LogFAQs > #936644179

10. Aeon's End (2016)

Category: Cooperative
Genres: Deck-building, combat
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4
Game length: 45-75 minutes
Experience: 15-20 plays with 2-4 players (2019)
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), NR/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player plays a mage trying to defend the town of Gravehold from a Nemesis. The Nemesis will attack the players' health and Gravehold's health by means of a Nemesis Deck. Each turn, a turn order card is drawn and the player or Nemesis will go based on that. On a player's turn, you prep a spell (or cast an already prepped spell) to an open breach on your player mat; buy cards for your deck; and power up intrinsic abilities unique to each mage. The Nemesis's deck consists of Minionsthat stick around and attack on every Nemesis turn; Power cards that are delayed-effect one-off abilities that players can prepare/respond to; and immediately-resolved abilities. The players lose if Gravehold's health or every player's health is reduced to zero; they win if the Nemesis's health is reduced to zero or the entire Nemesis deck is drawn.

Design - While it may not be the definitive deck-building game I've played, Aeon's End is certainly my favorite. As for why I wouldn't call it definitive, I actually think that Aeon's End's hybrid mechanics tend to shift the weight of decision-making in a different way than a pure Dominion type does.

Even setting aside all its other mechanics, Aeon's End is very notable because you get to choose the order of your deck. Now to be fair, you still have to cycle through your deck and you can't order every card. However, you choose the order in which you discard cards, and unplayed cards in your hand actually stay in your hand. This offers a potential for control far beyond the likes of Dominion; if you have two cards that combo particularly well (such as one gem - currency - that is worth twice as much if you draw it in combination with another of the same gem) then you can wait to play one until you draw the other, then play them together, which ensures you'll draw them together again. Additionally, because of the Spirit Island-esque ramp-up and runover effect, you can't just sit back and build and fine-tune the most fucking insane engine you've ever seen, like in Dominion. Instead, good play in Aeon's End usually involves spending almost no time ramping up economy and focuses big on getting damage spells, even early on, to control the threat of Minions.

Those Minions all serve a master. Unlike so many other cooperative games, Aeon's End gives you not only enemies to fight, but one specific boss to fight. Beat the boss, end the game. You're not trying to exterminate a neverending onslaught of faceless zombies (Zombicide), invaders (Spirit Island), ghosts (Ghost Stories), or even disease (Pandemic). Instead, each game is dominated and heavily characterized by the villainous Nemesis. Each Nemesis Deck consists of a blend of Nemesis card and generic cards, but even the generic cards often include the word "Unleash" on them, which behaves differently for each Nemesis - Rageborne, who charges and releases massive strikes; the Carapace Queen, who spawns baby spiders that will swarm you the more there are; Prince of Gluttons, who eats the available card market and inflicts damage or loses you the game when he exhausts that market; and Crooked Mask, who adds Curse cards to your deck, weakening your draw and forcing nasty effects on you. The uniqueness of these scenarios makes you feel like you're facing very distinct threats depending on nemesis.

The arc of Aeon's End is fantastic. Like in so many co-op games, the Mages and the Nemesis get stronger together. There's damage-control as you handle Power Cards, weather one-offs, and dispatch Minions. During the early steps your spells aren't as powerful, but you're able to spend time trying to build an economic engine and grab a good spell or two. Then you move into really trying to control damage and building your mage's powerful abilities. In the final phase, you're rushing to finish off the boss itself, because odds are you're simply not going to be able to do damage control any longer. It's exhilarating, and many games I've felt have come down to turn order.

That turn order is simple, brilliant, polarzing, and dare I say it, unfair. Instead of players going clockwise and the Nemesis acting at the end of each round, or end of each player's turn, there is a turn order deck with six cards in it: four representing players, and two representing the Nemesis. When a player's turn ends, you reveal a card from the turn order deck, and then that player (or the Nemesis) goes. It's by far the biggest injection of luck in the game - while this hasn't happened to me, it's almost impossible to fathom winning if when you start drawing Tier 3 cards (the usual point where it's win-or-die) you get hit by the four-Nemesis-turns-in-a-row sequence. What's much more common, and much more exciting, is "Okay, we'll win if any of us goes next... we have like 3:1 odds of that!... FUCK!"

Aeon's End is a little fiddly to set up, given that it's a deckbuilder with a stacked enemy deck and it's got HP for everyone and minions too. It's thoroughly worth it.

Experience - The first time I played Aeon's End, I played it six times straight. These are 45+-minute games. Now some of those plays were with the wrong rules, making it too easy, but that's how fascinating it was. I bought it off my friends after that session, since they already had Legacy, and have played it perhaps a dozen times since. I've played through every Nemesis, though we need to use the higher difficulty levels. It's been a very gaming pal #1-friendly game, so that's helped it to get to the table a lot - checks boxes like cooperative, sophisticated but not crushingly so, and enjoyably thematic.

Future - I'm not exactly burned out on Aeon's End as a system - I do want to try harder difficulty levels, replay bosses, try every combination of mages and cards. But that said, it's a card game, and that will trend toward the best cards floating to the top. I'd love to try out the different versions of Aeon's End that let you mix and match even more spells, gems, mages, and Nemeses.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness