Welcome to the end of Variable Turn Order Month! This month we saw Astro Knights: Expeditions with its card-based Variable Turn Order, then we saw The Plum Island Horror and its token and bag-based Variable Turn Order! We conclude this month with a discussion of some of the problems with Variable Turn Order and some ideas for fixing these issues!

Over the past few years, we’ve seen the Variable Turn Order mechanism show its face in quite a number of games! This is a mechanism that directs the order of players and “bad news components” in cooperative games. The first place I really saw Variable Turn Order was in Aeon’s End! Aeon’s End is a cooperative deck-builder and boss-battler game. I Kickstarted the original Aeon’s End and the War Eternal versions back in something like 2017: see our reviews here.

At that time, I was still enamored with the entire cooperative deck-building experience, and I didn’t quite understand the full-reaching effects of the Turn Order Deck (see above), which controls the Variable Turn Order in Aeon’s End and War Eternal. 

What Is Fixed Turn Order and Variable Turn Order?

Many many many cooperative games have a simple order of play: the Bad News happens then the players go in (something like) clockwise order.  The Bad News happens, then each player gets a turn. This would be a Fixed Player Order game.   Some examples of this would be Arkham Horror 2nd Edition (see snippet from rulebook above), Sentinels of the Multiverse, and Marvel Champions: Fixed Player Order (as the name implies) dictates that play unfolds in the same order every turn (modulo the First Player marker moving).  We discuss this in greater detail in a few places: Arkham Horror and Sequential play, Marvel Champions and Sentinels of the Multiverse on entry #7.

Variable Turn Order is random system in which the game controls the order of the players and the order of the “Big Bad”.  In most cooperative games, players are playing against the game; that’s usually expressed as a major villain (the “Big Bad”) the players are fighting against (See RageBorne from Aeon’s End above: he’s the major villain)! So, when the “Big Bad” takes a turn, it’s the game controlling some way for the game to attack/inhibit the players. When a player plays, he usually attacks the “Big Bad” or helps himself or compatriots in some way.  

In Aeon’s End, the Variable Turn Order is expressed through The Turn Order Deck. The Turn Order Deck is a small deck of 6 cards which controls the order in which the players can take a turn or the Big Bad (the Nemesis, controlled by the game) can take a turn. There are 4 player cards and 2 Nemesis cards (see above). You shuffle the deck and draw the next card: that card tells you who goes! So, the players get 4 turns, and the Nemesis gets 2 turns, and then you start again. This is a card-based system.

In The Plum Island Horror (which we just reviewed last week), the Variable Turn Order is expressed through drawing tokens from a bag (see tokens above).  The players get 4 turns (2 green and 2 blue tokens) and the game “Big Bad” gets 4 turns (3 red and 1 black tokens).  This is token-based system.

Some Cooperative Games With Variable Turn Order

Here’s an (incomplete) list of cooperative games we know of with Variable Turn Order.  All of these games here are standalone games, but some of them also expand a base game.

• Aeon’s End: a cooperative deck-builder with card-based Variable Turn Order.  See our review of Aeon’s End and War Eternal here.
• Aeon’s End: The Outcasts. As Aeons’ End. See our review of Outcasts here.
• Aeon’s End: The New Age.  As Aeon’s End.  We discuss The New Age in Outcasts review.
• Adventure Tactics: A cooperative dungeon crawler with token-based Variable Turn Order. See our review of Adventure Tactics here.
• Unmatched Adventures: A cooperative boss-battler with card-based Variable Turn Order.    See Our review here.
• Astro Knights: a cooperative deck-builder with card-based Variable Turn Order.  See our review of Astro Knights here.
• Astro Knights: Expeditions: same as Astro Knights.  We reviewed Astro Knights: Expeditions at the start of Variable Turn Order month!
• Kinfire Chronicles: a cooperative dungeon crawler with elements of deck-building: uses token/bag-based Variable Turn Order.  See our review here. 
• The Plum Island Horror: A cooperative tower defense game with token/bag-based Variable Turn Order.  See our review last week!

A common theme is cooperative deck-builders, but we also see in this list in a tower defense game and some dungeon crawlers!

The Problems

The problems with Variable Turn Order games are two-fold, but related.

1. Lack of Mitigation: Most (if not all) Variable Turn Order order games don’t have any mechanisms for mitigating or affecting the Variable Turn Order.   It’s much more difficult  to make tactical/strategic decisions based on who will or “might” go next.
2. Pathologically Bad Turn Order: Variable Turn Order can go pathologically bad and shut-out players for far too many turns.  This is usually expressed by the Nemesis taking all of his turns at the end of the round, and then all of his turns at the start of the next round!

As an example of Pathologically Bad Turn Order, consider The Plum Island Horror: if all 4 “Big Bad” tokens are drawn at the end of the phase, and then bad luck brings all 4 “Big Bad” tokens out at the start of the next phase, that shuts the players out of the game for 8 full turns!  This will frequently cause an immediate loss, especially in the late game.

I have personally witnessed losses in Aeon’s End many times from The Variable Turn Order giving the Nemesis 3 or 4 turns in row: in the late Aeon’s End game, this is devastating as a Nemesis turns are very powerful.  It’s very frustrating to watch 3 or 4 turns go the players can do nothing .. and just lose!  

At least Aeon’s End is only a 60-90 minute game: if players get screwed by randomness, it’s okay because it’s a shorter game.  I am more worried about being screwed in the game of Plum Island Horror because it’s a significantly longer game: imagine being three hours into a game then watching it be destroyed because the game takes 8 unanswered turns in a row!

External Solutions

So, if the game has no mitigation techniques built-in, you hope not destroying the game balance . We’ll explore an external mechanism: a mechanism outside of the game and rules.

Back in Seven House Rules for Cooperative Games (see link here), under entry #1, we proposed a simple solution for Aeon’s End: The nemesis is never allowed more than 2 turns in a row.  In other words, if you ever would draw a third nemesis card, you stick it back in the deck and draw until you get a player card.  (For token based schemes, you’d do the same kind of thing, but with tokens).   This has the effect of preventing the Pathologically Bad Order by simply never allowing it to happen.

