Aeon's End Board Game Review
Aeon's End Board Game Review
Aeon’s End is a cooperative umbrella builder who sees you and your teammates encounter a series of monsters and servants seeking to destroy your hometown.
In addition to spells, relics and gems, teamwork here is the name of the game if you want any chance to come back victorious.
- Aeon's end is a joint deck building game for 1-4 players ...
- Your deck never shuffles, changing player order simulates ...
- You will meet each game with different devils, each with a unique ...
A brief overview of Aeon's end
In Aeon's End, your character team fights to save your hometown of Gravehold from attacks by one of four possible Nemesis.
Players alternate in random order and work together to defeat the monster without releasing them or reducing Gravehorn to a pile of rubble.
You have many options to achieve your goal. You can cast spells, use gems and relics, and use special abilities while supporting your teammates on the battlefield.
Variations and extensions
Aeon's End: Eternal War
It’s a stand-alone extension that introduces four new bosses and updates the rather tired artwork of the original.
- Aeon's End: Eternal War is a joint game for building decks for ...
- Aeon's End: Eternal War is a stand-alone game that includes ...
- The End of Aeon: Eternal War is compatible with the end of Aeon. Depths ...
Aeon's End: A New Age
New Age is introducing campaign-style gaming in Aeon’s End, known as the Expedition System. It allows you to play among all the bosses, collecting and storing items as you go. However, the Nemesis are also getting stronger.
- Expedition system
- Construction of decks without relocation
- Variable order
Aeon's End: The Depths (second edition)
This is a slightly more classic extension. Depths add a new Nemesis to the game, along with three wizards and new relics, gems, spells and minions.
The second edition of the extension comes with updated card artwork.
- Expansion for Aeon's End
- It's not a standalone extension - a copy of Aeon's End is required to play
- He adds one new devil and three new wizards to the game
Other extensions of the second edition
Unpacking Aeon's End
For a game that is largely based on cards and chips and without thumbnails, Aeon’s End has a BIG box. When you open it, you will find the following:
- 40 life tokens
- 21 refill tokens
- 10 power tokens
- 15 Rage / shell tokens
- 2 life dials
- 4 chips with player numbers
- 87 gems, 86 spells and 30 relic cards
- 27 random cards
- 4 cards to help players
- 8 carpets for players
- 16 violations
- 9 cards for the order
- 4 nemesis carpets
- 75 nemesis cards
- 1 manual and overview of settings
There are a lot of cards that you can break through. The overall feel of it all is good quality, but it’s with a range of thicknesses that suggests this game is meant to be widely used.
The instructions for use are great, but they don’t have too much information. There are many useful images, graphs and spaces that make reading and tracking easier. I also liked that they include a lot of useful gameplay examples. Also included is a Game Set-up list, which was very handy for a quick start to the game.
Box size is not required for the original game. Probably twice the size actually needed. However, it is filled with foam blocks to fill the space, I assume it gives room for any extensions you can buy.
There, too, you will find two life calls that I was really excited about. These devices can be quite light at times and are often condemned for not seeing them past one or two games if you have exciting friends. But these are good qualities.
So by components, all very well. But when it comes to visual elements, things turn for the worse. Unfortunately, the standard for the game really falls here. So much so that I decided that this would be one of the main drawbacks of this game. You can read my thoughts on this below.
How to play Aeon's End
Four Nemesis are involved in the game. They all have different abilities and require different strategies to overcome.
Win or lose the game
The object of the game is to defeat the enemy. To do this, you need to inflict enough damage on the Nemesis to drop them to zero, or hold out long enough to run out of cards or minions left in the game.
But if your entire team runs out at the same time or Gravehold’s life becomes nothing, then you lose!
Setup
Each player chooses a character, a matching game mat, and a player number token. Their play mat tells them how to put together their starting arm and deck, along with all the key stats about your character throughout the game.
Then you take one of the Breach - a device that allows players to cast spells.
Then you need to choose your Nemesis, which has its own Life Dial dial to keep track of the rest of your life. Read the rules on the Nemesis card before you start the game. Each Nemesis has its own Nemesis Deck that is specific to them, and you will also see that Nemesis cards are graded. This allows you to build a deck so the cards get harder throughout the game.
Reverse order
The order of the game is determined randomly using the Turn Order Deck. There is a card on board that represents each player, along with two Nemesis cards, no matter how many players you have in the game. On the first turn, turn over the Turn Order card, the player who reveals himself, then it is his turn. When they finish their line, we reveal another card, and so on.
Stages of turning the player
There are three stages in a player's turn:
The casting phase - this is when you start to enchant. To make a spell, you need to place it in Breach. If they are in “open” infringement, then you can choose whether you want to play them or not. Spells in a "closed" violation must play.
The main stage - this is when you perform actions. You can choose as many times as you want:
- Play a gem or relic card.
- Get a card - buy these using Aether, the currency of the game, in a variety of ways, such as using gems and relics. Ether lasts only the turn on which it is obtained. Unused Ether gives up at the end of the bend.
- Gain charge - it boosts your abilities.
