Handelabra Games, who is behind some classic digital ports such as Sentinels of the Multiverse and One Deck Dungeon, have launched their Kickstarter campaign for their latest title: Aeon's End. Check it out here.
The game is a cooperative deck builder that adds some very unique aspects to the traditional deck-builder. You choose your discard order for starters, as you never shuffle your deck. That turns my deck-building brain upside down right off of the bat. Turn order is also randomized, that will surely flip some games depending on the draw. The importance of turn-order is magnified in the game by requiring spells be staged on one turn and them cast on the next. Naturally, the spells can be affected by the enemy's actions, so you might lose some spells from time to time. The game has a very fun combat staging/attacking system that takes things a bit beyond the standard deck-building fare. Oh, by the way, you also have to protect your city while keeping yourselves alive. This is going to be a tough one, as most co-op games are.
The game is only a couple of years old and has a very strong BGG rating of 8.1.
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I've gotten the chance to play a brief, two-turn demo of an early build of Aeon's End (I'm not special, anybody can play it through the Kickstarter page!) The game is shaping up nicely even in the early stages. Having played those first two turns a handful of times, I can see a glimpse of the game, and I've been enjoying it so far.
The game is heading to Steam initially. They team plans on bringing it to mobile, specifically tablets, after the Steam release. The big problem they have is that Apple doesn't officially support a way to deliver Kickstarter pledges on iTunes, which is quite strange. Regardless, look for the tablet edition to drop after the Steam release.
The Kickstarter features a few stretch goals. The first couple are bonus cards in the form of promo-packs. The next introduces cross-game pollination where one of the Aeon's End characters will be ported to One Deck Dungeon and vice versa, pretty cool. The last listed stretch goal is for The Nameless, the first expansion. The featured video on the campaign page mentions wanting to port all of the physical expansions to digital, as has been Handelabra's M.O. in the past.
The lower backer levels provide a game key upon release and some other odds and ends extras. If you pledge $40 you get to join in on the beta testing round, while a $60 pledge will get you into the alpha testing which is actually done through command line which is fairly awesome. The current plan is to cap the beta and alpha pledges to 100 and 50, respectively, so act fast if you want to be among the first to play the game.
You can find the Kickstarter here, and you can also follow the development closely if you watch Handelabra's Twitch channel, they do weekly development streams which will bring you really close to the development process.