A slight refinement of this idea came up in our Plum Island Horror review (last week’s review):

There are no mechanisms to mitigate Variable Turn Order—that’s the problem with it. Our stock suggestion is to make it so the Horrors can never have more than X turns in a row (where X=2 or X=3 depending on your tolerance) . One easy way to do this: if he players have two turns in a row, they must draw a horror token. If the horrors have two turns in a row, the players must draw a player token. This is more of a balancing mechanism, but simple enough.

This slight adjustment makes the game a little more regular as no entity can ever have “too many” turns in a row.  Although it’s almost always the “Big Bad” having Pathologically Bad Turn Order that’s frustrating, if the players have too many turns in a row (especially in the end game), the game becomes too easy!!  Let’s be clear: Variable Turn Order strikes two ways: too easy or too hard.  This slight adjustment (by disallowing the players AND the “Big Bad” more than a few turns in a row) keeps the game a little more fair.

Let’s be clear: the entire purpose of this external mechanism is to prevent the Pathologically Bad Turn Order.   It’s a simple enough technique that you can adjust it to your own preference.  For example, I can see allowing Pathologically Bad Turn Order early in a Aeon’s End game (because it’s not devastating), but maybe controlling turn order a little more in the end game where it matters more.   

We’ll call this the External Prevention technique.

Internal Mechanisms

A number of newer games do have some mechanisms built-in to the game to effect the turn order. 

Adventure Tactics: Adventures in Alchemy is an expansion to the base Adventure Tactics game.  This expansion adds some new content but fixes a lot of issues with the game (it also made  the #7 on our Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2023). 

On Page 5 of the Expansion Rulebook lists several ways to deal with Variable Turn Order! That’s right, the expansion addresses this issue directly! 

1. Fate Counter: The first way is to have a limited resource (The Fate Counter: see column 1 above) which you can discard to swap the order of two initiative tokens.  This is a simple mitigation technique,  but it gives the users some agency when it really matters
2. Static Initiative Invariant: The second way is to simply get rid of Variable Turn Order and use “The Static Initiative Variant” (see column 2).  You’ll see this is a much more constrained version of the External Prevention Technique: It simply becomes Fixed Turn Order.  For example, for  a 4-Player game, the game prescribes Hero, Boss, Hero, Hero, Box, Hero, Hero as the order.  It’s interesting to read Note 2: “With a predictable initiative turn order, you might find the game a bit easier”.

This expansion should be giving designers ideas! I like the idea of the Fate Counter: you can stop the randomness of Variable Turn Order … once. If you think the Prevention Technique we discussed earlier is too “ad-hoc”, then maybe you’d prefer a more formal technique like having a token (or two) you can discard to stop the randomness.

Kinfire Chronicles (which we reviewed here) is a bag and token based Variable Turn Order game.

Although Kinfire Chronicles can suffer from the Pathologically Bad Turn Orders, it does have a (limited) mitigation technique called (interestingly similar) Fate Tokens.

The players start the game with 2 Fate Tokens.

Players may then spend a Fate Token before drawing from the bag: if you do so, you get to draw 4 tokens out of the bag and choose which one you want!

So, Kinfire Chronicles gives you a limited resource which you can use to mitigate the Pathologically Bad Turn Order issue! I like how you get to draw 4 tokens and choose which token to keep! This make it even more powerful, as you get more choice in who might go next!

It’s interesting that both Adventures in Alchemy: Adventure Tactics and Kinfire Chronicles call this more formal token a Fate Counter/Token. Perhaps that’s what this should called? 

The Fate Token is a mitigation technique in Variable Turn Order games: it’s a limited resource which players must discard to affect the turn order (either by re-arrangement, or redrawing). By limiting its uses, players only use it when it’s absolutely essential to prevent Pathologically Bad Turn Order.

Summary

We’ve seen three ways to deal with the Pathologically Bad Turn Order issues:

1. External Prevention: Players, on an ad-hoc basis, limit the draw tokens/cards to prevent “too many” of any one type coming out.  This prevents both the players and the “Big Bad” from running away with the game.
2. Static Initiative Variant: As coined by Adventure Tactics: Adventures In Alchemy, players have a static chart which basically enforces a strict order, preventing any randomness in the system.
3. Fate Tokens: As coined by Adventure Tactics: Adventures in Alchemy, but further perfected in Kinfire Chronicles, players have a limited number of tokens they can use to either re-arrange or re-draw cards/tokens to prevent Pathologically Bad Turn Order.

A Case Study: Using Fate Tokens in UnMatched Adventures in the Solo Game

In our review of UnMatched Adventures: Tales To Amaze, we saw the Variable Turn Order was card-based.

In that review, we found that the Variable Turn Order of the 4-Player game must less intrusive than the Variable Turn Order of the 1-Player game! The issue here was more of statistics: you are far less likely the get a Pathologically Bad Turn Order in a 4-Player game, as there’s more cards (8 cards total = 4 player card, 4 “Big Bad” cards). 

Compare this to the 1-Player game, which only has three cards in the Initiative Deck: Hero, Villain, and Minion.  The odds of the solo player being shut-out for 4 turns is much more likely (2 bad guys at the end of a turn, 2 bad guys at the start of the next turn) just because there are so few cards!

Our plan: play the solo game with two Fate Tokens.  Since there are so few cards in the deck, we’ll simply make it so that discarding the fate token allows you to choose the next card from what remains in the Initiative deck.  You might notice that these are the Fate Tokens from Kinsfire Chronicles: this was on purpose.

For our UnMatched Adventures test play, we’ll play Daredevil in a solo game. 

You can see all the influencing games above!

Now, after our first game with just 2 Fate Tokens, it was clear that Pathologically Bad Turn Order comes out a lot more than we expected! We were trounced pretty quickly.

In our next game, we borrowed another token from Kinsfire Chronicles as a third Fate Token.

Even during that game, I cheated and added a fourth Fate token. It’s pretty clear that the Pathologically Bad Turn Order can really run you over.

In my final game, I was barely able to pull of a win with 4 Fate Tokens. I am leaning towards: 4 tokens for a solo game, 3 for a 2-Player game, 2 for a 3-Player Games, and 1 for the 4-Player game. That may be too much: you may want to reduce it by 1.

