In Aeon’s End: War Eternal, you play as breach mages who are trying to hold back giant monsters, nemesis, who are out to destroy the town of Gravehold. You prepare your breaches, cast spells, and buy new cards building up a deck to either outlast these giant monsters while taking out their minions, or to kill the giant monster itself. In the game there are basically always enough things to worry about to use your damage on, to heal Gravehold, and to buy that you don’t feel like you can do everything that you might want to do.

Let’s talk a bit about the unique deck building. In most deck building games, it doesn’t matter what order you put your cards into your discard pile because you end up shuffling the discard pile when you need to draw cards and are out. But in Aeon’s End: War Eternal and all the Aeon’s End games, it’s a bit different. The order you put your cards in matters because the discard pile doesn’t get shuffled, instead you simply flip it over, so if you’re very good at counting cards, you can set-up your hands so that you always have money (gems) and spells, or you can set it up so that you sometimes get a lot of money so that you can buy the best spell cards. I would say that playing solo makes it a bit trickier to stack your deck like you’d want. If I just had to focus on a single character, I’d likely be able to manipulate it more. But I found that very interesting, and it makes the game seem faster, especially solo, because I’m not having to stop to shuffle all the time.

Aeon’s End does another pretty unique thing, and that is with it’s turn order deck. You could compare it to an initiative track, but you don’t know it, and every time you go completely through initiative the order is shuffled up again. That means, if you are unlucky, you could have the nemesis go four turns in a row because it has two cards in the initiative deck. Now, that would be brutal, but you always have four player cards to the two initiative cards in the deck, so the odds of that happening are pretty low. I can see people not loving this part, but Aeon’s End: War Eternal gives you some more control not shuffling the discard pile, but then takes away control by having you not know the turn order. It’s a good tension point in the game, because the nemesis I played against in the live playthrough wasn’t too difficult, but if the nemesis had taken a few turns in a row, he’d have been much harder.

Finally, the last really unique thing that I can think of right now for Aeon’s End: War Eternal is the casting of spells. The casting one turn and it going off the next turn isn’t unique, but the idea of having to have these breaches open or being focused to cast spells is certainly interesting. And the fact that you can open them in any order is also interesting, though the higher numbered ones give you an advantage with extra damage, but they cost more. So do you want to rush to get one of those done early so that you can do more damage, but if you do that, you won’t be able to build up your deck as quickly.

Another thing that I like in games, but isn’t unique to Aeon’s End War Eternal is that it has variable player powers. Each character stars with a unique card in their deck that no other character has access to, so that starts unique. And their starting deck beyond that is also unique, so one character doesn’t feel like another character. But, to give each character more powers, they have special abilities that they can charge up, and these are themed to the character. One of the characters I played in the Malts and Meeples playthrough had healing abilities while the other did extra damage with their charged power. And each character has an ability themed to whom they are supposed to be in the game. So while the game doesn’t have role playing elements that you get in some of these fantasy games, it still has it feel unique.

I definitely enjoyed this game and it will go into the collection of deck builders that I have. I think it’s different enough and offers enough interesting choices that you can have it with other games from Dominion to Xenoshyft: Onslaught. I really like that the deck building aspect is more than just grabbing points, it gives you some real choices unlike, I feel, Dominion does. The game also feels thematic, which is something that Dominion doesn’t have, you feel like your own unique character which I really like. Looking at my favorite deck builders, having the unique character or starting point that you build a deck for is something I really look for in a deck builder, and something that I consider lacking in Clank! In! Space!, even if the rest of the game is really great.

Overall Grade: B+
Gamer Grade: B+
Casual Grade: B+

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Most people who are interested in board games are going to be up for learning a new game from time to time. Though, there will be some people who aren’t interested as well, but that was a different article. So, you get the game to the table, now how do you teach people the game? I might have actually written about this before, but I think it’s worth going back over and giving some more suggestions, because this is one of the bigger barriers to entry for a lot of board games.

