Aeon’s End Legacy

Aeon’s End Legacy, like I said above, is a cooperative deck-building game. Unlike a lot of deck building games, you never actually shuffle your cards in this game, or if you do, it’s as a punishment. Instead as you play down cards and run out of cards to draw you just flip the discard pile and draw from the top. That’s the part of the game that I normally highlight.

But let’s talk about ways that we can win or lose the game. A good cooperative game tends to give you a lot of ways to win lose the game and a few ways to win the game. Aeon’s End actually gives you a few ways to win the game as well. You can lose if the nemesis takes down all the mages or if they take out the city of Gravehold that you’re defending. But as players, you win if you do enough damage to take out the nemesis or you last long enough, keeping yourself and Gravehold alive, so that the nemesis runs out of cards to draw and that are in play.

That is a good design for the game. It is already fairly challenging with the nemesis. Plus having the secondary victory condition of outlasting makes what they can do with the nemesis more interesting. There are some nemesis in the base game and other boxes that have infinite life. You can’t kill them, you can only outlast them.

The Beer

Last nights beer was Mange Cart from Golden Road out in Los Angeles, California. It is a very light beer with mango added to it to give it a nice summery flavor. It’s not one of my favorite beers but for a really hot day it’s very good. And yesterday was a hot one.

In Minnesota where you get temps that range from over 100 once or twice during the summer to -20 for a high maybe during the winter, you drink a variety of beers. Summer I range lighter with IPA, wheat beers, and more tart ales and sours. During the winter, well, I still drink IPA’s but stouts and porters show up more often.

What’s Coming Up

Next Wednesday more Aeon’s End Legacy. Will it be chapter 3 or 4, you’ll have to watch the game to find out.

Plus a new 3 Reasons Buy/Not Buy came out yesterday as I looked at Tainted Grail. And there will be one next week as well, game to be determined.

Nothing next Monday. But the following Monday I’ll plan on covering a topic, find one to have a conversation around. I am not sure what topic yet, so let me know if you have one you want covered.

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The Unboxing

Heroes of Land, Air, and Sea: Order and Chaos

This takes the base game from four players all the way up to six players if you want. It adds in four new races, Goblins, Undead, Lizard Folk, and Lionkin. One of the main reasons that I picked this up was that the base box has pretty standard races. Order and Chaos adds in some more interesting races. Goblins might be pretty standard fantasy, but as at least playable races, the rest are fairly unique.

Heroes of Land, Air, and Sea: Pestilence

The pestilence expansion is smaller, but it is more of the same as well. It only comes with two new races to play, the Merfolk and the Birdfolk, but they are pretty unique. The Birdfolk come with an island that floats above the board. And the Merfolk come with a transparent plastic sheet that you put on the board covering up an island to make it submerged.

The Game

Since the unboxing was shorter than the previous week, I pulled a game off of the shelf to play as well. Deadly Doodles is a roll and write game that I’ve talked about and reviewed before. It has a fast solo mode, so I decided it’d be fun to play through a couple of games of it on stream and talk about how the game is played. I did poorly my first game, but the second time was a decent score.

The Beer

So, finally, but not least importantly, is the beer. This streams beer was a Chocolate Imperial Stout from Arbeiter Brewing out of Minneapolis Minnesota. I talk some about the differences between a stout and a porter or really the lack of differences that truly define it. However, the Chocolate Imperial Stout, at 9.7% ABV, was really enjoyable and had a very bitter taste to it, like a very dark chocolate. I am a big dark chocolate fan, and I like very dark chocolate, so I enjoyed the beer quite well.

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But my real first passion is with beer. I love hoppy beers, light saisons, dark porters and stouts, and basically everything in between. The variety is something that has really increased my interest, as well as taking up the hobby of brewing beer. What flavor can I get from different combinations of grains? How can I make the beer stronger? What types of hops will give the beer a different profile than before?

So I’m going to start with some basic stuff about beer.

There are two overarching classifications of beers: Ale and Lager. The difference between these two types of beers is the yeast.

So let’s back up a little bit further and talk about yeast. We know it from making bread or pizza dough — to name a few. It’s what allows the dough to rise and poof up. Why does it do that? Yeast eats sugar, turning it into two separate parts: alcohol and carbon dioxide. When you bake bread, the yeast eats the sugars in the bread and causes it to puff up, but when you brew a batch of beer and the yeast eats the sugars in the mixture, the carbon dioxide is expelled, leaving the alcohol behind.

So, to create ales and lagers, different types of yeast are used. An ale yeast will eat the sugars at a higher temperature and will ferment the beer faster. Lager yeast is a colder-temperature yeast, which means it takes longer to get the same amount of fermentation. The most common beers in the world, Budweiser, Coors, and Miller, are all lagers.

But what about the other differences in beers? Some are hoppy, some are stronger, some are bitter, and some are vastly different colors. What causes those differences?

Hops: Hops are one of the other ingredients that can make beers very different from each other. Hops, depending on when you add them while brewing, will influence the flavor in different ways, and different types of hops will make a difference in the flavor as well. Some hops can be very earthy in flavor, while other hops have a citrus flavor, and depending on which ones you use and when, it will influence the beer’s flavor. The earlier you add hops in the brewing process, the hoppier a beer will smell. But the longer you wait until the end, the hoppier the beer will taste. Think about cooking — the earlier you add an ingredient, the more everything else in the dish will take on its flavor; this will also cause it to blend into the overall flavor more than it would if you put it in at the end. The same holds true for beer.

Hops also can influence the IBU (International Bitterness Units) of a beer. The higher the number, the more bitter a beer will be. There is a misconception, though, that any beer with hops is going to be a bitter beer. The Apollo hop has an Alpha Acid (read: bitterness) of 19%, where as Saaz hops have a mere 4%, so depending on which ones you use, it can really influence how bitter the beer is.

Color: A beer changes color depending on the malts that are used in it. A toasted malt grain is going to give the beer a darker color, as will different types of grain. If you were to make a rye beer, it will end up having a very red color. If you use primarily wheat, the beer will have a much lighter color. Most beers will have primarily barley as the base to get most of the malts, but depending on what you add to that, you influence the color and the flavor of the beer. The malt itself you can get one of two ways — you can purchase malt that has already been extracted, or you can soak your own grains in hot water until the sugars have been leached from them.

Strength: And why are some beers 3.2% alcohol, and others 12%? This comes down to two things that we have talked about above: the grains and the yeast. The more grains you use, the more sugar you’ll get out. The more sugar you get out, the more there is for the yeast to eat; the more the yeast eats, the more alcohol is converted. So the stronger beers will often have a maltier flavor to them, no matter the color of the beer. If you want to keep the maltier flavor down, you can also add sugar directly into the beer, which I’ve done before with a Maple Stout, or you can use rock sugar.

So that is just a little bit on the basics of beer and what makes different beers taste the way they do. With beer, it can be at times an acquired taste, but most people will have some type of beer that they like, if they can find the right one. So I  recommend going around and trying different beers. With the small brewery boom that is happening in the United States, there are many ways to get your hands on a lot of different types of beer to try.

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