided by IV Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Moonrakers (2020)

Designers: Austin Harrison, Max Anderson, Zac Dixon
Publisher: IV Games
Art: Lunar Saloon
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Moonrakers Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Designer: Shem Phillips, S J MacDonald
Publisher: Garphill Games / Renegade Game Studios
Art: Mihajlo Dimitrievski
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-90 minutes

Introduction

First we had Architects, which was a bit like a grown-up Stone Age worker placement game. A good game, but not too heavy. Then came Paladins, which really upped the ante and got a lot heavier, and did a really nice twist on the standard worker placement formula. Towards the end of 2020, Viscounts arrived, and one was of a growing trend of combining deck-building and other mechanics.

In this game we’re sending our viscounts around the kingdom, constructing buildings, transcribing manuscripts, and increasing our nobles’ influence in the castle. To do that we’re using our band of townsfolk and criminals, gaining deeds and converting debts, trying to prove ourselves the most powerful.

What’s In The Box?

Shem Phillips’ games come in these neat, square boxes. They don’t take up much space, but getting all the pieces in there is a task in itself sometimes (cough.. Paladins). There’s plenty in the Viscounts box too.

The board is made up of five sections, each of which are double-sided, The side you use depends on the number of players. You place them down in random order, then the plastic castle – randomly oriented – locks the boards in place with an extremely satisfying click. Then there are piles of cardboard manuscripts placed around the board, and piles of townsfolk cards.

Resources in Viscounts are represented with wooden inkwells, gold and stone, along with the now de-facto cardboard coins (or metal if you’re lucky enough to have upgraded them). The player boards are thin card, much like the ones from Terraforming Mars. They’re the only thing which feels cheap in the game, but I understand why they’re so thin. I’m not sure everything would have fit in the box if they were thick cardstock.

Cards On The Table

As you might expect in a game with deck-building, there are quite a lot of cards included in Viscounts. There’s a starting deck of cards for each player, which are identical, and then a deck of townsfolk who can later be added to players’ decks. Finally, for the full-size cards there’s a deck of AI cards for the solo mode.

There’s also a whole bunch of the smaller size cards that feature in the other games. There’s a stack each of debts and deeds, which play an important role in the game, and some other cards for marking bonuses for actions later in the game.

The quality of all of the components, as you’d expect by now, is really high. The only negative is as I mentioned above, the player boards are more like player mats. Shiny card. But the big difference between this game and something like Terraforming Mars, is that the main things you’ll place on this board are cards, so a small bump or two won’t matter even if things do move.

How Does It Play?

So, we’ve got our boards placed in a random order, and the castle’s clicked into the middle. Each player has their starting deck, their board, and they added a combination of starting resources and Hero card, which gets shuffled into their deck. The viscount markers go to their designated spots on the board, and we can start.

Action Stations

As you might expect from a euro game, the core of Viscounts revolves around taking actions. At the most basic level, a turn consists of playing a card onto your board (more on this later), moving your viscount the requisite number of spaces printed on that card, and then taking an action.

There are three main ways to score points in Viscounts, and each of these has an associated action. Constructing a Building lets you take a spend hammers and stone, take a building from your player board, and occupy a space around the outer ring of the board. As you might expect, there are bonuses from doing this. The spot you build on gives you something, if you build next to another building and there’s a line between them, both building owners get whatever’s on that line, and the space on your board where that building used to live, now gives you something extra. Nice.

While you’re on that outer ring, you could be trading instead, Trading sees you cashing in your silver and any money bag icons on your board in exchange for resources, or flipping deed or debt cards. This is an important action that we’ll touch on later.

If you follow paths to the inner circle of the board, there are a couple more actions to take. You could Place Workers, where spending a combination of gold and fleur de lis symbols let you add your workers to the lowest tier of the castle. This section is great fun, as when you manage to get three of your workers in one section, one moves to the space to the left, one to the right, and the third goes up a tier, giving you a bonus action or resource. Where this gets interesting though, is that if any of those workers you moved is now the third of yours in a section, the same thing happens again! And again! You get this deeply satisfying cascade of movement and bonuses from the centrepiece of the board.

