Aeon’s End: Legacy Game Review

Aeon’s End is a wonderful game. A cooperative deck-builder in which you do not shuffle, it’s built around the fact that you have perfect control of your cards. Every game centers on a battle between your Mages and the Nameless, monsters who terrorize your home city of Gravehold, and they can be punishing. There are many deck-builders premised around beating the Baddie. None of them can ratchet up the difficulty like Aeon’s End.

On its (relatively) easy settings, Aeon’s End provides a reliably tense experience. At its higher difficulties, it is brutal. Games often end with only the slightest margin of victory, or in a crushing defeat. The lifetime win percentage for all users on the Steam implementation, an environment that typically attracts a lot of high-skill players, doesn’t sit far above 50%.

Aeon’s End isn’t just difficult, though. Difficulty alone does not a fun game make. It’s also creative, with an inventive bevy of characters and Nameless across its many expansions. But between the difficulty, the variety, and the cognitive load—constantly checking your deck order and making choices that consider what your hand will look like two or three turns from now ain’t nothing—Aeon’s End can be intimidating to onboard. To my surprise, Aeon’s End: Legacy is the perfect place to start.

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