Aeon's End: The New Age

I had played Aeon's End before, and what had stayed with me was the very good feeling that it managed to translate a boss fight into deckbuilding without losing any of its tension. The New Age arrives with new cards and enemies, but its main distinguishing feature is its progressive story campaign, which does not dump the entire box in front of you from the start: it introduces cards gradually and lets the game unfold at its own pace.

At its core, you build your deck while trying to take on a particular monster. It does not feel like simply “collecting better cards”; the deckbuilding serves the fight against a boss. That was exactly Aeon's End's strong point for me, and it is completely present here as well.

The flow of a session is built around that confrontation: the group tries to find a way to stand up to the enemy, with new cards appearing gradually through the campaign. In our two encounters with the first monster, the pressure of the system was clear: we got wrecked the first time, while the second time we beat it by the skin of our teeth. Those narrow victories are exactly the kind of interaction with the game that I want from this sort of boss fight.

Overall, I was very pleased. I can easily see this as the game that comes out once a month, with no rush, so you can progress through the campaign at your leisure. A very solid item for the shelf in the solitary player's cave.