Year: 2019 | Players: 1-4 | Minutes: 60 | Ages: 14+
This Aeon’s End: The New Age review was made after playing the game six times. We were sent a copy of this game by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
What is Aeon’s End: The New Age?
Aeon’s End: The New Age is a cooperative, campaign, deck building game in which you play as mages who are attempting to defeat a series of big bosses (nemeses). This is a standalone expansion that adds in the new Expedition campaign system and it’s compatible with Aeon’s End and all other AE games.
Aeon’s End: The New Age was designed by Kevin Riley and it’s published by Action Phase Games and Indie Boards & Cards.
Rules Overview
If you’ve played any of the other games in the Aeon’s End series, you’ll have no problem jumping right into Aeon’s End: The New Age. Check out my Aeon’s End review to learn how the core system works.
Besides the mages, nemeses, and supply (market) cards, here’s what’s new in The New Age:
- The Expedition system – Instead of playing one-off games of Aeon’s End, you play through a short series of battles. After each successful battle during your first expedition, you’ll open new content for the game. You’ll get new cards to add to your decks and some new cards that you can add to the supply (you “banish” any supply cards that you don’t use). The nemeses also get better by getting upgraded cards for their decks.
- Treasures – After each battle you’ll gain new treasure cards to use during the expedition. Some treasures are gems and spells that replace cards in your deck, some are abilities that stay active, and others are group treasures that benefit everyone.
- Echo (keyword) – These spells cast twice.
- Attach (keyword) – These relics are attached to breaches, making them more powerful.
- The Barracks – This is where you store all of the content that is available to you for your current expedition.
After you finish your first expedition, you can start a new one with cards from any of the Aeon’s End games. The New Age includes randomizer cards for all of the mages and nemeses released so far, and you’ll shuffle and draw from those decks to determine your team, your market options, and your nemesis for each stage of the expedition. You’ll get a score for your expedition based on how many attempts it took you to defeat each nemesis.
I should also point out that you can use any of the mages and nemeses from The New Age in a standard one-off game of Aeon’s End.
Check out our Top 10 Co-op Deck Building Games!
Pros and Cons
Pros
- The expeditions in The New Age are quick to get through, but they still do the job of making you feel like you have a team of mages that get more powerful as you progress while also giving you tougher and tougher challenges. I really like this type of short campaign.
- These new mages are great. Their powers give you new ways to cooperate and deal with the enemies, and some even have their own unique breaches. The New Age also has my favorite mage so far (Soskel).
- The treasure cards are very cool. They give you more ways to customize your mages than you get in Aeon’s End and Aeon’s End: War Eternal.
- I’m glad the new mechanisms don’t make the game more fiddly. One of the great things about the Aeon’s End base game is how smoothly it plays, so I was happy to see that The New Age added things in without slowing the game down.
- I like that you can play one-off games with any of these mages and against any of these nemeses. That’s still my preferred way of playing, though I will be playing more expeditions.
- I think The New Age looks about 10 times better than the original Aeon’s End. In my opinion, this is the best art and graphic design work that they’ve done for the series so far.
- There’s a good amount of replayability in The New Age since the expedition system will make each mage and nemesis a bit different every game. Even if you don’t have any other Aeon’s End games, you will get plenty of plays out of The New Age before you’ll want to get more mages and nemeses.
Cons
- The game assumes that you’ve played and finished Aeon’s End: Legacy. If you haven’t, be warned that The New Age does spoil the ending of Legacy. That was a strange decision.
Final Thoughts
Aeon’s End is my favorite co-op deck building game, so I pretty much knew from the beginning that I was going to be a fan of Aeon’s End: The New Age. It adds in some cool new mages, some interesting (and a couple very tough) new nemeses, and, of course, a fun new way to string together some battles in a short campaign. As I pointed out earlier, I still prefer the classic one-off battles, but I can see a lot of people sticking with the expedition system.
If you’ve never played Aeon’s End before and you’re a fan of deck building board games, I’d say start out with the original game or War Eternal, and then get either The New Age or Legacy. If you’re already a fan of Aeon’s End, I highly recommend checking out The New Age.
Aeon’s End: The New Age Links
BGG | Amazon | Miniature Market
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