Case Study 2: Using Fate Tokens in a 3-Player UnMatched Adventures Games

For this play-through, we used two Fate Tokens for a 3-Player game. We played with the power of the Fate Tokens: we allowed us to draw any Initiative card we wanted when we use the Fate Token. In our case, we used it both times to keep Cloak from dying in the early game. (We played Daredevil, Cloak and Dagger, and Black Window vs Mothman).

In our case, we still lost, but part of that was misplaying Cloak and Dagger, and realizing the abilities of Cloak and Dagger don’t work quite as well: they can make a foe discard cards … which isn’t as useful in the cooperative version.

It was clear the 2 Fate Tokens were very useful: we used them to save Cloak early in the game! Cloak might have died a lot earlier in the game, and the game would have been much less fun. As it was, we still lost, but it was a “satisfying loss”: we felt that we got close. The randomness that shows up from Variable Turn Order was kept under control.

We did wonder if maybe 3 Fate Tokens might have been better, but we felt like that may be too powerful.

Conclusion

Hopefully, you have a better understanding of Variable Turn Order and ways to mitigate it so its inherent randomness doesn’t destroy your games. There are a lot of cooperative games with Variable Turn Order, so it’s nice to know they are some standard mays to mitigate that randomness:

• External Prevention: This is an ad-hoc mechanism you can use in most Variable Turn Order Games: Don’t let the “Big Bad” have more than X turns in a row (where X=2 or 3 usually).  A more balanced approach is to also not let the players have more than X turns in a row.  Basically, you balance the game as you go.
• Static Initiative Invariant: Eschew all randomness of the Variable Turn Order and have a static order for the initiative tokens/cards to come out: see how Adventure Tactics: Adventures in Alchemy operates for more info.
• Fate Tokens:  For a more formal mechanism, games like Kinsfire Chronicles suggest using a limited number of Fate Tokens to help mitigate the randomness.  You can either use it to draw the exact cards/token you want (like we did on our UnMatched Adventures case studies), or draw a bunch of tokens/cards to give you more choices (the latter method only works well in Kinsfire Chronicles because there are so many tokens in the bag).

Don’t feel afraid to add a mitigation mechanism to your cooperative Variable Turn Order games: They are your games! For me and my groups, these mechanisms make the game more fun!

One final story: my friend Joe, Kurt, and I were playing UnMatched Adventures a few weeks ago:  Joe was coming over to have Dr. Strange heal my Daredevil, but nope, Variable Turn Order had the exact wrong bad guy come out and murder poor old Daredevil.  It was depressing, and made Joe dislike UnMatched Adventures because it appeared too random too him: I think with one of the mitigation techniques above, we might change Joe’s mind!

Welcome Back to Variable Turn Order Month! Last week we looked at Astro Knights: Eternity with its card-based Variable Turn Order System! This week, we discuss the game Plum Island Horror with its bag-based Variable Turn Order system! 

The Plum Island Horror is a cooperative tower-defense game for 1-4 players from GMT. This arrived at my house the first week of January 2024.

That’s right! I said a cooperative game from GMT! For those of you who don’t know, GMT usually focuses on very complex wargames. I was intrigued when they said they had a cooperative game!

Interestingly, GMT rates the complexity of their games, and they give The Plum Island Horror a Low to Medium score (see above). We’ll examine this claim later. They also claim the game is 45 minutes per player: we’ll examine that as well.

GMT P500

This game came of interest to me back in June 29th, 2021: that was when I “pre-ordered” my copy. See, The Plum Island Horror was part of GMT’s P500 program (see link here). Basically, GMT won’t print a game until they have at least 500 people express interest with a credit card! Once they hit that magic number of 500 people, they hit the print button! I was actually getting worried because I hadn’t heard anything in a while, so I sent GMT an email back in Oct 2023, and they told me the game was at the printers! Huzzah! My copy finally arrived January 11th 2024! That was quite a wait!

At the time of this writing, it looks like you can order a copy of this game if you are interested: see here. At this time, it’s $95. I only paid $64, but that’s because I was willing to wait and be part of the P500 program. Let’s see if this is worth it!

Unboxing

This is a fairly normal sized box, if a little tall. See the Coke Can above for perspective.

There’s quite a bit in this box: there’s two rulebooks (a base rulebook and a reference guide: reminds me of Marvel Champions and other FFG games where they have two rulebooks!)

There’s 6 factions in the game, so you have a board for each of those, as well as some mutations (bad guys) and NPCs (they help you)

There’s quite a number of punchouts. One you take those out, you find a BIG board, and I mean BIG! It’s an 8-fold board!

On my table, it actually won’t fit in one direction! It’s huge!

See above as the board drapes off of BOTH ends of my table.  Luckily, it’s still playable like this!  (You can lay it the other way without it draping, but for my first solo game, the above layout was best).

One complaint about this board is that it didn’t really lay flat very well. Even after being set up for about 10 hours (spoilers), it still wasn’t “flat”.  I suppose I should have put some heavy books on it.

Underneath the board are the rest of the components: some cubes, some dice, and 3 decks of cards. 

Overall, the components were surprisingly good for a GMT game. I only say that because GMT has (historically) been more into wargames where the aesthetic matters less. This one looks pretty good, if not great. I am happy with the components. Lots to punch out, though!

Rulebook

From The Chair Test, I wanted to give it an A-, but it droops over just enough to earn it a B+.  But the font is good and big, and … the pages aren’t shiny!  I think I liked unshiny pages: almost every other rulebook in the world is “glossy”, but that glossy glare can sometimes get in the way of reading.  I think I prefer more “dull” paper like in this rulebook.  It just seems easier to read in heavy light. 

From a content perspective, this might be one of the best rulebooks I have encountered. The rules were well-specified and well-notated. It has a Table of Contents!

Continue reading “When Is A Zombie Not a Zombie? A Review of The Plum Island Horror! A Cooperative Game by GMT” →

Welcome to Variable Turn Order Month! This month, we take a look at a bunch of cooperative games using some evolution of a Variable Turn Order System! These are games that rotate through the players and bad guys in some random fashion, allowing the turns to happen in some random order (instead of clockwise or something else). At the end of the month, we will conclude with a discussion and some ideas how to work with Variable Turn Order in cooperative games! We start Variable Turn Order Month with Astro Knights: Eternity!

I almost didn’t back this on Kickstarter! Although I liked the original Astro Knights game (see our review of the original Astro Knights here), I saw what happened with Aeon’s End (another cooperative deck-builder from the same publisher): I got lots of content … that I never seemed to use. I was worried I would get more content and just never play it.

