5 Ways to Play Aethermon
In recent years the tabletop gaming ecosystem has seen a greater acceptance of board games designed to offer a highly crafted single experience, at the cost of replayability.
- Legacy style games, such as Pandemic Legacy, literally ask players to tear up components throughout game play
- Decksporation games, like TIME Stories, hide secrets or decision points in their decks that lose their surprise in subsequent playthroughs.
Aethermon’s campaign mode embraces this philosophy – fine tuning the experience with twists and surprises that will lose some impact on subsequent playthroughs. Nevertheless unique playstyles for each aethermon, branching narratives and varying interactions with other players will give player plenty of reasons to revisit the campaign.
More significantly Aethermon has been designed with multiple playmodes beyond the primary campaign; each offering a distinct experience, tied together by common mechanics.
This is only a very surface overview, we’ll address each mode in their own blog post eventually
Campaign Chapter 1
The competitive chapter of Aethermon’s campaign. In a story familiar to most, players collect their Aethermon, compete with various Dojo leaders, training their Aethermon to its 2nd evolution, before challenging the Jr Champion. Successfully beating the Jr Champion triggers a tournament which all players compete in. Along the way players can engage in various side quests including a team Evil subplot that feeds into chapter 2.
Campaign Chapter 2
The cooperative chapter of Aethermon’s campaign. Players come together after the tournament to fight an ancient adversary. On the way players will unlock powerful co-operative abilities and train their Aethermon on their 3rd evolution.
Competitive Gauntlet Mode
This mode forgoes the overworld map, allowing players to focus purely on Aethermon Development and combat.
- Each player starts with a level 1 Aethermon; with whom they must defeat every enemy in the game in ascending difficulty.
- Players receive XP similar to normal, between rounds players can use this XP to develop their Aethermon, recover their Aethermon OR make the next enemy more difficult for their opponents
- Last Aethermon surviving wins
This mode was inspired by a similar process we went through in balancing the starter Aethermon.
Tale of 2 Cities
The overworld map in Aethermon is largely symmetric in nature – with the starting town on one side and the Aethermon League on the other. (There will be a blog post on how difficult this was to achieve later)
In the Tale of 2 Cities players are divided into two teams with the objective of landing players in their opponents “Base”
By capturing key points on the map teams can increase the difficulty of their opponents encounters, making it more difficult for their opponent to advance
This can vaguely be thought of as a moba-esque playstyle
1 Vs All
Plays similar to chapter 2, however 1 player controls The Darkness and a single Dark Champion.
The Darkness can win by defeating a target number of player Aethermon
Stay tuned for more Aethermon insights