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.