After recently picking up way too much Aeon’s End (mostly due to this thread: Aeon's End: what is it like and why should I care?), I was eager to get it played.
I really think this will be a good co-op game that my partner and I can enjoy together. There’s certainly enough content in the AE collection I bought secondhand to keep us playing for a long time (seriously, I don’t know why they keep making more sets! There’s SOO MUCH – maybe there are people that have explored it all… I doubt that number is north of 1000 people in the entire world, though)
At first, I felt like the 1-sheet “Hey! You, don’t look at that other stuff, start here!” introductory rules were amazing. The previous owner of my collection had re-assembled the “Stop A” and “Stop C” decks prior to sending the game (I double-checked them still… it’s what I do). Unfortunately, that 1-page sheet stopped short of actually walking me through the game. The end result was that I had to read the entire rulebook anyway – no big deal, as it turned out! What an elegant game (if the designer is not a skilled computer programmer, I would be surprised; the game flow certainly leverages some idioms you see in computer programming).
Aeon’s End is a deckbuilder† with the twist that you never shuffle your deck. Ever. As you add cards to your discard at the end of your turn, you are given the choice to arrange them in whatever order you like.
Ultimately, I was a bit confused by this; my interpretation of the rulebook is that any spells cast are immediately discarded in the order that they are cast (the order you cast is up to the player, but they must be discarded in the same order; this rarely mattered in my game). Then, during the action phase, you can play Gems and Relics from your hand but don’t add them to your discard yet; you may also buy cards from the market and immediately add them to your discard in the order you buy them. And then finally, you place the Gems and Relics played on your turn into your discard in any order.
I could certainly see an argument for “a player’s turn is atomic; any cards entering the discard on a single turn can be placed in any order as long as the order of cards from previous rounds are not altered” – but the rules do not suggest this at all (or I’m missing a nuance somewhere).
My nemesis was the Introductory Baddy™, Ragebourne who was an absolute pushover using the unshuffled “Stop C” deck – again, assuming I interpreted the rules correctly; I believe it was:
- Assess each card in the line,
newest to oldest oldest to newest (I may have done this backwards! I honestly don’t remember but I probably did whatever the player aid card says (hopefully). Thanks, Roger, for correcting me!)
- Draw a card; resolve immediate effects (such as Attacks) and/or place new card in the line, sliding all other cards down.
- If Rageborne has 4 or more Fury tokens, draw a Strike card, resolve, and shuffle the Strike card back into the Strike deck. Remove 3 Fury tokens. (I did this correctly, just forgot to type it here)
And then only add new Fury tokens when an Unleash effect is resolved.
I was playing 2-handed solo (which is the newbie-friendly recommended solo mode, I think) with Brama and Jian. Brama was absolutely the key to my easy victory; being able to easily heal herself and Jian a couple of times throughout the game meant I never had to worry too much about taking damage, which allowed me to choose damage to my mages over different outcomes on some “this OR that” cards that came up. Jian was an absolute beast when it came to generating damage output; I opened up his 3rd breach ASAP (to get the + damage) and loaded him up with high-damage cards, though I only managed to activate his special ability twice.
At the end, Brama had 8 life left (having just healed herself on the penultimate turn of the game), Jian had 7 and Gravehold was holding steady at 19.
I’m excited to introduce this to my partner; I hope she’ll enjoy it as much as I think she will.
A blurry picture
†Deckbuilder:
