Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Aeon’s End is a wonderful game. A cooperative deck-builder in which you do not shuffle, it’s built around the fact that you have perfect control of your cards. Every game centers on a battle between your Mages and the Nameless, monsters who terrorize your home city of Gravehold, and they can be punishing. There are many deck-builders premised around beating the Baddie. None of them can ratchet up the difficulty like Aeon’s End.
On its (relatively) easy settings, Aeon’s End provides a reliably tense experience. At its higher difficulties, it is brutal. Games often end with only the slightest margin of victory, or in a crushing defeat. The lifetime win percentage for all users on the Steam implementation, an environment that typically attracts a lot of high-skill players, doesn’t sit far above 50%.
Aeon’s End isn’t just difficult, though. Difficulty alone does not a fun game make. It’s also creative, with an inventive bevy of characters and Nameless across its many expansions. But between the difficulty, the variety, and the cognitive load—constantly checking your deck order and making choices that consider what your hand will look like two or three turns from now ain’t nothing—Aeon’s End can be intimidating to onboard. To my surprise, Aeon’s End: Legacy is the perfect place to start.
Training Ground
Aeon’s End has so many Legacy-able bits and bobs that it was hard to know what to expect. Would you keep fighting the same permutative Nameless? Would the very cards in your deck be modified over the course of the game? Would your character powers change? It turns out the answer to all of these questions is, “Yes.”
Rather than beginning with a fully-operative Mage, you start as a trainee. You have no special power. You have no unique cards in your deck. Most of the damage done to the first Nameless is done by NPC instructors via a nifty Event deck that gives the first battle a strong narrative shape. Over the course of that battle, as you manage the most straightforward set of resources you’ll have all game, you learn the basics. From there, chapter to chapter, Aeon’s End: Legacy drip feeds you the complexities. By the time you finish Chapter 3 or 4, you’re playing a full game.
This is terrific for newcomers, but it does make the game a bit too easy for people who have a lot of experience. I’ve had a good time with Aeon’s End: Legacy, but the games didn’t become interesting until Chapter 5. Sweaty, yes, but that was more due to artificial power throttling than any challenge. Also worth noting, since Aeon’s End is the kind of product that attracts completists, that you won’t find any Nameless or Mages here that you’ll be aching to add to your permanent collection. They work well in this context, but they don’t stand out.
Overall, Aeon’s End: Legacy is an incredibly smart implementation of the idea. They take advantage of all the possibilities afforded by the system, and the resulting game serves as a primer for the game in full. It’s also the perfect length, with just enough chapters to feel worth the investment without crossing into “Oh, that? We never finished that.” Would I rather be playing any other Aeon’s End box? Yes. But if I were asked to introduce someone who I knew I’d be playing with for more than one game, this would probably be the first box I’d reach for.
Aeon’s End: Legacy details
- Designer: Jenny Iglesias, Kevin Riley, Nick Little (I)
- Artists: Daniel Solis
- Publishers: Action Phase Games, Frosted Games, Gém Klub Kft., Indie Boards & Cards, Korea Boardgames, Matagot, Portal Games, SD Games
- Release Date: 2019
- Player count : 1 - 4
- Age range : 14+
- Time range : 45 - 90 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Card Drafting, Cooperative Game, Deck, Bag, and Pool Building, Hand Management, Legacy Game, Open Drafting, Scenario / Mission / Campaign Game, Solo / Solitaire Game, Variable Phase Order, Variable Player Powers
- BGG Geek Rating: 8.04214 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
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