But, there’s the other side of the coin … for one thing, this is a stand-alone expansion to the Astro Knights game! That’s right, if you didn’t pick up the first Astro Knights, you could still play this version without anything else. So that was appealing. And, to be fair, one of my main complaints about the original Astro Knights was that there weren’t “that many cards”, so new content would reinvigorate the game. After much internal debate with myself, I ended up Kickstarting it May 2023. Astro Knights: Eternity arrived at my house December 31, 2023 … after promising a January 2024 delivery; that’s right, it delivered one day early!!! (I am still counting it is as a 2024 release though).

Astro Knights Eternity is a cooperative deck-building game in the Astro Knights universe. It plays 1-4 players in about 60 minutes for players 14+. Players work together to try to take down the “big boss” in the game, bringing it to 0 hit points. I guess that means this is a cooperative boss battler game as well as a cooperative deck-builder?

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

The unboxing was a bit of a mess because the Kickstarter version includes 2 expansions in the box … and they were very poorly notated! 

I had to go back to the original Kickstarter to try and sort out “what’s what”. I found a nice thread on BoardGameGeek that had a nice picture of what’s in each version. See that thread here, and the pictures replicated below:

Without these pictures, I would have been a whole grumpier. Even as it was, I was grumpy because the components list in the first few pages of the rulebook is wrong!

See how the components page lists the 12 Turn Order cards? I went spare looking for those 12 Turn Order cards! Was I missing a deck? Was I missing something? No! As it turns out, these 12 cards are in Deck 1A … and you only discover if you start going through the campaign!!! You are told very specifically “DO NOT OPEN THESE DECKS UNTIL TOLD!”, so why would you open them earlier?

The fix is easy; either get rid of the Turn Order cards listing from the Components Page, or notate that same page with some text that says “The Turn Order cards will be available once you open Deck 1A!”

There’s a lot of cool stuff in here, but my unboxing took about two hours to try figure out where everything was and how it all fit together.

Rulebook

The rulebook is actually quite good, except for one major glaring issue.

It gets an A- on The Chair Test, as it fits just about perfectly on the chair next to me. It has nice annotations  and pictures, and it’s pretty easy to read (I would have preferred a slightly bigger font, but that’s a minor complaint).  This rulebook worked really well putting the rulebook on the chair next to me!

My complaint with the rulebook is really how it addresses playing this game for the first time. I think most people who pick this up already know how to play Astro Knights (I did like how they put all new rules in pink to point those out: like I said, this is still a good rulebook), so I wanted some directions how to “break this all up”. This issue goes along with a bad unboxing; how do I play this? I think this game needed a single page RIGHT UP FRONT (even separate from the rulebook) saying “To expose all the content of Astro Knights Eternity, you need to play through the 4-chapter campaign! You can’t play the game without at least starting the campaign!!!“ They do say something like that, but not until page 28! ”To play the expedition, skip reading the rules section for now …” and that’s buried on page 28 in the Expeditions rules.

This is the major flaw of the rulebook: it needs to be upfront that the expedition must be played first to expose all the content. I guess you could play the game without the expedition, but then you’d be opening up all the card that say “DO NOT OPEN”. Once you know this, this organization is fine. “Cool! I get to play an expedition!” But if you just come into thinking “Where’s all the cards? I don’t want to play the campaign, I just want to play right away!!!“ …. you can’t. Caveat Emptor.

Other than that, this was a good rulebook: good components page, good set-up, lots of text (not too small) with annotations. 

Gameplay

Gameplay is pretty much the same as Astro Knights: each players picks a character, builds a deck, spends energy to buy new cards or power-ups, and fights with weapons at the top of the turn. See our review of Astro Knights for more discussion of basic Astro Knights gameplay.

An Expedition!

So, Astro Knights Eternity comes with what’s called an Expedition: It’s really a campaign over four chapters for exposing all the new content in the game: the new monsters, the new cards, the new mechanisms. As we stated earlier, you pretty much have to play the full Expedition right our of the box to unlock all the content.

The campaign … err, Expedition is contained in the STOP card decks (see above) …

…and also the envelopes: note there’s one for each later chapter. (The first chapter’s components are mostly already out at the start of the game … yes that’s confusing too … where’s the Roman Numeral I envelope? There’s not one!!!). The card packs hold the new cards for the Expedition, and the envelopes hold everything else. Don’t worry, you don’t have to destroy or rip-up anything as you play the campaign: you can easily reset the Expedition back to it’s base state to start over! This is pretty much what I did: I played through the full campaign as a solo player, then reset it to play cooperatively with my friends. 

So, you play each chapter once or twice (only once if you win the first time, only twice if you lose the first game … you are still required to move on even if you lose) and then move to the next Chapter. Each Chapter basically introduces some new mechanic to the game! This is nice: we essentially get “5 new major ideas (and 4 new minor ides)” inserted into the Astro Knights system, but piecemeal, so we can enjoy the new mechanics one or two at a time.

We got through the new ideas below: they are slightly spolilerishy, but because the rulebook talks about all these new ideas (without a spoiler qualifications), we don’t feel we are spoiling anything.

Chapter I: Afterburn and Bolster

For chapter I, you don’t have to open any envelopes, but you do have to open three decks: 1A, 1B, and 1C.  Chapter I starts everything off with two cool new ideas in the deck-building genre!

Afterburn is a fantastic idea where the cards in your discard pile can do something! The cards with the special Afterburn tag in red (see above) can be used when they are in your discard. From the rulebook: “Afterburn means: Once per turn, during the main phase, if this is in your discard pile, you may resolve this effect”. What a cool idea! I also like how this mechanic canonicalizes the discard cards as being sideways: if you want to read the Afterburn text, it makes sense that all players now keep the discard sideways!

This is a great idea: it works pretty well, but you typically move through your discard deck pretty quickly in the game, so it’s not game-breaking, but it’s cool that you have another option on your turn!

The other mechanic is BOLSTER: see the Quasar Cell card above with a BOLSTER ability. Many times in gameplay, the Bad News cards of the game will tell someone to discard a card as a punishment. If the chosen card to discard has the BOLSTER keyword on it, the card is still discarded BUT the player gets the ability listed! In the example of the Quasar Cell, you get to Power Up! 

