Astro Knights Review

Stellar monstrosities are attacking the home worlds of civilisation. You have gathered with your fellow Astro Knights to fight them!

Astro Knights is a cooperative deckbuilding boss-battler for 1-4 players, designed by Nick Little (one of the developers of the Aeon’s End series) and Will Sobel, and in many ways plays like a more streamlined version of that game. There are some significant changes, but if you know Aeon’s End you won’t feel lost, and similarly this would make a good introduction to that game.

How To Play

Like Aeon’s End, you’ll cycle cards from deck, to hand, to play, to discard pile, never shuffling that discard but just turning it over when the deck is exhausted—so you can structure your discards through the turn to group useful cards together. Unlike Aeon’s End you don’t have to manage breaches for casting spells; instead you start with a number of weapon slots, normally one, and you can increase this over time.

There are three types of card: Fuel (provides you with energy), Weapons (do damage to the enemy), and Tech (has some special effect). Weapons are “equipped” into a weapon slot, and go off at the start of your next turn. You’ll buy new cards from a market, but rather than Aeon’s End’s nine piles each of a single card name, you sort cards into six piles by type and cost—if you buy a Particle Cannon from the mid-price weapon pile, that may leave a Fractal Grenade on top for the next player.

Normally a bought card goes into your discard pile for use in a future turn, but for Tech you also have the option of Overcharging: pay the cost, but play the card immediately for its effect, and then send it to the bottom of its pile rather than gaining it into your system of cards.

You can also spend energy on Charges, both for yourself and for the Homeworld. When a charge bar is full, you can use it to gain a special effect—then reset it and start charging again. Any energy you have left at the end of your turn is lost (in fact there aren’t even tokens to track it, because you acquire it and then spend it straight away), amd you can discard as many cards as you like before filling your hand up to five.

Turn order is randomised: there will be four player turns and two Boss turns in each round, but these are controlled by shuffling a deck of turn order cards. On a Boss turn they’ll play a new card: this is either a Strike, which has an immediate bad effect on players or Homeworld, or a Minion, which will cause trouble every turn until you finish it off (distracting your attention from attacking the Boss). When the Boss’s deck runs out, it will power up: shuffle its discards to make a new deck, but things are now tougher (for example all future minions may gain extra hit points).

Bring the Boss to zero hit points, and you win. Lose the Homeworld or all the knights, or run out the Boss’s deck enough times, and you lose.

As in Aeon’s End, you can play solo with multiple Knights using the standard rules, or with just one Knight and three turns per round against the Boss’s two.

Components

This is a well-presented game. The artwork is from Gong Studios (no individual artists are credited) and in a colourful, space-operatic style; one could easily picture this as a tie-in game to an animated adventure series. Player and boss mats are irregularly shaped, but still easy to use.

On the other hand, this isn’t a game with table presence that lures people across the room to see what it is; there’s no central board, no complex tableau of cards, and progress is shown mostly by hit point counters rather than by anything more obvious.

The manual is a model of clarity: it lays out what each component does, what’s where on the cards, and all your options at every stage of play. Definitely good for new players; in an ideal world I might have added a sheet summarising differences from Aeon’s End gameplay, but they’re not hard to get used to in play.

In this base box you get six Astro Knights, four Bosses, and four Homeworlds. An expansion and a new stand-alone box (with a mini-campaign mode) are already on the way, and like Aeon’s End this is a system with an infinitely extensible core mechanic.

Summary

Astro Knights gives you 80% of the Aeon’s End experience in one small box; it’s simplified, but not dumbed-down, and still presents a challenge to players in finding combination effects both within their own decks and playing off each other’s abilities. If you already have and enjoy the Aeon’s End games, you probably don’t also need this, unless you especially prefer the science-fantasy setting (which honestly, like the early days of Aeon’s End, comes down to “there’s a monster and we have to fight it”); or you don’t like the ability to win by exhausting the enemy’s deck—or you want a faster-playing game that’s more friendly to players who don’t already know the system.