Finally you could spend crosses and inkwells to transcribe manuscripts, taking the tokens from the board, gaining the bonuses on them, and setting up some set collection for end of game scoring. Any purple criminal icons are wild, and count towards any action.

Decked-Out

Even on its own, that sounds like a satisfying game in its own right. But we haven’t even looked at the player boards yet, or those cards in our hands. On your turn, you slide any cards on your board a space to the right, eventually dropping off to form a discard pile. You choose one from your hand of three cards, and play it into the now-empty space. Some cards have an immediate effect, giving you something when you play it. Some have a dropping-off effect, triggered when they fall off the end of the board, and others have an ongoing effect for the time they’re in play.

Each of these cards has one or more symbols on them, which relate to the actions from the section above. To take an action, you total up the matching symbols and the resources you have that you want to spend. So for example, to build a building you’re combining hammer icons and stones. The more of each thing you have, the more potent the version of the action you can take.

I did mention right at the top, waaaay back up there, that this game has deck-building, so what did I mean? At the end of a turn, you can buy the card next to your viscount for the cost printed on it, and add it to your discard pile. In the tradition of most deck-builders (Though not Aeon’s End), the discard pile is eventually shuffled and recycled into your draw pile. There are other actions which let you destroy cards from your deck, removing them from the game. By combining these things it’s possible to build a deck that’s very strong at one thing, by adding more of those type of symbols, and weaker in others, by weeding them out of your deck.

“He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”

The last thing to mention are the two sets of polar opposites employed in the game: deeds & debts, and virtue & corruption.

Deed and debt cards are acquired throughout the game, Deeds give you 1 VP, or three when flipped, and debts are worth -2 VPs, which are cancelled if flipped and give you a free resource. It’s collecting these cards that triggers the end of the game too. Partway down each of the decks (deeds and debts) there’s a larger card, which, when revealed, signals the last turn of the game. In a fun twist though, revealing the card in the deeds debt rewards the player with the most flipped debts, and vice-versa. This means there’s a see-saw of players making sure they have enough of the deck that looks like it’s going to get triggered, which in turn moves that deck closer to being the one which triggers the end. The tension!

Finally, on each player’s board there’s a track representing virtue and corruption. A black marker starts on one end, a white one on the other. Certain actions cause the markers for one or the other to move towards each other, and when they collide there’s a resolution phase. This sees the player take a number of deeds or debts, before resetting and starting the track again. At first it doesn’t seem that important, but when you consider that pushing that track all the way to one end gives you three deeds or debts, it becomes really important to keep an eye on.

All of this pushing and shoving carries on until the end of the game is triggered, then players total up the points from what they’ve accomplished, plus any bonuses. Then to the victor, the spoils! If you don’t have any spoils, maybe replace it with a cup of tea and a chocolate hobnob.

Final Thoughts

Viscounts of the West Kingdom is a great game. I could probably just leave it there and you’d know all you need to, but you’re out of luck, because I want to tell you why I like it so much,

King Of The Castle

I have no shame in saying that one of my favourite things in this deep, strategic game, is moving all the little dudes around on the castle. It’s ridiculously satisfying. Lots of games have actions that combo up and give you stuff, but none do it in such a fun, toy-like way. I take an inordinate amount of pleasure from moving the pieces around and telling everyone else – in explicit detail – what I’m doing.

“So i add my guys here, then this one goes here, that one goes there, and this one goes up a level and gets me a free move on the first tier. I move him, there, and trigger another one. This guy goes up, flips a debt for me (thank you very much), now there’s three in there, so up he goes again to the top, and now I take a resource, and the castle lead card. Oh, and look down here, there’s four in this section now, and two of them are yours? Oh dear, off you get then. My castle! Adam’s castle!“

Yeah, I can be pretty annoying to play games with.

That’s just one part of the puzzle though. Getting the buildings off your board gives you some really powerful bonuses, like permanent bonus icons for your preferred action, and clearing a full set of buildings is worth loads of points. Collecting manuscripts is the real sleeper strategy though, the initial bonuses on them aren’t always extravagant, but the bonuses for collecting sets of different coloured ones, and the bonus cards for being first to collect three of a kind, they can lead to some crazy end-of-game scoring.

