Word Weaver Adventures is a cooperative word and (sorta) boss-battler game from Gamefound back in June 2024. It arrived at my house sometime April 2026. There were delays along the way from tariffs and other issues, but it delivered!
I have to admit, I almost didn’t back this! This wasn’t a well-known company or anything like that, just a bunch of passionate new gamers. They promised a cooperative word game (maybe like a cooperative Scrabble?) .. and the art and the enthusiasm for the project amped me up enough to back the project! It ended up being a smallish Gamefound project at about $13,000 with only 152 backers.
In the end, when the game finally arrived, I enjoyed the personal letter they sent. See above.
Will this be a hidden gem? Let’s check it out!
Unboxing and Gameplay
Word Weaver Adventures is a smallish box; see Coke can above for perspective.
The rulebook is, unfortunately, a folded pamphlet. Sigh. See above.
If Ace of Spades (from a few weeks ago) uses poker hands to take out bad guys cooperatively, then Word Weaver Adventures uses words (with point values like Scrabble) to take out bad guys cooperatively! There’s actually a surprising amount of overlap in the ideas!
Each player takes the role of one of four characters: see the choices above.
Each character has a special ability, powered by letters and gems. See above as Fulminate : The Exploder can double the value of a letter!
Each use of your power consumes a gem and 2 letters (see above). You only start with 3 gems, which means you only get to use your special ability 3 times during the game! And that use also costs precious letters!
At the start of each turn, each player draws up to 7 letters, and uses them to try to spell things! It has kind of a Scrabble vibe, eh?
The letters are really nice wooden letters, ala Scrabble. They are in a very nice bag holding them … see above!
The words you spell do “damage” to bad guys! How much damage? It depends on how much the letters of the words are worth! JARS above (with no modifiers) would be worth 8+1+1+1 = 11 points of damage!
This is a boss-battler game! Sort of! To win, you have to take down one of the big bosses (see above) by doing enough damage! I keep saying this is a boss-battler, but these “bosses” are just challenging you to spell! My first pass through the game, I thought these were bosses you “defeated”! No no no!! The theme is that they are teachers quizzing you, and you have to get enough points to move on to the next teacher! The “damage” you do is just points towards overcoming a “test” or “quiz!”
Along the way, you must pass smaller quizzes from Assistant Teachers! See The Termite Colonizers above! He’s an Assistant Teacher who gives you little quizzes! They are just a minor quizzes on the way to the big test at the end! (The bad guys are all grouped; we are spelling for the yellow diamond bad guys! See the little yellow diamond in the upper right corner)
The (left) bottom of the card describes how many points they have, plus (right bottom) how much “damage” they do to the characters if the survive to the next round! Damage to characters is done “cracking” a letter spot so that character(s) get fewer letters next turn!
If the players can survive the big boss (called Head Teacher) test and take out little spelling quizzes along the way (with Assistant Teachers), players win! Basically, if all slots are cracked (meaning players can’t draw any letters), players lose!
Overall, these components are just fantastic!
Rulebook
Yes, the rulebook is a pamphlet. Sigh. I really detest this form factor for rulebooks.
It DOES fit on the chair next to me without drooping, but the text is a little hard to read. They did a good job of not wasting space (there’s almost no wasted space: see above), and there is no droopage, but it’s still a pamphlet that’s kind of hard to read: this gets a C on the Chair Test?
The rules were ok, but a little unclear on a few things. I didn’t realize until I looked at the Variations, that you can generally only spell one word per turn with your tiles! If you play the Early Spellers Variation (above), you can spell multiple words! Whoops! I wish that had been clearer!
I mean, I got the game played from this rulebook. . I would have been so much happier if this had been a little rulebook. But I get it; there were only 152 backers for this campaign. They did such a great job with the cards and characters and the art therein, I guess someplace had to suffer a little. I’d rather have the great art and cards (which you look at all the time) and an ok rulebook (which you only ever look at once or twice). So, I get it. The rulebook mostly taught the game; It was fine.
It is SO EASY to support solo play! Just play the 2-Player mode (play as two characters) and alternate between them as-if the game were 2-Player! This is perfect example of 2-handed solo working just fine! I found that this solo mode worked! I am a little surprised they didn’t include this simple solo mode.
This is how I learned the game; playing 2-handed solo mode! In the end, I had a fine time playing.
Cooperative Mode
We played a few cooperative games. We liked it enough, after the first game, that we wanted to play again! In fact, we probably should have upped the difficulty in the second game! We crushed it!
From a mechanism point of view, there isn’t really that much cooperation. Every turn, you can maybe swap one letter each, and each player can only swap once! (Which means in a 3-player game, there is a limit of one swap total per turn). Basically every turn is mostly multiplayer solitaire (see Teresa above looking at her letter) as each player tries to get the best word they can with their letters! So, there’s not that much cooperation, at least at the spelling word level.
Interestingly, even if the “spelling” part of the game had pretty minimal communication and/or sharing, some of the higher-level strategies emerged as we chatted. “You know, if I spell a lesser word, I can use my shield to protect us all from cracking!” “Oh ya! Do we have good letters? I can double the best letter? Is this a good idea now?” As the monkey, I was good at shielding …
The special powers and special cards (treasures) actually became very important part of the strategy of this game. The discussions that revolve around when to use these cards was the main cooperation that emerged.
