Announcing Aethermon: Adventure!

This is a big one. We know we said that our next game would be Aethermon: Ascent, the game we took to PAX Aus in 2022, but….I guess we lied*. There is still a lot of work to achieve on Ascent before it is ready for market. But it’s okay, because while we continue...

The Battle and Progression System

Aside from some convention apperances this year, we are hard at work on two future Aethermon games, which share one very important feature – the Aethermon Battle and Progression System! Let’s talk about it! Unlike Collect, which has fairly abstract...

Design Insight: First Player Advantage

On one level or another every turn-based game has to deal with the asymmetries created by one player acting before another. This is often called First Player Advantage. We see this in TCGs where the second player is often given additional resources, or more...

Inclusive design principles

Lately we’ve been working out our card layouts. It’s an interesting challenge to find the cleanest, least obtrusive way to pack as much information as possible onto a 63mm x 63mm field. While Aethermon: Collect is not complicated, the below information does still need...

‘Table moments’ and Friendship in Aethermon Ascent

When people gather around a table to play a game, there are two elements that heavily impact the enjoyment they experience from that game. One is of course the game itself – the rules, the goal, the pieces. The other is the people, who are choosing to spend...

How to choose a move when levelling up

The original levelling up process involved players drawing 2 moves (1 Aethermon Specific and 1 Global), from which the player could choose one to learn and one to discard.  This system simultaneously addressed multiple design goals: (1) limiting analysis...