Getting The Full Picture

One thing I found in my first few plays, is that it’s very easy to get drawn into this mindset of ‘see what cards I have, see what I can do, do that, repeat’. Playing this way however, you’re not really taking advantage of the gimmick (and I really don’t like that term) of having deck-building. Choosing which cards to destroy when you can, and which you recruit into your deck, is one of those things which shows its importance more with each play.

There are usually small margins in victory in Viscounts, and a carefully crafted deck means you can do your preferred action maybe even just one more time than your opponent, and that can be the difference between winning and losing. Destroying cards not only refines your deck, but you also get the value of the card back in silver, which is also vital for certain things. You will undoubtedly reach a point in one of your games where the thing you need to complete your master plan is one… space… further… than you can move, and that single silver piece can be spent to increase your range by one.

That’s the sort of margins we’re talking about here.

Set Your Own Pace

It’s no secret that I love heavy euro games. One thing that I’ve noticed in a lot of the games I played last year is that you can always see the end of the game. In Merv you get twelve turns. In Praga Caput Regni it’s something like 16. Even in Shem’s own Paladins of the West Kingdom, there are eight rounds, then it’s done. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind that at all, all of those games are fantastic. What it leads to though is a lot of over-analysis for the last turn, trying to squeeze the maximum points from it.

In Viscounts, the end is driven by the deed and debt decks, and when one runs out. It’s maybe a subtle difference, but an important one to me. It’s something normally in older or more light- or middle-weight games, like Stone Age, Dominion, or even Ticket To Ride. Seeing it again in Viscounts made me really appreciate the tension and meta game it brings, keeping an eye on your opponents, the cards remaining, where the virtue and corruptions are, trying to figure out if it’s worth triggering the end and watching people scramble for the last points.

Any Pieces Missing?

The danger when combining mechanics in a game is whether all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. Nobody wants a jigsaw with a piece missing, or the wrong shaped holes and nobbles? tongues? Whatever the sticky-outy bits on a jigsaw piece are called. Anyway, I digress. Viscounts marries everything together really nicely.

There is so much randomness in setup that no two games will feel the same, and there are a lot of different ways to play, and no dominant strategy. You’ll see people say that filling the castle is an easy road to win every time, but when you compare the points available for completing all the castle actions, buildings, and the maximum realistic amount of manuscripts, it really isn’t.

The deck-building is really clever. Balancing who is in your deck, who you recruit or dismiss during you turn, the order you move them across your board, and combining the icons and effects on them, it’s really nicely done. Much like moving and taking actions, the card management feels like a game in its own right, but the really important thing here is that although each part feels like a game, the way they combine is nigh-on perfect.

Deck-building, area control, resource management, player board upgrading – it’s all there, and it all works.

“Dancing With Myself, Oh Oh, Dancing With Myself”

Even Billy Idol had to entertain himself sometimes, so it’s a good job there’s a full solo mode in the box. Shem puts proper opponents in his solo games, which I really like in a solo game, and Viscounts is another excellent example of how to do it well. Paladins’ opponent was great, with variable difficulty, and Viscounts goes even further. The reverse side of each of the player mats has a different AI to play against, each focusing on a different favoured action. It’s really well done, really easy on the housekeeping, and thanks to the clear iconography and excellent player aids is really easy to do.

Solo doesn’t feel like a “I’ll have to make do with this instead of real people” option, it’s really enjoyable experience deserving to be played even if you have a regular group around you.

The TL;DR Bit

In summary Viscounts is awesome. It plays smooth, it’s great fun, it’s on the heavy side. The deck-building works, the components are great, the solo is fantastic. You can play differently every time you play, which keeps things fresh. You’ll know how to play it within your first game, and the teach is pretty painless too. If you like Garphill Games‘ other West Kingdom games, I think you’ll love this. The Mico’s distinctive art style might not be for everyone, but it’s the signature on these games, and personally I love it.

It’s cheaper than most of the games being released now, and it deserves a space in any euro fan’s collection. Is it better than Paladins? ….hmmm, ask me this time next year.

The post Viscounts Of The West Kingdom Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Spoiler-Free Section

Introduction

Designer Kevin Riley gave us the original Aeon’s End game back in 2016. It’s a cooperative fantasy deckbuilding game, in which players combine spells, relics and gems to build a powerful deck, in order to fight legions of evil creatures, and to save your home, Gravehold.