To be clear, there are NO communication limitations (thank goodness) in this game! Players can talk as much as they want! And even the rules aren’t 100% clear, I am pretty sure you are allowed to show all your tiles to all other players! That encourages the cooperation and helping! You can kinda tell when someone is having trouble with their letters, and you can look across the table and offer suggestions! I did that a few times … and I was offered suggestions a few times as well. It works; each player still make all the decisions with their own letters, but minor help occasionally from your friends does help.
The game is mostly multiplayer solitaire, as players spell their words fairly independently. There’s a minor mechanism for sharing letters, but much of the conversation that flows in the game is high-level strategizing about how to use special powers and treasures. Despite the multiplayer solitaire nature of the spelling part of the game, the rest of the game is fairly interactive and cooperative!
What I Liked
The Art: The art in this game is generally fantastic! I love the vibe that this art exudes! No adjustment needed on the art at all! This art is AWESOME!
Cooperative Scrabble: I like that I can generally describe this as a cooperative Scrabble game! Most people know what Scrabble means, but they wonder how it comes together as a cooperative game! It’s tempting to hear, “Oh, you can play Scrabble cooperatively?”
Easy To Pull Out. In general, this game is easy to pull out and teach.
What I Didn’t Like
No Solo Mode? It’s really weird that there’s no solo mode. Play 2-handed solo; it works fine.
Scaling: The game scales weirdly. It’s supposed to be Easy/Medium/Hard difficulty, but honestly, the game is so much easier with more people! If you have 4 people, you can do so much more “damage” per turn! I was struggling in a 2-Player game at the “easy” level, and I realized I would be destroying the game with 3 or 4 characters playing! So, it sorta feels like the difficulty should be a function of the number of players? It’s not!!! I think that the difficulty level should probably be the number of characters in play: Use easy for 2 characters, medium for 3 characters, and hard for 4 characters. (Note that I say characters because a solo game would be 2 characters!) I guess you can choose to make the game easier or harder by upping or lowering the difficulty.
It felt like a mistake the game had no notion for scaling for the number of characters in play. This is probably the biggest flaw in the game; there needs to be an orthogonal scaling factor for the number of players and the difficulty; they conflated them and I think that’s a mistake (and confusing).
Pamphlet For Rulebook. Yes, I’ve complained about this a lot; I’ll shut up now. I’d much rather have the amazing art and a pamphlet than mediocre art and a real rulebook. I’ll shut-up about this. The pamphlet worked. This is a personal issue.
What’s a Word? There is no discussion really of “what’s a legal word I can use?”. I think they are relying on the Scrabble back-knowledge of most people, assuming people will use standard Scrabble rules for “what’s a legal word”. But there wasn’t really a discussion.
Conclusion
Word Weaver Adventures is a hidden gem of a game! Most people know what Scrabble is, so it should be easy to pull this out and teach this to most people. As long as you know about the scaling issues (and know how to correctly use the difficulty based on the number of players), this game is great! 8/10.
You can play solo; have the solo player operate two characters and alternate between them. It’s surprising this solo mode isn’t in the rules.
I am so glad I have a simple and gorgeous cooperative Scrabble game I can pull out and show anyone.
What is Tanares Expeditions: Central Sea? It’s basically Gloomhaven with a pirate theme! You fight a bunch of minor bad guys on the way to fighting a big bad boss on every quest!
Players quest! Players each play as a pirate exploring a map! That’s not quite true; there must ALWAYS be four pirates, no matter the number of players! So, a 4-Player game works best, as each player gets their own pirate to play! Other player counts can work, but you have to either take control of multiple pirates or do something special (that isn’t well specified) using something called comrades. I found the comrade rules very underspecified and underwhelming, so I always just played with 4 full pirates with full abilities. It’s a lot of work (especially for the solo player operating all 4 pirates), but you get used to it … after a quest or two. It’s still a lot of work to operate multiple pirates, even if you do use the comrades rules … so just play as full pirates.
Pirates fight! They roll barrels! (Seriously!)
Each quest offers “about” 4 encounters where it’s tactical combat! Each combat is unique and different! A full quest takes about 2.5 to 3 hours, with each encounter in that Quest being about 30 to 45 minutes.
Each combat is a little different and a little special; you don’t always do the same thing! There are challenges (see above) that help give the combat a lot of flavor! Sometimes you have to roll barrels to kill opponents, sometimes you have to push them into spikes, sometimes you get drunk on Grog, and sometimes you have to bat them into the hole with the Kraken! (I am not making this up). You can still win the combat if you don’t succeed at the challenge (BTW, the word challenge wasn’t in the Index, so you have to go looking to find it), but it’s better to succeed at the challenges if possible! Succeeding at challenges allows to activate your Sea Blessings sooner and better!
Sea Blessings are arguably the best part of the game! Basically, after each encounter, each pirate gets a new Sea Blessing! The Sea Blessings enhance each pirate character and allow them to feel more powerful very quickly! Since each Quest is “about” 4 encounters, you will have a full raft of Sea Blessings (no pun intended … well maybe a little)! See below for four full Sea Blessings active!