- Focus on the violation - you can only cast a spell in a "closed" violation if it has been focused. This also reduces the cost of “opening up” the infringement in the future.
- Open the violation - it will cost you Ether, but it lasts until the end of the game.
- Prepare a spell for a violation - remember that you can prepare a clock for a violation that has been focused or open. You can only prepare one spell for a violation at a time. The prepared spells can then be cast in the next phase of Casting.
- Eliminate the "While Ready" effect.
- Determine the effect of “DECREASE: effect.
Drawing phase - discard any gems or relics that were played in the main phase and fill your hand.
Nemesis reversal phases
Nemesis gets only two stages:
The main stage - resolve the effects of each minion and power card, in the order that first entered the game.
Drawing phase - draw cards from the deck of Nemesis. If it is an attack card, this should be resolved immediately. If it's a minion or power card, put it in the game. These will be the next steps.
Exhausted
If your player loses a lifetime, he is exhausted. That means they stay in the game but permanently lose one of their violations. They also can no longer gain life. The damage is doubled to Gravehold instead.
If all the players are exhausted, the game is over.
Cemetery
In Aeon’s End, Gravehold is the home you protect. It has its own Life Dial and will cause harm to both your Nemesis and servants. The well-being of Gravehold is just as important as yours. If his Life Dial reaches zero, it’s over.
Your first Aeon's End game
Unlike many other deck-building games , you never mix your own waste in Aeon’s End. This is important as it is a feature of the game. No matter how tempting it may be - you’ll probably get caught at least twice to do it automatically - resist the urge!
The fact that cards only appear so often and you can plan them contributes a lot to the gameplay. You will wait before the killer spell returns. Another thing is to get involved in your strategy.
It’s helpful to look at your pile of discards and help plan.
In addition, Aeon's End is very easy to pick up, but it's a tough game to win. So if you find it too demanding (and sometimes you just want to win), you can make it a little less challenging by reducing the amount of two and three cards on board the Nemesis.
Advantages disadvantages
Advantages:
- Great collaboration
- Good change
- Easy to learn
Weaknesses:
- Random items are not for everyone
- I didn’t fully dedicate myself to the topic.
What I liked about Aeon’s ending was the level of collaboration it took to win it. Some co-op games can feel pretty quiet as players perform individual turns and hope this helps the overall effort. However, there are many opportunities in this game to directly support allies, such as healing, focusing violations, or charging. To get to the top, effective support to followers is just as important as a spell - right JK Rowling who said that?
I was also impressed by the extent of the repeatability of this game. There are many cards to play and you can choose from the characters. While four different Nemesis present a very different challenge.
Last but not least, Aeon’s End, although it seems quite complicated, is very easy to pick up. Once you run one turn at a time, everything else is very self-evident. Someone could easily join a group of seasoned Aeon’s End players and get fully engaged in an instant. Although the rules are easy to read, they are almost confusing as if they were.
I can’t really blame playing for the weaknesses. However, there are some people who simply cannot master the random elements of the game. If they win, they want it to be their fault. If they lose, they can’t bear the feeling that it’s simply because of luck.
There’s only one real random element in the game - the order - so it’s not exceptional, but it can have a big impact on the game. If Nemesis gets the first move before you manage to kill a few servants, you can end up doing a lot more damage than if your card came out first.
For me, this is not a question. I like the enthusiasm for this kind of feature, but it’s worth considering some players.
My main grievances with this game were the inspired design and theme. I felt that the developers had been putting together the mechanics of the game for a long time, and then two days before the deadline, someone reminded them that they needed some characters, a story, and artwork to do that.
So while the game runs brilliantly well, I struggled with emotional payouts when battling Nemesis, taken from Generic Fantasy Game Monsters 101. In addition to liking Too Many Bones - in the design of which I wasn’t a big fan, no doubt the game’s developers put your heart and soul into your story - compared to the pale.
TL; DR
In Aeon's End, your character team fights to save their hometown of Gravehold from attacks by one of four possible Nemes.
This is a deck building game that requires real cooperation if you want to win.
It is easy to learn, with plenty of repetition options and is great value for money. Too bad for the vague execution of the theme and the artwork.
Conclusion: a verdict?
Aeon's End is a sleek, well-composed cooperative game to build a deck that has a lot more to show than the time it takes to learn. This could be a great start for someone just entering the deck building genre, as they have enough to challenge but aren’t so strong as to scare them.
The fact that your success depends so much on teamwork and given the statistics and circumstances of your teammates is a great way to create camaraderie as you struggle to defeat the Nemesis.
It offers great value for money also simply because of the amount of gameplay you can pull off. With more characters to play and enemies to fight, it will be a long time before you experience the same adventure twice.
Despite all this, it remains a shame that the vague rendering of the theme and artwork means that in the end I simply wasn’t exactly interested in what happened to our heroes or their home. A themed makeover would really put this up with some of the top deck builders around, but he hasn’t quite gotten that spark yet.
Sorry Gravehold, we had to put the parking lot somewhere.
- Aeon's end is a joint deck building game for 1-4 players ...
- Your deck never shuffles, changing player order simulates ...
- You will meet each game with different devils, each with a unique ...
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