The rules to games are often challenging, and unless everyone loves board games, reading from the rule book won’t likely teach people. Even if the people do love board games, and someone starts to read from the rule book, I’m going to zone out, because I can just read the rule book myself if that’s how we’re going to learn. There needs to be a more engaging way to keep people involved in the rules.

Teaching Rules Steps:

1. Start out by knowing the rules yourself. That doesn’t mean that you’ve had to have played the game before, though playing a sample hand wouldn’t be bad or sample turn, just to make sure that you get it. Or you can watch videos from places like Watch It Played that go over the rules to certain games. What you’re looking to come out of is the win or loss conditions, end of game, and what people can do on their turn. You are going to want to know those things well.
2. Start with the theme of the game (if there is one). By starting with the theme, you can get people’s interest since you aren’t starting off with something dry. This is actually a time where you can read from the rule book, because some games, like T.I.M.E. Stories actually have a bit of a story at the start of the rule book. You can use whatever the game gives you to tell the story. Now, for some games there won’t be a theme you can do this with, I’m looking at abstract games or Dominion as examples, so you can skip that step.
3. Then talk about how you win or lose the game. This is going to be the most important information for people in the game. Generally it’s going to be about how you win the game, especially in a competitive game. You want to have the most victory points, you want to control so many territories, you want to empty your hand of cards first, whatever that might be. But if there’s a condition, say, if you run out of cards, that can eliminate someone from the game, tell them that too. Or for something like Pandemic, there are a lot of ways to lose the game, so talk about those while you talk about how you win. Pandemic is also a good example as to how you can combine this with step two, because you can talk in the theme about how you’re all members of the CDC who are trying to cure four diseases. In that case, you can get the information out in one fell swoop, though I would be tempted to repeat it again, just to make sure everyone knows.
4. Spend some time go over turn/round structure. This isn’t what people can do on their turn. But if you start by drawing cards, then playing two cards, then moving the villain ahead two spaces, then optionally getting an event card, explain that. This is meant to teach people who this works at a high level and what the structure is going to be through most of the game. It is also going to give you a chance to show off random decks of cards or things that the players might not immediately interact with in the game.
5. Go over what people can do on their turns. Now, this doesn’t have to be everything. Especially if there is a player aid that is good and clear. But talk about the important things that people can do on their turns. In Pandemic, explain how the moving works and how to treat diseases and how to cure diseases. Then, most of the characters have a special action that they can take. You don’t need to teach something like this which is specific to a single player, but have the players read, at this time, their special powers, if they exist, and in fact hand them out at this time, and then you can answer questions.
6. Show people the important parts of the game. But more than just showing off the important decks, let your players be involved in it. In Pandemic, as an example again, you can talk about the player deck and have someone shuffle it and hand out people’s hands of cards while you continue to teach more. It seems like it might distract from your teaching by having someone do something like that. I personally don’t think it will, in fact it might keep people more engaged. Because people are going to be paying attention so that if you ask them to help with something it won’t be obvious that they weren’t paying attention.
7. Finally, teach in the game as need be. This can be a few different things. Sometimes there are several things that only happen once or twice in the game, you can teach them in the moment when they happen. However, this only works if it isn’t something that is extremely important to the game or to the scoring. If there’s something that can give you an automatic win, teach that earlier even if it’s really rare. Or if it’s something that helps you as the person who is teaching the game and hurts someone else, teach it earlier or refrain from doing it, and give it as an example as something that you could do. Another thing that teaching in the game can be is letting players roll back a turn if need be. If someone has an extremely good move and makes a very bad move, point out the option to them, they might have forgotten or just missed it. But don’t do this all the time, because you’ll basically be taking that person’s turn and make this about teaching the game, so once you’ve taught something once during the game, you don’t teach the same thing again.

Now, there are probably more things that you can do. But being patient and teaching a game from theme first, and from a position where you know the rules is going to make it more likely that people will enjoy the game. And when people don’t enjoy the game, don’t assume that it was how you taught it, if you were trying to be considerate and engaging about it, not every game is for everyone.

Have you found any ways that make teaching a game easier? Or are there things that you’ve found help keep people engaged in learning the rules?

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