These Sea Blessings are also unique to your character type! Captain Mavra (above) is a Controller type which tends to focus on upgrading her abilities to do magic damage from far away! See above as she has 4 of her Sea Blessings out! Each Sea Blessing really makes her feel a little more powerful! And of course, you get some choices on the Sea Blessings that come out, so you can make your own combos!
There are 4 character types: Healer, Tank, Controller, and Striker. All quests must have four pirates, with one of each type. See above for the Healer.
See above as the solo player BARELY keeps all four sets of pirates cards together! Yes, this game takes up a LOT of real estate!
Probably the second coolest thing about this game is the powers: each pirate has two main Attacks (far left) and 1 Ultimate Attack (far right)! You can use the main Attacks all the time (once per turn), but you can only use the Ultimate Attack once per Quest!
Oh, and you’ll notice the Kickstarter awesome version of this game came with plastic stands to hold cards. These were completely unwieldy and took up waaaaaaay too much space for the solo game. We’ll see how much we like them in a 4-Player game? Honestly, I don’t think I would recommend them at all. I kept knocking over the cards. UPDATE: Andrew and I hated them and didn’t play with them. Sam and Teresa kept theirs the whole game, but their cards got knocked over quite a bit.
Sure, it looks cool all set up with these card holders (above) but I found them unusable. They got in the way, the cards fell down all the time, and I couldn’t see the map!
It was kind of a mess to player 4 characters solo, but above (with the 4 characters all scrunched together) worked MUCH better than the plastic card holders. Your mileage may vary.
Minis and/or Standees.
Players are pirates fighting pirate-themed bad guys. I got the Kickstarter version which has Minis.
There are bunch of minis; most of them are bad guys you fight! Bad pirates, Spiders, Goblins, etc. the standard pirate stuff!
Some of the minis (the big bosses, see above) are even painted!
So, I got the painted version of the game, but not all my minis are painted? Just a few? Shrug? Just so you know that not ALL your minis will be painted.
Here’s some bad guys (above and below) with their stats card and minis.
The minis seem to correspond pretty well (we had trouble correlating minis to cards in The Last Spell from a few weeks ago). So that was nice.
Combat
Combat order is decided by the initiative deck! See above! Each pirate gets a card and each bad guys gets a card.
See other side of the initiative cards above.
Once the Initiative cards are laid out, they stays like that for the rest of the encounter. See above! Those of you who have played Dungeons & Dragons might recognize this; this feels very much like the initiative system from D&D! In fact, you can even use special powers to “slightly modify” your turn order! To be clear, this is NOT Variable Turn Order (like we saw last week in Aeon’s End: Beyond the Breach)! Once the cards are out, players know the order that everyone will activate for the rest of combat! So, it may suck that the bad guys goes twice or even thrice in a row, but it’s predictable, you know it’s coming, and so you can work with it or around it!
Oh! One of my favorite parts of the Initiative system is that a Sea Curse (see above) defines attack preferences for that round! One of these cards come out every round, revealing some bad news, but more importantly: defining attack preferences!!! Bad guys are red or blue in this game, and you can see that each round has the attack preference VERY WELL DEFINED! “Red enemies go after the farthest enemy” and “Blue enemies go after enemy with fewest HP!” This disambiguations makes me very happy! They kind of dropped the ball though; if there’s a “tie”, … the players pick! No no no no no no! You already have a well-defined ordering in the initiative line! LEFT TO RIGHT! If there’s ever a tie, just use the leftmost character in the initiative line!!! ARGHGH!! ARGHGH! ARGHGH! ARGHHG! I have very strong feelings about this; I hate it when a cooperative game says “players choose”! (See my blog entry here about this: Resolving Ambiguity in Cooperative Games). They are SO CLOSE to getting it perfect; they should have use the leftmost character in case of ties! Done! So, this will be a house rule if you play with me …
This is a boss-battler; you (generally) have 3 minor combats on the way to a final combat with the boss! You have a decent chance of dying while you play … but there are many mechanisms for healing, and one-shot resurrections! This game really FEELS LIKE they want you to keep going! Even though the game is hard, there are enough mechanisms to keep you on-track … it almost feels like you have a DM who is trying to look out for you …
Campaign
To be clear, this is a campaign; you can see that designation on the cover.
The campaign is many Quests; see the quest book above! Each Quest is about 4 encounters long!
I said earlier that this game reminds me of Gloomhaven; and I stand by that. There is flavor text and story in the game … about as much as Gloomhaven (some story but it’s not the main emphasis). The main emphasis of the game is the tactical combat on the many different maps.
Each Quest (see the first one above) has about 4 encounters, and may actually span multiple maps. I would say each quest is “about” 2.5 hours to 3 hours? It depends on how much you know. Sure, my first quest was probably 4 hours, but it was a learning quest.
There IS an overarching story going on here! I gotta be honest, I kinda like the story! It feels very thematic and piratey! Each Quest, when you end, gives you upgrades and takes you to the next part of the story! The game DOES have a branching adventure … again, very much Gloomhaven.
The campaign and game feel very much a like a Gloomhaven style campaign; a story evolves, but the main emphasis is on the tactical combats (usually 4 encounters per Quest).
Upgrades
One of the best parts of this game is how many upgrades you see as you play!
We’ve already mentioned the Sea Blessings! You get a new Sea Blessing (from a deck of 5 you chose) after every encounter, so you get upgrades mid-quest to help you feel more powerful!
And at the end of every Quest, you get to upgrade your Sea Blessings so you can choose better ones! You can choose Sea Blessings that combo! You can choose Sea Blessings that fit your play-style! If each encounter is “about” 30 minutes each, that means you get a Sea Blessing every 30 minutes! It feels good to get those!
After some Quests, you get loot! See above.
After each Quest, you also usually get to upgrade an Action! See as Captain Mavra’s Tentacles Action is now level 2!
These upgrades follow you as you play; this is a campaign after all! You always feel like you are upgrading, which is a really great feeling!
Ships
Wait! There’s also ship-to-ship combat! No pirate game is complete without some ship-to-ship!
It’s not all the time, but on some quests, you must sail the Seven Seas! On Quest 3, I got to sail!
The sailing part of the game is VERY different! You have very different rules for shooting and ramming other ships! But, they seem fairly well-defined on just 2 pages of the rulebook! See above! You also don’t get Sea Blessing (boo hoo) in the sailing parts of the game. Or powers. You just do what your ship does!
If you flip your character card, you have a ship on the other side! When you sail your ship, you get to choose two things: your Crew and your Attack! See above as Captain Krog chooses a defensive crew (+3 defense) and Lightning as an Attack!
The basic combat still works, more or less, the same way! You have Initiative cards for your ships and the bad guys ships!
There’s a bunch of bad guys ships that come out (see above), each with their own weapons and weaknesses!
The sailing part of the game feels VERY different … but it still feels very piratey and thematic! I cheated a little bit to make sure I made it to the end. The good news is that, even if your ships sinks, it can come back … once. If all four pirate ships sink twice, well, then you lose. You probably will lose at least one ship, but it’s good to know you have at least one resurrect.
I liked the sailing part of the game; it really fit nicely in and really gave the game a lot of variety!
What I Liked
Art: I adored the art in this game. It’s VERY piratey and thematic.
Components/Minis. The components were all high-quality and worked really well. They looked really cool on the table.
Upgrades. Between new Sea Blessings between encounters and upgrades to Main Actions between Quests, you always feel like you are advancing and getting better. It happens quite a bit!
Sea Curse and Resolving Ambiguity: They almost got the ambiguity resolution perfect; the Sea Curse cards do a great job of helping describing attack resolution! See above! They unfortunately don’t say anything on “ties”: as a House rule, use the leftmost relevant player Initiative card to resolve ambiguity in case of ties.
Story: there’s not THAT much story, but I like what I have seen. The campaign seems well-defined.
Combats all feel different! Each combat, so far, feels very different! I rolled some barrels, I shoved into some spikes, I got drunk! sailed some ships! Everything I have seen feels just a little different and gives it a nice flavor. The Challenges really enhance that flavor too.
What I Was Annoyed Over
Dice Based: Combat is dice-based; it would remind you a lot of Dungeons & Dragons as you roll a 20-sided die and have to be over the enemy Defense. If you are rolling badly, you can just lose lose lose and it’s not fun. Sure, there are buffs, sure there are a lot of mechanisms to help you (two free resurrections!), and sure it’s just the nature of dice. I found that I had to cheat once of twice to keep the game going because of one or two bad rolls! This is one place where this is more like Dungeons & Dragons and maybe a little less like Gloomhaven.
Rulebook and Rules. There are a LOT of rules. I played a bunch of gams, and it felt like it took a while to converge to what the rules where. The rulebook is ok; it has an Index but it is incomplete (Area of Effect? AoE? Challenge?). I used it it a few times and it worked, and a few times and it didn’t. (When an Index doesn’t work, it means you have to linearly scan the entire rulebook to find a rule). I guess I’d rather have an Index that not, so maybe I’ll count that as a win.
Player Summary Cards. Seriously, only two Player Summary cards? And they are DIFFERENT? We needed at least four Player Summary Cards! My friends are fine sharing (we usually shared Player Summary cards, one per side of the table), but it was annoying to constantly be going back and forth.
Always Four Players: Gloomhaven did a great job balancing the game for different player counts; there were set-ups for 2, 3 and 4-player games! In this game, there must always be 4 pirates! It works, I understand why they did it, but it makes it harder to play the solo game (even with the comrades rule, you are still operating 4 pirates).
Conclusion
So, what’s a pirate’s favorite letter? C (for the Seven Cs!) for solo mode, and B (for Be eating lemons or you’ll get Scurvy) for the cooperative mode.
It’s probably a 7.5/10 for the solo mode; I still want to keep playing the solo campaign. I was a little bummed when I had to reset the campaign so I could play cooperatively with my friends (yes, you can reset the campaign). It wasn’t THAT much state to reset, and I have taken pictures to keep track of the decks (the state is mostly your choices for base Sea Blessings), but it was a little work. The worst part of the solo mode is just how much work it is to operate four characters AND the bad guys AND do maintenance! You can use the comrades cards to mitigate this work a little, but that gets rid of Sea Blessings which are arguably one of the best parts of the game. So, that workload for the solo players brings down the score a little.
I would absolutely recommend playing this solo for at least 3 Quests (partly so you see ship-to-ship combat) and to converge to the rules. There are a lot of rules, and the rulebook could have been better. The rules are mostly all there. I think diving right in to this with an uninitiated group is a recipe for disaster! Play it solo to learn it, then teach your friends.
Cooperative play is pretty darn good. 8/10. A lot of cooperation emerges as everyone discusses ways to get the best results using their pirates and traits! Each pirate is very different! It’s pretty clear that four players (one player per pirate) is the optimal way to play. I could see doing a 2-Player game (two pirates per player) or maybe a 3-Player game (one per, and a shared pirate?), but I always prefer when I get one character to focus on and inhabit. My group still want to keep playing, so we’ll be heading into the campaign for the next few weeks. So far, it’s been a hit.
A pirate’s favorite letter is R! ARGHHHHH when you are learning the game and coming up to speed with everything; it’s a lot of work. Once you get into it, I think you might enjoy it. Hopefully this review will help you see if this is for you.
Aeon’s End Ennui is the condition of being sick of so much Aeon’s End! It’s the ennui of yet another Aeon’s End game!
Aeon’s End: Beyond the Breach is the 1000th standalone expansion (okay, I am exaggerating a little; it’s maybe the 16th expansion) for Aeon’s End. This is a standalone game, so it can be be played by itself. You can also use the mages and friends and foes and nemeses from this to add gameplay to other Aeon’s End you may have (and vice-verse). Today, we are concentrating solely on the standalone experience of Beyond The Breach!
Cure For Aeon’s End Ennui
The cure for Aeon’s End Ennui is simply reminding yourself HOW EASY it is to jump into an Aeon’ End game! Each standalone Aeon’s End game comes with the first game sheet above!
That first game sheet clearly defines (at least for the first game) what you need to do to get the game moving! And in fact, the Nemesis deck is fully constructed for you! One of the most annoying things in Aeon’s End is constructing the Nemesis deck, but that first play is all set-up for you! Just grab the the first few decks and set-up!
I am not being glib here; the ease at which you can set-up your first game and get going might be a major reason I still keep buying the Aeon’s End games. It’s so easy to jump in for your first play. Other manufacturers take note: if you can easily jump into a game, it’ll make it easier to play and easier to like.
Unboxing and Gameplay
See box above with Coke Can for scale.
Each player chooses a mage to play. Aeon’s End are all cooperative games where mages work together to take out a big bad.
The base game only starts with the 4 mages above (the extras are from Kickstarter backer extras and expansions that came in the box itself).
The mages battle one of the nemeses (the bad guys) above! To win, they cast spells to try to reduce the nemesis to zero hit points!
There are Friends and Foes that help/hinder you along the way. No player actually plays them, they are just operated by the game and have a mildly good or mildly bad effect when they activate.
This is a cooperative deck-building game: see some base cards above. Gems (like the crystal) generate Aether (the little notes) and that is used to buy bigger and better things; better gems, better spells, better everything. Aether is the currency of the game and is used to buy upgrades for your deck. Aeon’s End: Beyond the Breach is a cooperative deck-building game! For more examples and discussion of cooperative deck-building games, see our Top 10 Cooperative Deck-Building Games!
There’s a whole wide selection of Gems, Relics, and spells to buy! See above. More come out as the game unfolds.
Casting spells are how you do damage to the Nemesis and other bad guys that come along. In order to cast a spell, you have to prepare it into an opened breach: see above as Nook has 4 breaches: 3 of them are opened and have spelled prepped into them! The fourth breach is closed and can’t be used for casting a spell*, but it can be opened (at the cost of some Aether) later on. Interestingly, cast spells on your turn actually go off at the start of your NEXT turn!
The quality of Aeon’s End: Beyond the Breach is great! See components above. The art is a little inconsistent with other Aeon’s End games, but only if you look too closely. Internally, this game is very consistent.
Oh yes, I forgot to mention one of the more interesting things about the Aeon’s End systems, no shuffling! You just plop your discard over and turn it into your deck! Those of you “annoyed” by Dominion‘s constant reshuffling, you (mostly) don’t do that in Aeon’s End! I say “mostly” as foreshadowing … Beyond the Breach actually adds shuffling in at some point … spoiler …
Friends and Foes
In Aeon’s End: The Descent, they introduced one of my favorite new mechanisms into the Game: Friends and Foes! See our review of the original Aeon’s End: The Descenthere!
In Descent, the Aeon’s End team introduced us to the Friends and Foes family!
Two new characters are inserted (optionally; it is a module you can choose to play with or not) into the game that help of hinder you … slightly. No one actually plays a friend of foe: the game just operates them for you (with a little help from you).
Aeon’s End: Beyond the Breach continues with this trend and adds more Friends and Foes! See more above!
I still love the Friends and Foes! Even though it makes the game more complicated (because it’s yet another mechanism to operate as you play), it gives the players more choices! When a friend or foe activates, you usually have a choice of two options; so you can choose how you be slightly helped or slightly hindered! It makes the game feel like you have more agency!
The other thing the Friends and Foes does is tamp down the problems with Variable Turn Order. See discussion below.
I am very very glad to see more Friends and Foes being available! This is a modular expansion you can add to any Aeon’s End game!
Sleeve Your Cards!
Aeon’s End games are all Variable Turn Order games: a deck of cards control when entities have a turn. The numbers indicate a player number, and the Nemesis cards indicate when the bad guy has a turn.
Basically, for balance, the players (as a group) always have 4 turns (no matter the number of players), and the Nemesis gets two turns always. See rulebook above as it confirms that!
A deck of cards (the Turn Order deck) controls this.
If you sleeve NOTHING else, you should sleeve the Turn Order deck (see above: like I did above). You handle the Turn Order deck all the time in this game. Learn from my mistake: my original Aeon’s End turn order deck is kinda grody because I didn’t sleeve it!
This is deck-building game too … you usually should sleeve a deck-building game because players handle the cards so much. I plan to sleeve Aeon’s End: Beyond The Breach before RichieCon 2026, but I haven’t had a chance to yet. I did play about 10 games without sleeving it, and it’s still fine, but I will still sleeve it before I let it loose on the convention floor.
Variable Turn Order
We have written many articles about the dangers of Variable Turn Order: see the most recent one here: Variable Turn Order and How to Mitigate It’s Randomness. Basically, Variable Turn Order can be too random sometimes and ruin a game. There are some simple mitigation techniques (usually: don’t allow the Nemesis to ever have more than 2 turns in a row), but it can be an issue.
Luckily, Aeon’s End: Beyond The Breach has a few things that help mitigate the problems of Variable Turn Order. The problem is still there, but it’s much less pronounced.
First, Friends and Foes! By adding two new cards into the Turn Order Deck (see Friend and Foe cards above), this evens out how often the Nemesis comes out! Adding these two cards makes it much less likely to get multiple turns of the Nemesis in a row!
Second, there are new mechanisms in the game that address the problem by allowing the players to alter the Turn Order deck! For example, the friend Lash: The Dreamer has the ability to re-insert a player turn order card into the deck (effectively giving the players one extra turn)! See above!
The Relic card Chronoid allow users to move the next Turn Order card to the bottom of the Turn Order deck. There are a few other places in the game where the players can alter the Turn Order deck.
I like that they have added some new in-game mechanisms to fix turn order problems. I don’t think I ever needed my“The Nemesis never gets more than two turns in a row“ house rule in all the games I have played of Beyond The Breach. Between Friends and Foes and these few extra mechanisms, we may be at the point where it’s not as big a deal? Shrug?
Rulebook
For a rulebook that’s had SO MANY iterations, I still have some complaints. Bigger than I expected.
Seriously, this rulebook gets a grade of C on the Chair Test! Sure it’s got good pictures and good set-up, but it droops over the edges making it much harder to read this on the Chair next to me! This form factor is really not great.
This is a standalone game, right? Sure, it expands the Aeon’s End universe, but you can play this all by itself! So why are some concepts in the game NOT DOCUMENTED AT ALL IN THIS RULEBOOK? The “Recall” keyword (see Chronoid and Atomized Ash above) are not documented in the rulebook! I had to go online and found this BGG link which answered the question: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3708173/recall-new-keyword-not-a-question-just-a-lack-in-t
There’s at least a few more; I encountered the Conjure keyword and had no idea what it meant: I had to go Googling. This is unacceptable that the keywords in the game are NOT documented in this standalone rulebook.
I like the IDEA of highlighting new rules in a different color (see rules above), and it mostly works. But this rulebook also makes the error of putting new rules in sidebar boxes outside the flow of the main rules. It’s too easy to miss a rule; usually sidebar floating boxes of text are “examples” or “clarifications”! By putting sidebars outside the flow of the normal rules, I think there are too easy too miss. This is definitely a personal thing for me, so maybe it’s not a problem for you. I encountered this problem in the game Unicornus Knights (see review here and here) and they FIXED the rulebook to eliminate rules from sidebars and put that text into the main flow! It made the rulebook that much better!
Don’t get me wrong: this is a pretty good rulebook. It’s just frustrating that this rulebook (given the number of iterations of it) still has problems.
You will be able to learn the game pretty well from the rulebook.
New Concepts
There are a surprising number of new additions to the game system.
Trinkets: A lot of spells and bad effects cause you to draw Trinket cards (see above). Trinkets are basically one-shot items that clog your deck for one pass but then go away (back to the bottom of the Trinket deck)! The Trinkets are always good currently, but I can see them adding “evil Trinkets” in the future. I liked their use of the word Trinket; it implies it’s a crappy little piece of junk you can only use once. And that’s exactly what it is! I found the addition fun and useful. They were all over the game!
Pulse Tokens: Yet another token. Certain cards give you Pulse Tokens (see the little explosion token on Dezmodia above) which other cards or abilities or powers allow you to spend. I think there might be a mage or few new items that embrace the Pulse Tokens more, but in my 10 games of Aeon’s End: Beyond The Breach, there were a VERY minor addition. Eh. I barely used them.