This mechanic is clever, because it makes people want to discard! “Oh! Let me do the discard! I can BOLSTER!” Who’d ever think there’d be a mechanic where people want to discard cards?

These two ideas are really fresh ideas in the cooperative deck-builder genre! I have never seen them (or if I have, I don’t remember). The Afterburn ability gives you a new power, perhaps even multiple times in the discard! That’s a really fresh and new idea! And then the BOLSTER idea actually encourages players to cooperate as they vie to discard cards when required! 

I really liked these new ideas.

UPDATE: Someone pointed out to me that I ways playing BOLSTER wrong. You can only use BOLSTER when an ally effect causes you to discard a card. From the rulebook, page 5:

“Some cards have the keyword BOLSTER:. The BOLSTER: effect if a card can only be triggered during an ally’s turn, not your own main phase. During an ally’s turn, if that ally plays a card or activates an effect that causes you to discard a card, and if the card you choose to discard has a BOLSTER: effect, you immediately gain the listed BOLSTER: efect. The discarded card is placed in your discard pile before its BOLSTER: effect activates You cannot choose to discard a card on an ally’s turn without a trigger.”

I suspect the reason you can’t you use it “anytime” is for balance. But this feels like one of those rules that might be better if it were simpler “You can discard a BOLSTER: whenever you are called to discard a card.” I think the precondition about the ally makes it unnecessarily complex; again, it’s probably about balance from playtesting.

So I “inadventantly” had a house rule about BOLSTER! 

Chapter II: Inventions and Villains in the Supply

Chapter 2 has the VOLT FUSION villain and the Inventions idea and a new Character you can play!

The card pack (2) for Chapter 2 give you a new character card, 5 new Inventions and the rest are the VOLT FUSION villain cards.

Chapter II introduces the Inventions idea (see above). Rather than being in the Supply, each player has a special card only they can buy! (This reminds me a little of Splendor when you reserve a card and only you can buy it later). Basically, you put the card to the side, and if you want to buy it … you can … but only you! The Invention for Caleb was so fantastic, so I tried to get it into play as soon as I could! The Invention idea is a very minor idea, but it still left like a little jolt of “that’s kinda cool”. Everyone still gets to pick something only they can have !

Another unique idea I’ve never seen is having the bad guy cards come out from the supply!  You can only damage the main villain if you reveal enough minions (see above), but those minions are hidden in the supply decks!

As you play, the Villain has Bad News cards that discard cards from the top of the supply decks, further exposing the minions! This is really cool idea, but it was perhaps a bit more random than I expected. It’s a lot harder to fight if the card you were saving up gets destroyed by the Bad Guy! Although this is a cool idea, I think it only “mostly worked”. It was just so random: my first game in Chapter II was a miserable loss. I won my second game of Chapter II, but I am not sure if I played that much better … still, it was a cool and interesting idea.

Chapter III: Combo Cards and “Lifeless” Villain

Chapter III introduces another new character to play (bringing the total playable characters to six), a new “villain” (which is just a stellar event), and the new Combo cards.

With the Combo cards, everyone chooses a Combo card before starting, as well as choosing another player: when that other player “does something”, the Combo holder gets a benefit! See the Dual Inferno Combo card above where “when player x gains a slot, you may destroy a card in your hand”. This was an interesting way to force two players to talk! “Hey! I got crappy cards in my hand , can you get a slot this turn so I can cull?” This was a neat idea: we didn’t use it too much, but it was a mechanism that furthered discussion and encouraged some cooperation.

The “villain” was actually a stellar event, and players had to keep the stellar event under control.

There were cards you could buy to lower the Solar Collision track: that was cool! This Solar Collision was very thematic: I really liked how this “villain” worked.

Combo cards were pretty neat, but not game-changing. I still enjoyed that they seemed to bring some more cooperation.

Chapter 4: Team Attacks and Dilemmas

Team Attacks are a way to “slowly” build up to a devastating attack, if you can satisfy all the pre-conditions!  Every time a players satisfies one of the pre-conditions on their turn, they place a token on it.  At some future point, a player can activate it to get a cool, big reward!  The example in the rulebook is Bolster Your Spirits:  

1. Red Blob: Suffer Two Damage
2. Blue Blob: Lose Two Slots
3. Yellow Blob: Discard a Weapon that costs 5 energy or more

If players do the necessary things (“ok, I’ll take 2 damage to get the red token if you lose slots on your turn for the yellow token!“), then they get the cool reward.  For Bolster Your Spirits:

Reward: Any player gains up to 3 cards from supply with a total cost of 11 energy or less and places them in their hand!

This doesn’t necessarily feel innovative, as we’ve seen something like this before: for example, In the Fantastic Four Marvel United set (see our review of that here), there’s Teamwork cards that allow you to put tokens on the Fantastic Four card (see above).  This mechanism, while not exactly the same, has a similar feel and purpose: rather than do direct good on your turn, do indirect good with hope to build a deferred reward!

This Team Attack mechanism definitely encourages cooperation and discussion.  I like it!

Dilemmas are another interesting way to add more choices to the game: I don’t want to say too more other than they were a very different way to play.

Solo Play

So, there are multiple solo modes (congratulations for following Saunders’ Law!) for Astro Knights Eternity!! The solo mode is a choice. One way to play solo: the solo player can choose to play multiple knights, alternating between them “as-if” there were that many characters. The solo player may also play just the single solo knight (just one character, which is his own ally), but only gets three player Turn Order cards! So, the Bad Guy comes out more often in the “truly” solo game. I played just the 2-handed way. (We did play “truly” solo game in the original Astro Knights: see our review for more info about that mode to see if that’s the way you would enjoy).

As a solo player with Caleb and ZAK, I played through the entire campaign! I really enjoyed the story that unfurled, and I looked forward to my next chapter! (You can change characters as you play, but I knew what these two did, so I stayed with them).

Basically, over about 4 nights, I played through all the campaign so I could reveal all the unlocks and cards!

Here’s the thing, after I was done, I reset the entire campaign! I liked the story that unfurled and I could see playing it again solo. I really liked the each chapter introduced some really neat ideas and unlocks. My only complaint was that Chapter II was probably too random.