There have been several expansions since, thanks to the game’s popularity and success, and today we’re going to take a look at one of them – Aeon’s End Legacy. The biggest difference between this version and the others in the series is that word on the end of the title, “legacy”.

Legacy games, if you’re not familiar with them, tend to have things happen which permanently change the game as you play. It can be things like stickers or marks on the game board, stickers or writing on cards, changes to the rule book, or even tearing things up and never using them again. Aeon’s End Legacy takes this format and applies it to deckbuilding, so let’s have a look at the game.

What’s In The Box?

Aeon’s End Legacy comes in a pretty huge box. It’s not going to fit comfortably in your Kallax. I can’t tell you exactly what’s in the box without spoiling some things, suffice to say there are a lot of cards in there, along with cardboard tokens for things like tracking your hit points, and two of the spinner disc devices used for tracking the life of the nemesis you’re fighting, and the home you’re defending.

Along with those sealed decks of cards are a bunch of envelopes, one for each chapter of the game, and a series of Insight boards. The artwork throughout is beautiful, the illustrations are top-notch fantasy fare.

The Insight packs contain the stickers which you’ll be using throughout the game, and the envelopes contain various bits and pieces you’ll need to advance the story and introduce new features and mechanisms,

The cards are really nicely produced, as you’d expect for a game that revolves around playing cards, and the cardboard chits are solid and well-printed. The box also has a great insert, designed for storing everything you need to play, including dividers for the various sets of cards, and some foam blocks to bolster it before it’s full, to keep things in place.

Finally, there are four boxes labeled A, B, C and D. I’m not going to tell you what’s inside them, you’ll just have to find out for yourself.

How Does It Play?

Aeon’s End Legacy is designed for 1-4 players. Based on how many people are playing (and it’s highly recommended those same players play every chapter together from start to finish), a turn order deck is constructed and shuffled. Nine piles of supply cards are laid out in a 3×3 grid, the current nemesis and their deck are added to the table and any specific setup instructions followed. Finally, each player draws a hand of five cards from their starting deck, and we’re ready to play.

For each turn, the top card of the turn order deck is revealed. If it’s one of your players, it shows you who gets to play. That person plays the cards in their hand in any order. They can be spells, which are played to prepare them in one of your breaches, and used next turn, relics, which can do things like let you draw additional cards, or gems, which give you aether to spend. Aether is the currency of the game, and can be used for a few different things, the main one being buying new cards from the supply.

After that player’s turn, all the played and bought cards are added to their discard pile, and the order they choose to discard them is important. In most deckbuilders players shuffle their discard pile when their draw pile is empty, in order to create a new draw pile. The Aeon’s End games are a little different in that the discard is never shuffled, just flipped to create a new deck. So if you use a bit of strategy, you can influence the way cards will turn up.

If the turn order card is a Nemesis one, it’s the bad guy’s turn. There might be some persistent effects to resolve from cards already in play, and then a card from the nemesis deck is turned, and its instructions followed. I won’t elaborate much more than that, other than to say it may involve bringing a minion onto the battlefield to fight, or triggering some other kind of event.

What Happens Then?

Play continues until either the heroes or the nemesis wins. Then the players read the next card in the Legacy deck, which drives the story forwards. It might tell them to open an Insight pack and apply some stickers somewhere, or maybe give them an opportunity to change up the cards they’re using each chapter.

Play through the chapters continues like this from the start to the end of the Legacy deck, and the story that goes along with it. There’s quite a bit of tear-down involved at the end of each chapter, so build a little time into your session to see what the outcome is, and to make any changes or choices that might reveal themselves.

In essence, that’s all there is to Aeon’s End Legacy. Build a deck, fight a bad guy, advance the story. But summing up like that does it a real disservice, so let’s take a proper look at what it feels like to play.

Final Thoughts (Spoiler-Free)

I’ve completed the full campaign now, and I have to say I really enjoyed it. The story, considering the fact it’s told through a small amount of text on cards, is really engaging. I was able to invest in the universe more easily, and care about the characters more than in a lot of fantasy novels I’ve read.