Treasures: Although Treasures aren’t new, Level 4 treasures are! In battle 5 of the campaign, you get a card that only you can buy! Sounds familiar? You might remember something similar from Astro Knights: Eternity! (see review here). Astro Knight: Eternity called them Inventions, Aeon’s End: Beyond the Breach calls them Level 4 Treasure. I guess it’s not a big surprise since the same company makes both games! It’s hard to tell how useful Level 4 Treasures are since you only use them for one battle (at the very end). The Level 1-3 treasures were much more useful.
Aether Tokens: You can earn Aether tokens (which is basically just Aether). Unfortunately, you must spend all Aether tokens by the end of your turn, or you lose it all! One of the games I played, I accidentally kept them around as long as I wanted! Nope! Learn from my mistake!
Solo Play
So, Aeon’s End: Beyond The Breach supports solo play. Huzzah! (Thank you for following Saunders’ Law).
I still want to complain about the rulebook, but some props: they give solo rules, and they are good! It’s unfortunately an “afterthought” on the very last page of the rulebook, but even after complaining about this in Aeon’s End: The Descent, they STILL haven’t fixed a glaring problem! When setting up the Turn Order Deck WHY do they not address the true solo? They address 2-Player, 3-Player, and 4-Player. You have to “figure out” from context that the solo player has 4 player turn order cards (and those of you who have played the Aeon’s End App might think you only get 3 Turn Order cards!!). Ugh. This is another thing that should have been fixed in this rulebook.
BUT, this is true solo play, where the solo player plays a single mage! Since the single mage has fewer hit points, it’s easier to be “taken out”, so if and when your solo mage is reduced to 0 hit points (called exhausted), you still keep playing! The problem is that Gravehold takes the damage you would be dealt instead! At twice the rate! So, you want to keep your mage healthy, or Gravehold dies quicker! Remember, you lose if Gravehold is ever reduced to 0 hit points!
You can also play multi-handed solo (playing multiple positions). I usually prefer two-handed solo (see my review of Pandemic: Fate of the Fellowship), but the true solo rules are so simple, it’s easy to play one mage and the game flow doesn’t change much! The only “other” rule for true solo (besides Gravehold taking your damage if you are exhausted) is that you are your own ally.
Actually, the rule that you are your own ally is kind of neat; you can strategize different things to do things for yourself! A lot of cards in here help your ally, and if you choose the right spells/relics/gems, you can buff yourself pretty quickly. I chose a lot of upgrades and cards based solely on how well the ally rule helps myself! That Phosphor Nugget (see above) becomes a LOT better when you get your OWN token!
Because you only play one mage in true solo, the maintenance and upkeep as you play is NOT overwhelming. This particular box of Aeon’s End is more complicated than most, so I worry that playing multiple mages would be too much mental and physical overhead (plus the context switching). But since you can true solo, no problem! I never felt overwhelmed by the maintenance playing solo… well… I did when switching between chapters of the campaign, but that problem will be there in the cooperative game too!
I played the entire campaign solo, pure solo the entire way. Spoiler alert: I had a great time! I must have if I kept playing!
Campaign
There is a campaign game here! A Narrative Booklet (see above) describes a story and helps you set-up and get rewards from each chapter. There are 5 chapters to the campaign, each of which is played once or twice.
For Battle One (see example above), there’s flavor text telling the story of the battle (in black and white). The “game text” is in yellow and orange as it describes how you set-up the first battle. At the end of the battle, you will have some more flavor text describing the resolution, and then some “treasure” (both literally and figuratively). At the end of every combat, you will unlock new things that will go into your next battle!
Each chapter of the campaign has its own deck(s) of cards (see above).
.. as well as an envelope with “new stuff” (new mages, new bad guys, etc).
The campaign is completely resettable. After I finished my campaign, I put everything back so that the game was in pristine shape! There’s something “fun” about opening the decks and discovering the new cards as you go! If I come back to this in the future (and I suspect I will), I will want to “rediscover” the joy of the entire campaign. The cards were all labelled from what deck they came from (and they are numbered), so it’s easy to reset the cards. The envelopes are little trickier; I had to take a picture of the contents so I could remember what was in each.
So, is this a good campaign? Yes and No. From the perspective of a “the campaign is a way to play all the contents of this box”, it was a phenomenal success! I played the entire campaign solo and really enjoyed the campaign! I got some great battles with great bad guys! I had some really interesting mages to operate! I tried about 5 different mages over the battle! There were all interesting (but see discussion below.
From another perspective, the campaign was a failure. The story DID no draw me in. I struggled to read the first wall of text (see above).
I even tried the trick I did in Aeon’s End: Descent, where I put the Mage’s pictures next to the text! See above! That trick worked really well in Descent, as it helped ease me into the story when I could see all the mages.
Unfortunately, this trick did NOT work for Aeon’s End: Beyond The Breach. I found the story impenetrable; there was some time travel and meta things going on that just put me off the story. I just stopped reading the story after Battle 2. Remember, I really liked the flavor text from both Astro Knights: Eternity and Aeon’s End: The Descent (see those reviews here and here), so I am not against story … but I just couldn’t get into it here. I feel the campaign story here did not work.
