Shattered Aeons Review

It has been an aeon since we started reviewing the Forgotten Age cycle, and I certainly feel shattered, so Shattered Aeons seems an entirely appropriate place to end. And what an end. After an incalculably long descent you have reached the Nexus. All the threads are at last bound together.

Depending on your choices and aptitude thus far you may be well on your way to putting everything together… or this might be quite the intense series of revelations! Bringing the orb and nexus together sets off an orgy of chaotic energy, breaking a rift in time open. You step through into a wild tour of the multiverse, times, places, probabilities, wound into one. You need to understand the forces at play, gain control of the orb, and decide what reality will be, before the forces at play rip time itself into pieces. 

Naturally, the enemies that have dogged you since the start of the campaign will be out in force, trying to take the orb for themselves. Sadly they only seem to fight you, not each other. Though, in a decision point that has been fore-shadowed throughout the campaign, you will have far more say over how the campaign ends than in previous cycles.

While Forgotten Age once again follows the portal to realms beyond imagining trope of every Arkham Horror card game campaign so far it keeps half an eye firmly on reality. This is as close to a classical sci-fi mcguffin-lead scenario as AH is likely to get. That combined with the absence of some ludicrously vast cosmic terror to fight keeps this scenario grounded and it is all the better for it. I think this might be the strongest end to a campaign yet, at least from a single playthrough perspective. The tie in between campaign structure and resolution in Path to Carcosa, mind, will still take some beating.

The real brilliance of Shattered Aeons though lies in the agency it gives to you, the player. There are multiple win conditions here, with some very unexpected outcomes, but you won’t blunder into them. You’ll choose them. And with that comes a very special blend of existential horror.

Rating: What Have I Done!?

Player Cards

The final pack of a cycle is a fabulous time for player cards, big experience demanding cards of all-powerful capabilities that you will build entire decks around. Except, weirdly, this time it seems to be the low XP cards that are most exciting! Must be something to do with the time warp…

OK, fine Flamethrower is HOT. The thematically perfect weapon for dealing with flailing tentacled beasties is also the perfect weapon for dealing with cardboard enemies. A massive 4 damage, that can be spread between engaged foes making it as effective on Elder Gods as crowds of nibbling nasties. Even the lightning gun stares at this in envy. As do the Mystics and Seekers. Both Seal of the Seventh Sign and Pnakotic Manuscripts seem like awesome options for dealing with the most important of skill tests. Sealing the auto fail token!? Skipping the draw from the chaos bag entirely!? Ho boy! But…

The auto-fail is a powerful token. It can’t be sealed forever. So you’ll only be able to block maybe 1-2 draws of it before the other symbols degrade its strength and then the card is gone for good. Yes, there are occasionally some tests you absolutely do not want to fail, but 5XP is a lot to pay to guarantee that one test. What you’re really doing is protecting all those little, less important tests. Pnakotic Manuscripts gives you more control over when to protect those tests. But it requires an action for most instances (attack of opportunity) or a friend at your location. The auto trigger only applies to the somewhat limited selection of revelation tests that only very occasionally are really that bad for you to need to skip the draw. 

All In is a bit more interesting, but I’m certainly not all in on it. If you’re running with one of those ‘succeed by two’ decks then this can be the icing on a combo cake but it is not going to be THE card you rush to with your hard-earned XP. I honestly like Borrowed Time more, not least given this cycle’s overarching theme. It lets you save those ‘I don’t really have anything I want to do’ actions for later when you really, really do! Following up with other cheaper new cards is the wonderfully illustrated Alter Fate. This may be more useful in some campaigns than others, but it also Sarah Conner’s favourite Arkham Horror card. 

The wonderfully thematic Vantage Point is a great little starting card, letting you shift clues from high shroud locations to your (hopefully) easier to search, new location, and you get a good look ahead at it. Kerosene is a handy source of warmth and horror healing, for less than first aid. Impromptu Barrier extends the collection of play from the discard pile cards Survivors have been enjoying recently. It is less wildly useful than the previous entries in the series, the from discard ability is particularly niche, and doesn’t even have the decency to be cheaper. Shards of the Void is a rather… ballsy card to be playing with. Sealing on the few good chaos tokens takes some serious justification (or mitigation) which, to be fair, may be achievable with the Mystic’s pool. Alternatively, you need to use it as quickly and aggressively as possible to unlock those 0s again. It’s never replacing Shrivelling, but if you’re going combat heavy you might want a third or fourth combat card anyway!

Spoilers

With time 5 glasses of wine into a 3 glass bottle anyway, let’s start this with a look at the end. The conclusion. You must, unsurprisingly, save the timestream, put the Shattered Aeons back into some coherent order, lest everything, or more accurately everywhen, be lost to chaos. That requires getting hold of the Relic, researching the locations you are able to visit and literally attaching them to the Relic. Given the presence of the usual unsavoury characters, this will not be easy.

You will be facing the Brotherhood. You may, for old times sakes, be facing some snakes. And you will definitely need to worry about the blob of black goop that lives in the nexus. But the important two enemies are your old friends turned nemeses, nemesi? Whatever. Alejandro of Pnaktos and Snake Lady Ichtaca. Here to hunt you down, and also offer you an alternative… if you manage to talk to either of them. Side with them. Help them to bring the world they desire into being. 

Agree and you need only research Pnaktos (Alejandro) or Valusia (Ichtaca) instead of the numerous locations for a default win. And it is a victory! You are rewarded greatly for your contribution to the Yithian/Snake cause. Heralded as heroes and treated to the very best your alien masters may provide. But humanity will be gone. Alternatively you can fight boldly to save your species but your actions will never be known. You will be left with the horrifying trauma of your ordeal. Or worse, the investigators guarding the relic may die and everything is lost. What do you choose? What can you live with?

I love this. It is easier to give in. Not least because you will face one less infuriating enemy for the rest of the scenario. The outcome is even, materially at least, happier for your investigators. The reason to pursue the harder path must come from within you. And won’t you just feel awful if you push your luck and lose everything?

But wait. What if we could undo everything? This nightmare began because of the expedition to the Eztli ruins and the discovery of the artefact. Ichtaca was subsumed into Yig’s will and His pursuit of a reborn Valusia, Alejandro was replaced by the Yithians and the brotherhood attempted to steal the relic to save Pnaktos from its dark future. You unleashed this chaos when you brought back the artefact and while it resides in the hands of man, time can never be safe. But maybe, if you’ve grown to know the relic well over the campaign, if it was never out of your hands, then you will know how to return to that fateful day, and seal away the relic forever…

Pull off the impressive achievement of keeping the relic throughout the campaign and you’ll unlock a special, final scenario! It’s all the way back to scenario two, but with a brand new act deck. You rush into the pyramid ahead of the expedition, journeying down the dimly recalled hallways and into the resting place of the relic. There, waiting for you, is Yig. No, don’t ask how the towering serpent behemoth slithered in here, the important thing is to face down the beast one last, brutal time. Defeat him to save the world! And fortunately there are some tricks you can pull to help you on the way.

This is a delightful twist ending, making the most of the time-travel adventure focus and offering a real reward to those able to triumph against Arkham’s hardest cycle so far. Amazingly this brings the total number of scenarios up to 10, depending on how the campaign goes. It is easily the campaign that has had the biggest surprises in terms of campaign structure. It also has gone the furthest to gate information from the player through your choices and when it chooses to reveal things to the player. It led to a definite sense of being lost (thematically appropriate given the exploration/expedition focus!) but it also means the story will not be consistently satisfying.

I loved discovering the truth about Alejandro in the City of Archives, but that could easily be missed. Likewise you might never know why Ichtaca is behaving the way she did. Unless you read this article, of course. It took until I read missed cards to figure out that, yes, the Brotherhood cultists you have been facing throughout the campaign were working for Pnaktos though how and why is still unclear to me… they can’t all be Yithians, surely? And I still don’t know how The Boundary Beyond scenario fits into the greater narrative beyond pure filler. The overarching story of the campaign is, now that I can see the scope of it, rather impressive and cunningly done. But the loose ends are a frustration that keeps the intentionally paranoia-inducing story of Path to Carcosa on top.

Sadly, it may be some time before this series returns, if it ever does. There are some big life changes on the way for me and I have not started collecting either of the newer cycles that follow this one. More news on this sometime soon.

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Our copy of Shattered Aeons was provided for review by Asmodee UK. You can pick up a copy for £14.99 RRP from your local hobby store.

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