Overall, I really liked playing this solo. This Expedition idea, which presents all the content over a campaign really enticed me to keep playing. 

Expedition

We never talk about this in other campaign games, but “How many chapters is too many and how many is too few?” In this case, four chapters seemed just about right! It was just enough new content to encourage replay, but at the same time four chapters didn’t seem too daunting! ”Ya, I can get through 4 chapters! 6, I don’t know … and 3 is too few”.

The fact that the campaign is pretty easy to reset and short made me want to play all the way through! I really like what they did here! The Expedition is a way to see all the content of the game with a directed story! This worked so well! 

We saw this same story system for unveiling content in the Aeon’s End Outcasts, and it worked really well there too! This is my favorite way to play this genre of games: a directed story, doling out just a few ideas and content every game.

Cooperative Play

Cooperative play was very smooth.  Once I explained the new ideas (Afterburn and BOLSTER), the game flowed really well.  Like I said, the BOLSTER had the effect of encouraging people to volunteer to discard cards, which was great! 

We had a great time talking, discussing, and figuring out how to proceed. There was also a surprising amount of cooperation in game maintenance: if Teresa was busy finishing her turn, I would handle the bad guy cards, or Sam usually did the Turn Order cards, unless he was busy … then I did it. There was a really nice flow to the game: everything was so smooth. We had a ball playing. See the big smiles above!

Oh, even though the amount of flavor text is longish (three pages for Chapter 1), we ended up sharing the burden for that: I read the first page, Teresa the second page, and Sam the third page. That worked well!  We shared the “reading out loud” burden … I recommend you do the same!

What I Liked

I’ve always liked the art for this game: it has a comic book feeling that I really identify with.

I really liked the way the content came out in the context of the Expedition story: there was just enough new content (cards, things in the envelopes) per Chapter to entice us to playing, but not so much that it was overwhelming!

The rulebook (once you’ve gotten over the hump of getting your unboxing and first play going) is quite good.

The story that comes out is a little cheesy, but it’s fun! It has a Firefly vibe to it: Caleb really looks like Mal from Firefly…

I like that you can choose to reset the Expedition OR just play “what you want” from this box (after you’ve unlocked everything) with the original Astro Knights!

What I Don’t Like

The mess that I got from the original unboxing could have been totally avoided if they just had a “First Play” or “Start Here” guide. And a sheet describing Kickstarter extras would have nice so I could keep those separate.

I still don’t love the Variable Turn Order deck: it can have too much randomness and destroy a game. I won’t dwell on it, but I have talked about it many times here, here, here, and here! I suggest a solution here. (We’ll talk more about Variable Turn Order at the end of the month!)

If you sleeve nothing else in this game, make sure you sleeve the Turn Order cards.  You touch these cards more than any other cards in the game!  Trust someone who did not sleeve one of their Aeon’s End games and saw how grody the Turn Order cards got … so you have to go out and get at least 12 sleeves.  It’s a deck-building game, so you may want to sleeve the whole thing.

I like the playmat, but it’s probably too busy. It’s thematic, it looks cool, it helps organize the game but I think there’s too much “art” on it, and it can be distracting.

Conclusion

The original Astro Knights is the “simpler” version of Aeon’s End, and something I’d recommend to someone just trying out cooperative deck-builders (rather than Aeon’s End as your first). Here’s the thing, there’s so much new complexity here in Astro Knights Eternity (with the Expedition, the Afterburn, Bolster, Inventions, Combo Cards, Team Attacks, etc.), I can’t recommend Astro Knights Eternity as your first game into this field! Even though it’s standalone, Astro Knights Eternity really should NOT be your first foray into the cooperative deck-building genre!

BUT once you know Astro Knights and start yearning for more content in this game system, this is a phenomenal standalone expansion! Heck, I think I’d recommend this over most of the Aeon’s End games if you are an experienced gamer! There so many neat ideas in here for cooperative and deck-building games: Afterburn is a really innovative new deck-building idea, Bolster encourages cooperation, Inventions are just cool, Combo Cards really help bring teams of two together, and Team Attacks encourage overall discussion, tactics, and cooperation! And the Expeditions idea is just enough story to entice to play more! And it’s resettable!

This probably gets an 8.5/10 for me (but only if you fix the Variable Turn Order somehow….); I really liked it both solo and cooperatively. I played through all the Expedition solo and really enjoyed it. I also found cooperative play to be so very smooth and fun. Great game: Astro Knights Eternity is a great standalone game (as well as an expansion to Astro Knights), but it probably shouldn’t be your first cooperative deck-builder.

Before we head into the top anticipated cooperative games of 2024, let’s take a look at the anticipated cooperative games from previous years and see how those games have been doing!

We started doing this in 2021 with the Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2021, and believe it or no, there’s still a few there we were waiting for and/or processing games in 2023 from that list of 2021!!

• Onimaru.  Promised Delivery Sept 2019. We don’t think we’ll ever see this.
• Isofarian Guard.  Promised Delivery Dec. 2020.  It finally arrived here in 2023 … and we didn’t like it.  Those of you who blinked may have seen a review here, but we took it down when we realized we may have played it slightly wrong.  We ended up selling it to someone else: It had amazing components, but we just didn’t like it.
• Freedom Five.  Promised Delivery in Nov 2021.  It is pretty late, but we have been seeing some regular updates: this will probably deliver in 2024.

There’s still quite a bit of stuff happening here in 2023 from our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2022!

• The Stuff of Legend: This finally arrived in 2023 and we liked it!  See our Review of The Stuff of Legend here!
• Valor and Villainy: Lludwick’s Labyrinth: This arrived in early 2023 and my game group really liked it!  We liked it so much, it made the #4 spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2023!!  See our review of Valor and Villainy: Lludwick’s Labyrinth here!
• Earthborne Rangers:  This arrived later in 2023, but we still did get a chance to play it.  Cooperatively, it was pretty good, but I think this is a better game solo: it made the #2 position on our Top 10 Solo Board and Card Games of 2023!! See our full review here to see if Earthborne Rangers is something you might like!
• Arydia: The Paths We Dare Tread: Promised Delivery Dec 2022.  We have been seeing regular updates.  Hopefully this delivers in 2024. UPDATE: The Kickstarter is showing mayyyyybe December 2024.  Probably 2025.
• Rat Queens To The Slaughter: Promised Delivery  May 2022.  There have been some very worrying messages from the publisher about this game and squandered opportunity.  We are not convinced we’ll ever see this made, but we think they are making some progress.  Who knows when we’ll see this, if we do.  We remain hopeful.
• Union City Alliance: Promised Delivery Oct 2021.  Yes, this one is taking a really long time, but the publisher does a pretty good job of keeping us up to date.  We really do believe this is imminent and will be delivered in 2024.