Despite not liking the flavor text, I loved the way the game evolved during the campaign.
I got new treasures all the time!
I saw new Mages! In fact, me and Dezmoda(she came out in the campaign) bonded! I used her for two of my battles I liked her so much!
As a vehicle for pushing new content forward, the campaign worked great. As a story to follow, I feel the campaign didn’t work; I just didn’t like the story and stopped reading the flavor text. For the record, you can play the campaign perfectly well even if you don’t read the flavor text.
Despite the story failing for me, the game was a blast! I had so much fun playing all 5 chapters of the campaign! I played all of them solo and a few of them with other people!
Cooperative Play
I was able to get this played with 4-Players, 3-Players, and 2-Players.
I think that this set of Aeon’s End (Beyond The Breach) worked best at 2-Player when playing cooperatively. I have alluded to this point earlier, but this is one of the most complicated Aeon’s End campaigns! There are a lot of new rules, the cards have many “complex” interactions, and some of the Mages are hard to operate! With all that newness and complexity, it seems easier to cooperate in a 2-Player game.*
Joe and I had a marvelous time playing 2-Player! We were able to combo and use ally-helping abilities very well and just slaughtered the first Nemesis!
On the other hand, the 3-Player game, we got slaughtered! Part of that was because we played Battle 3 (they were helping me wth my campaign), which is harder.
And the 4-Player game was also a loss (see above). After playing 4-Players, I noted that we had to “travel” around the board a lot to see all the cards in the display, and what the villains are doing.
So, when we played 3-Player, we all stayed on one side of the board so we could all see the cards! This mostly worked, although were were bit a cramped. I think I would recommend playing 3-Player all on one side.
A couple of notes: we have played many games of the “simpler” Aeon’s End games at 3 and 4 players and not had any problems. In fact, I have seen the original Aeon’s End game work tremendously well with 4-Players! So, I am a bit concerned that it doesn’t work “quite” as well at 3 and 4 players.
There is one common element to the 3 and 4-Player failings: the mage Stake. See above. All the games we lost had Stake as one of the mages. Andrew, who has played some Aeon’s End in his time, said he didn’t like playing Stake. And notice the complexity rating on Stake: 8!!
It’s weird to me that Stake is one of the original 4 mages you are SUPPOSED to play with! My friends didn’t really like playing him. In a 3 and 4-Player game, it felt like it was it was just too hard to get him going.
Because there are so many Aeon’s End games. this set has to try some new things to try to do something differently. The other mages played were interesting and different, and I had fun playing them. Stake seems like too much,
2-Player cooperatively is probably best, and 3 and 4 player will work, but I don’t think I’d recommend playing with Stake. At RichieCon 2026, I will recommend a 3-Player game WITHOUT Stake.
Conclusion
You might think I didn’t like Aeon’s End: Beyond the Breach from this review. That’s not true! As someone who has played a ton of Aeon’s End and Astro Knights and Invincible, I might see the holes a little too much. Maybe I have concentrated too much on those.
The rulebook is good enough to learn from, but I am sorely disappointed that neither conjure or recall is in there: you will have to go on the Internet to find those. There are some other minor points (Chair Test, sidebars with rules, some missing solo rules) that are triggers for me, but don’t let my personal peeves influence you too much. You should have no trouble with the rulebook.
Beyond The Breach is probably the most complex set of Aeon’s End games; the designers really had to stray from the simple starting premises in order to add variety to this system, but they have succeeded! The price of this variety is extra complexity that can be overwhelming. It’s not too bad, but it is there.
As a solo player, I adored this. I loved playing the campaign! This game will easily make my Top 10 Solo Games of 2026. It might have been even a bit too easy? Luckily, the difficulty can be adjusted: It’s good to know every bad guy can be made worse (wait, that’s a good thing?) With Friends and Foes and all the interesting Mages and battles, this is a 8.999/10 solo for me. (Why not 9? see below)
As a cooperative player, I would say, be careful. We had a good time playing, but there is a lot more complexity in this version. Be aware of what this is; you probably don’t want to bring newer inexperienced players into Aeon’s End: Beyond the Breach! I would argue towards the simpler original Aeon’s End for newer players (or even Astro Knights?), and only bring this out to players who are ready for this more complex experience. Also, be very careful with the mage Stake; unless someone really wants to play him, I would stay away from Stake in the cooperative game. 8.49/10
Why 8.49? Because I didn’t like the story. I stopped reading it. The campaign is a great vehicle to play through all the content, but in the end, the story didn’t work for me.
I think I would give Aeon’s End: The Descent the ever-so-slight nod over Beyond The Breach. In Descent, I liked the story, I liked the mages, and of course The Descent introduced Friends and Foes! But the two are very very very close …Beyond The Breach is great, and if you want more Aeon’s End, Beyond The Breach works well, but just be aware how complicated this set is.
The cure for Aeon’s End Ennui? More cowbell!
Appendix: Playmat
The playmat was an option in this Kickstarter. I really liked it; it helped organize the cards and keep everything on track. If you like the Friends and Foes modules, this especially helps keeping all that straight.
I’d recommend getting this playmat if you do get Aeon’s End: Beyond The Breach: it’s very thematic and useful.
coopgestalt 