I love deckbuilding games, I was hooked from the first time I played Dominion, ten years ago. The feeling of carefully crafting a deck which works to its strengths and makes you feel powerful is a great one. Aeon’s End does it really well, and the theme using spells and powers is great. It feels more dynamic and interactive than something like Dominion, where the deckbuilding is largely passive, without much interaction between players.

I played solo for the campaign, which works in almost exactly the same way as it would for anything up to four players. I really recommend Aeon’s End Legacy for solo players. The way the story changes how you play the way the game changes with every chapter is really good. I can safely say without ruining too much that the way my box, cards and character now will almost certainly be different to anyone else who ventures through the campaign.

I want to mention the fact that I personally found the game pretty easy. However, from reading various forums, it seems like that’s not always the case, in fact a lot of people find it very hard. This isn’t me trying to flex like “I’m so good at this game”, it’s just a case of your mileage may vary. I think it was a combination of having played a lot of deckbuilding games, and also having played the video game Slay The Spire a lot too, which is a digital deckbuilder. I might have gotten very lucky with the choices I made in the game too.

If you enjoy deckbuilding games, Aeon’s End Legacy is a great introduction into the franchise and a solid co-operative game, and if you’ve never played one before but are thinking of trying one, I’d recommend this without hesitation. It teaches the game well, has a great rule book, and has plenty of second chances if you don’t do so well.

If you’ve got a regular small group who like a good story and co-op games, this is a brilliant option. I played through solo, and I’d definitely recommend it to fellow solo players.

Warning: The section below contains spoilers that may spoil your enjoyment of the game.

Spoiler Central

What’s In The Box?

So as well as the things mentioned above, there’s plenty to open. The boxes A-D contain new tokens that come into play in certain chapters, and it’s really exciting to be instructed to open one ahead of a new chapter. It’s like a mini Christmas.

The envelopes all contain at least a new Nemesis playmat, a divider for the cards in the box, and sometimes new tokens. The Insight packs have stickers where are for the rule book (usually to show how to use new tokens revealed for the next chapter, stickers for the player board to give you new equipment and abilities, and stickers to alter some of your cards. There are also some stickers which evolve enemy cards into more powerful ones.

My favourite surprise in the box is for the final chapter. When you start the game you can see seven chapter envelopes, but at the end of the seventh it tells you to remove the box insert, and lo and behold, there’s a big final encounter and new cards and playmats. I’ve played the Exit games before which like to tricks like this, but I was genuinely surprised and happy when I found it.

Final Thoughts – Spoiler Edition

I really enjoyed Aeon’s End Legacy. I love how the game reveals new mechanics with each chapter, rather than swamp the player with everything at once. In a game where you can replay each fight ad infinitum it’s fine, but in a legacy game where losses can affect the game negatively, it’s a really good way to break new players in gently. The story also progresses with these changes, so thematically it’s very strong too.

Speaking of story, the story in here is really good. You could quite easily see a blockbuster film being built off the back of it. I felt sad even in the end of the first chapter when one of my comrades died.

I love that each nemesis has its own player board, rules, cards and tokens, even rules of play. It means that subsequent fights aren’t just rinse and repeats of the previous ones, there’s real variety in what’s happening.

The biggest problem, if you can call it one, was for me the game was very easy. I never lost a fight, and only once, very early on did it even feel like I might. I don’t know if that’s a result of me being good at the game (doubtful!), lucky buys in the supply cards which change every chapter, or just the game not being too difficult. Maybe it’s a combination of all three.

Because I found it very easy, I feel like I lost out on a lot of potential game. I never used the cool power that helps you in a re-fight, and I never saw probably half of the enemy cards. That’s not an exaggeration either. In a game that’s one shot and done, it’s a shame, even from the point of view of missing out on a lot of the artwork.

But now that I’ve completed the game, there’s still a lot I can do, despite it being a legacy game. There are instructions for after the end that show how to battle the nemeses again, use randomiser cards to get different supply piles, and how to transport your character and all their unique equipment and abilities to other games in the Aeon’s End franchise.

As I said in the original summing-up above, if you’ve got a regular small group, or love a good solo, don’t hesitate, it’s a fantastic game and great example of the deckbuilder genre.

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