Interestingly, the majority of things from our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games from 2023 actually delivered in 2023!  (This is especially weird when you consider how much we have in the backlog from 2021 and 2022!)

• Gathering Gloom: This delivered late late 2023.  The rulebook really frustrated us to the point that we stopped reading.   We hope we can still get a review up of this, because it looks like a neat game, but that rulebook is daunting and long!
• Tamashii: Chronicle of the Ascend:   This arrived later in 2023. The game is pretty good and just a little shy of being  a great game!  Check out our review of Tamashii: Chronicle Of The Ascend here!
• Kinfire Chronicles: Delivered late 2023.  We liked it, but want to play more of it!  See our first impressions here!  This game has a lot of potential, we just wished we could have played it more!  So, we made it our Honorable Mention on our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2023!
• Daybreak. Delivered later 2023. Played it a few times.  We hated how random it was: the four orthogonal sources of randomness can destroy this very very tight game.  We can’t recommend it currently, but maybe we haven’t given it a full chance.  We want to try it again and see if we are missing something, because we feel like we are the only ones who didn’t like this.  
• Doomensions: Pop-Up Mystery Manor: It arrived right at the very end of 2023.  Man oh man, did we like this! See our review of Doomensions: Pop-Up Mystery Manor here! This made the #7 position on our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2023!
• The Dark Quarter: Promised Oct 2023.  This is from Lucky Duck, so we  pretty sure it will be delivered in 2024 or maybe early 2025. We are not worried that this one is late.
• Hacktivity:  Promised Feb 2023. This publisher has been very open about his problems, and how his printer went out of business!  Yet, his perseverance makes us think we’ll still see this in 2024.   We are cautiously optimistic we will still these, despite all of the problems.
• Set A Watch. Promised Delivery in Feb 2024.  When we listed this game, we didn’t have a promised delivery date.  I am 100% confident this will deliver in 2024: these guys have done a great job on the Set A Watch series: see our reviews of  Set A Watch and Set A Watch: Sword of the Coin here!
• Legends of Storm City: This delivered (PDF) early 2023.  I kinda liked it, but my game group didn’t like it at all.  See our full discussion of the roll-and-write Legends of Storm City here!
• Tesseract.  This delivered mid 2023.  This met all the hype and ended up being the #2 game on our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2023! The components are fantastic! See our review of Tesseract here!

Okay, let’s see what our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024 look like! As we have done in previous year, we give a link to its website, a promised delivery date, and a summary of the game from BoardGameGeek!

10. Cyberpunk Unfolds

Platform: Kickstarter Cyberpunk Unfolds: Immersive Sci-Fi Pop-Up Escape Game
Promised Delivery: Jan 2024
Summary: Pop-Up Escape Game that unfolds and make a 3d paper structure. Find clues, solve puzzles & explore a city full of hidden secrets.

We had such a good time with Doomensions this year (see our review here), another pop-up Escape Room game sounded great! We thought we’d give this Sci-Fi Pop-Up Escape Room a chance! There are a surprising number of Pop-Up Escape rooms available at the time of this writing! Hopefully this one will be good!

9. Defenders of the Wild

Platform: Kickstarter Defenders of the Wild
Promised Delivery: Aug 2024
Summary: Defenders of the Wild is a cooperative board game of animals against machines. Play as one of four unique factions and assemble your crew of defenders from a wide range of animal characters to resist the machines across a modular map that changes with each game.

War has come to the Wild. For millennia, animals have weathered shifting alliances and the cycle of the seasons—but they’ve never faced an enemy like this. An army of machines powered by corrupted magic is rampaging across the woodlands, enclosing everything in its path and exploiting the warmth of the world. Across the marshes, plains, mountains, and forests, scrappy crews of defenders rise up to resist the machine occupation. The partisans hail from four factions, each determined to fight back in their own way: the Council with its fortitude and bread, the Order with its wisdom of the flame, the Sect with its ingenious inventions, and the Coven with its spells and subterfuge.

This game looks kinda cute, but fairly strategic.  I like the art and the promised gameplay description!

8. Santorini: Deluxe Edition and Co-op Expansion

Platform: Kickstarter Santorini Co-op & Deluxe Pantheon Edition
Promised Delivery: May 2024
Summary: Santorini: The Riddle of the Sphinx is a co-operative expansion for Santorini that adapts the competitive experience into an ongoing adventure that players navigate together.

In this expansion comprised of a series of scenarios called “riddles”, players will seek to complete tactical objectives to solve the riddles. However, if players exhaust their supply of Santorini tower pieces before an objective is completed, the riddle remains unsolved and must be played again.

Each successfully solved riddle allows players to progress on the adventure map and unlock new gods to add into future riddles.

This kickstarter is a combination of a deluxe edition of Santorini and a co-op expansion for Santorini called Riddle of the Sphinx.  The components for the deluxe version look amazing, and coupling this with a cooperative mode make this something we are very much looking forward to!

7. Weirdwood Manor

Platform: Kickstarter Weirdwood Manor
Promised Delivery: Apr 2024
Summary: You will assume the role of one of six asymmetrically designed characters as you battle against one of the three different Fae Monsters, each with their own unique mechanics and loss conditions. You’ll make use of dice drafting, card play, resource management, and location actions as you move through the ever-shifting Manor in pursuit of the Fae Monster and his minions. You can also recruit additional companions to aid you and you will improve your character’s abilities as you earn experience.

My friend Kurt played a prototype of this at Dice Tower West; he said he really liked it and it would be right in our wheelhouse! A cooperative game with asymmetric powers in a spooky universe sounds like a lot of fun!

6. Flock Together

Platform: Kickstarter Flock Together – An Asymmetric Cooperative Game
Promised Delivery: June 2024
Summary: Flock Together is a beautifully immersive cooperative experience for 1-5 players. During the game, each player takes on the role of a unique chicken with asymmetric abilities and works together to drive off the invading predators before the third season ends.

