Aeon's End: Outcasts

The outcast is a nice addition. Some of the best nemesis to fight. The expedition was fun.

welcome standalone xpac

If you don't know anything about Aeon's End, it's a cooperative deck builder where there is no randomness in your deck because you flip it instead of shuffling it. Each player plays a mage who uses spells, relics, and gems to defeat a big boss monster (Nameless) and smaller minions spawned by the boss. it has a fixed market (like Dominion) of cards you can purchase each turn to add to your deck, and like most deck builders, new cards go to your discard pile. You have a hand size of 5 cards, and you cannot discard cards (uncommon for a deck builder). You either play them or hold them, and at the end of the turn, you draw back up to 5 cards. If your deck runs out and you still need to draw more, you flip your discard pile, and it becomes your deck, and you finish drawing. There are often opportunities to thin your deck, especially in Outcasts (as opposed to The New Age), so you do sometimes get to make a fairly lean, awesome deck (unlike Clank!, where it’s an ever-growing mess). This game is addictive for people who like to overanalyze and obsess over setting up cool combos between cards and with other players because the cards provide a lot of awesome possible combos, and because there's no randomness in your deck, so you can plan out exactly how things are going to go. The exceptions to this are the turn order deck (turn order for each round is random), and the Nemesis deck. Yes, the big boss monster gets to take turns, too, and its deck is semi-random, and it will sling things at you that may affect your deck, your hand, or require you to spend your turn differently than you would have liked. The New Age is a better introduction to Aeon's End than Outcasts, so if you're new to Aeon's End or buying it for someone who is, get The New Age. If you're familiar with the game and want some good fights, get Outcasts. Why? The New Age hooks you from the get-go with highly asymmetric mages that sound cool to play (except Taqren, who looked completely uninteresting). I was disappointed when I opened Outcasts and saw the starting mages. They weren't nearly as appealing (granted, the new Taqren is awesome, and a character unlocked later is really awesome). Additionally, the fights in Outcasts are more complex, and it might be a bit overwhelming and unappealing to deal with when first learning Aeon's End. The story in Outcasts is a lot better than the one in The New Age, but it's neither great nor compelling in either of them. Do not buy these games for the story. Buy them because you want to work together (or solo) to struggle to defeat interesting bosses by setting up cool combos. What does the game do well? Great fights/bosses with very different and distinguishing mechanics, great combos between cards and characters, and most importantly well-balanced difficulty. Every fight feels like dancing on a knife's edge. Will we win? Will we lose? Sometimes it all comes down to the turn order deck (if we go first we win, if we don't we lose). It's not always that perfect, and I've won most of my games, but I also tend to overplan and overanalyze and make the game take too long. This game is also appealing to play solo because you can plan everything out, and I typically have no interest in playing board games solo. What does it do poorly? It doesn't satisfy with one box. If you only buy this core box, Outcasts, or just The New Age, and you enjoy it, you're going to feel like you must buy more. You're going to want more cool cards, more cool mages, and most importantly, more cool bosses/Nameless. If you do buy more, before you know it you'll have way more cards than you really care for and you won't even want to play as half the mages. And after enough plays, the luster will wear off and you'll notice repetition and predictability and how a lot of the apparent asymmetry between mages and such is illusory because you wind up playing similarly no matter which mage you choose (and often no matter which boss/Nameless you choose). You'll feel kind of letdown because all of the exciting things that initially hooked you weren't fully realized like you thought they would be. Aeon's End is neverending (usually a Kickstarter each February for each new wave), so the card pool and available mages and Nameless are all ever-growing. Additionally, like a lot of cooperative games, this one suffers from quarterbacking/group decision making and not actually having that many options if you don't want to lose. You don't really have the agency to do whatever you want because if each player did, you'd probably lose. As a result, you're often consulting everyone else - Should I buy this or that? Who should take the damage? Should I play this now and who should I use it on? In this kind of situation where everyone needs to commit to a collective strategy, some people may dominate the decision making such that the other players have no voice and no fun and may as well be pawns. That depends on who you play with, though (I like playing with people who love the dancing-on-a-knife's-edge and Oh no! How do we handle this? feeling and want to work together). Also, the cool combos and plans you cooked up often aren't fully realized because of the surprises from the Nemesis deck. So is it great? Yes, but unless you’re a diehard fan/addict, you’re going to be disappointed when you open a small-box expansion (e.g. Return to Gravehold) and see it’s just some more cards and a new mage or Nameless or two. I enjoyed getting The New Age and then Outcasts, but after playing through both I’m not that interested in exploring the small-box content. Do I still enjoy it? Yes. Would I play with people who want to play it? Yes. Would I rather play something else? Probably. Do I wish I’d bought fewer small-box expansions? I think so. On the upside, it's easy to reconstruct the first-playthrough experience of The New Age and Outcasts because of the way the cards are labeled and numbered at the bottom left. So if you want to recreate that first expedition experience for someone by putting things back in their envelopes and such, you could do that.