Every turn, players choose their own strategy to progress their cause by selecting two of their eight available actions. Along the way, players will also have to manage leveling up, predator loot drops, traveling grubs, and adverse weather conditions. However, players must plan carefully, because as the seasons change, every predator that is still alive grows stronger and gains new abilities.

With eleven asymmetric characters to play and ten unique predators to defeat, Flock Together offers immense replayability that can be enjoyed with quick turns and an experience that lasts 25 minutes per player.

Beautiful art by Andrew Bosley? An interesting woodland theme and asymmetric powers? Yes please! This production looks gorgeous … hopefully it will play well too! I mean, who doesn’t want to play a chicken?

5. Luddite

Platform: Kickstarter Luddite
Promised Delivery: Dec 2024
Description: Luddite is a roll and write style game with a fully integrated graphic novel. In Luddite, one to an unlimited number of players will progress along the story of the novel whilst competing to destroy ever more complex automata. Creating a full campaign style game.

As a Luddite you will be hacking into the neural networks of the NED automata. These bionic, dog-like creatures are capable of performing almost any complex task to which they are assigned and, as such, have begun to replace vast swathes of the human population. As a Luddite, you will work to destroy these infernal machines.

This cooperative roll-and-write campaign looks interesting, but what makes it stand out is the graphic novel that comes with it! I am really looking forward to seeing what this one does! One fun fact: Luddite (which basically means a type of person adverse to technology) can be delivered electronically! As a true luddite, I got the physical version. 🙂

4. Once Upon a Line: The Butterfly’s Breath

Platform: Kickstarter Once Upon a Line – The Butterfly’s Breath
Promised Delivery: May 2024
Description: Once Upon a Line is a narrative game played out in chapters. Embody heroes and use their actions to play on a board of scratch off ink. Uncover hidden words and take their corresponding cards. This will reveal the next part of the story as well as new words to find in order to accomplish your mission.

• Fully immerse yourself in a personalized adventure.
• Elude traps (riddles, anagrams, palindromes, etc.).
• Complete your Quest before scratching off the last square on the Line of Tragedy.

This is strange one: it’s a word game, in a campaign! The main hook is that letters are “scratched off” the sheets (so they are one-time use). There’s some discussion about how the arrows direct your progress, but this just sounds like a fun cooperative campaign!

3. Leviathan Wilds

Platform: Kickstarter Leviathan Wilds
Promised Delivery: Feb 2024
Description: Long ago, the once-gentle leviathans lost their minds and tore the world apart. After generations of hiding and struggle, humanity discovered that the frenzied leviathans can be restored. Climbers willing to take the risk must explore the wilds and work together to remove a series of binding crystals to heal the leviathans roaming the world.

In Leviathan Wilds, 1-4 players will confront these colossal beings, with each creature being depicted across the spread of a spiral-bound storybook that makes up the game’s board. The book also forms the basis of a connected campaign mode built around the game’s story, with each of twenty included scenarios estimated to last around 45 minutes. Tougher difficulty levels are also available for added replayability.

This basically looks like Shadow of The Colossus, the board game! Players climb on the creature of interest, doing damage sort of like that old PS2 game Shadow Of The Collossus! This looks really different and interesting.  It had a relatively small Kickstarter (after trying a second time and succeeding), which is unexpected given the design pedigree of this game: Justin Kemppainen, (who worked at FFG and Z-Man for years)! I am expecting this to be great!

2. Marvel Dice Throne: X-Men and Co-op Missions

Platform: Kickstarter Dice Throne | X-Men • Marvel Missions Co-op • Deadpool
Promised Delivery: Aug 2024
Description: In Marvel Dice Throne: X-Men, you become one of eight of Marvel’s iconic X-Men, including Wolverine, Storm, Cyclops, Rogue, Gambit, Psylocke, Iceman, and Jean Grey!

Every Marvel Dice Throne hero is painstakingly designed and balanced to provide the most thematic experience possible, allowing you to truly embody your favorite heroes like no other game. Featuring all-new mechanisms and asymmetrical designs, these are some of our most innovative and exciting heroes yet!

Marvel Dice Throne: X-Men is a heart-pumping, fast-playing game of skilled card play and dice manipulation supporting multiple modes of play, including 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 2v2v2, or free-for-all.

We have played Dice Throne (see here), Dice Throne Adventures (see here), and Marvel Dice Throne with Dice Throne Adventures (see here) We really do like this simple, yahtzee-esque combat system! It’s so cool to be able to get X-Men in the Marvel Dice Throne universe, but what I am looking forward to the most is the Dice Throne Missions! This will make it easier to play Dice Throne X-Men/Marvel cooperatively! We love the Dice Throne Adventures, but it requires a little more of a commitment to the campaign: The Dice Throne Missions promises single cooperative scenarios! The quality of the Dice Throne has been phenomenal, so we are really looking forward to this! That’s why it’s #2 on this list!

1. Marvel United: Multiverse

Platform: Kickstarter Marvel United: Multiverse
Promised Delivery: March 2024
Description: In Marvel United: Multiverse, you take the role of iconic Marvel Heroes cooperating to stop the master plan of a powerful Villain controlled by the game. Each Villain unveils their unique master plan, with cards that trigger different effects, and threats that pose challenges across the locations. Heroes must choose carefully the cards to play from their unique decks, that not only offer different actions and superpowers to use, but also combine with the actions of other Heroes to do the impossible. Build your storyline, unite your powers, save the day!

It’s hard to separate just the one Marvel United: Multiverse game from this kickstarter! There’s so much content coming from this Kickstarter!! Galactus: Herald Expansion, The Wrecking Crew, and so much more! The Omniverse pledge has: Marvel United: Multiverse, Exclusive Wrecking Crew Villain Team, The Coming of Galactus Expansion+19 More
And this doesn’t include the stretch goals! I came into Marvel United later, but I have absolutely loved it! See our review of Marvel United (Parts I and II), Marvel United: X-Men (Parts I and II), Days of Future Past (see here), Fantastic Four (see here), and First Class (see here) ! In fact, Marvel United: Days of Future Past was so good, it made the #1 spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2022! I can’t wait to see all the stuff that comes with this! The king-sized Galactus is probably my most anticipated component!