Aberration Review - Don't Let Them Get To The Village!!
Transcript
Hey, I'm Alex from Board Game Co, and today I'm reviewing Aberration, designed by Peter Lee. Aberration is a game from Ghostfire Gaming that was on crowdfunding last year, then delivered, and with the newest crowdfunding campaign coming up shortly, I figured now is a good time to give you my thoughts on the various content we have so far, the base game, and the two like mini expansions. We'll talk more about these after we get to the base game. Before we do though, this channel is sponsored by All Play, more about them at the end of the video. In Aberration, players are playing a tower defense bag building game. That's what you're doing, it's tower defense bag building. That kind of describes most everything you need to know, because what you're going to do is you're going to start off with a character. You have a specific character, as well as you're going to have their class. So, you have two different aspects that already customize your character before you begin the game and continue that customization, cuz you will be building up your bag to customize what you draw out and the types of actions you have available to.
Meanwhile, on this board over here, you have a bunch of shadows that are slowly creeping towards the village, and the player's job is to uncover these shadows either as they enter the light or alternately by walking to the space and then spawn the relevant monster onto that space once you know what that shadow represents. Meanwhile, the influence of the dark great one, whatever it is, is slowly spreading onto the board, making it harder and harder for you to actually hold back the enemy forces because they're spawning closer and closer to your gate. Basically, it's tower defense. You go through a character bag building phase, you draw chips from a bag, you assign them to actions, then the board is slowly going to advance towards you, trying to hurt you, and you're either going to win or lose depending on how things go. Now, with that, I'm going to give you a bit more of a general turn structure, how something plays out, but this will not be a full rules overview. But, what you're going to do is you're going to start by drawing chips from the bag equal to your intellect score. So, for all players, it's going to start off at three chips. You're going to have three chips you draw from the bag, and those are going to be the chips you can assign each turn in order to take actions.
You're going to have a list of actions you can take on your character over here that allow you to trade in various chips to do a bunch of different things. We can ambush, for example, right now we can move up to our speed, and then we can place a trap token in any safe space you enter or leave during this move. Our speed value is two, so this is not necessarily a bad time to go ahead and immediately try to carry that out. We're over here, this road character over here is right there. We can go ahead and take this, we can spend our blue chip because that's a blue action to move up to our speed and we can drop off a trap token on the space behind us, which is going to cause the enemies a little bit of a chaos if they try to walk into that space. That's going to have us then revealing the shadow over here and we have a villager. We actually got a villager. That was actually a really good So our chip over here, we're going to add a villager to the central village. This is actually a very easy one because it's not a bad thing. It's not a bad thing, it gives us another tool at our disposal. Then we have our other chips, we can go ahead and assign them. We can use our general strike action or our strike action.
Alternatively, we can look over here, we can reveal a shadow on any map tile and make a ranged attack by rolling speed dice. So for example, we can go ahead and I don't know if I want to do that one. Let's see if we want to Maybe we'll go ahead and move again. Moving's not bad because we can move one, two. We could also go one, two. Let's go ahead and do one, two. So we're going to go ahead and assign this this wild chip to do whatever we want over there. We're going to once again ambush moving up to our speed one going through this pathway to two, which is going to reveal that and we're going to once again drop off a trap at the spot, which means there's monster spawn, that's going to make the life harder. Although speaking of making our life harder, we draw draw another five over here, which means we're going to go ahead and have an ancient Herak over here coming to play and it's also going to add an influence tile to the spot, which means that's going to kind of shove everything over here into the next space, which is going to reveal another monster. So you could see a cascading effect. This one's going to have us reveal a level three monster and if we are playing at three to four players, we would reveal another level one monster, which means we're grabbing so far these two monsters. We have our ancient Herak over here keeping in mind that we are playing right now with the miniatures expansion. The base game has miniatures for the heroes, standees for the monsters. I have the miniatures expansion which also gives us miniatures for the various enemies as well. And then we have a vile beast as well that's going to enter the space. So So, general, when you reveal a shadow tile, it's going to do one of a few things. It will possibly have something good, like you saw with this villager.
Alternatively, it has an enemy and it also might have an effect. These effects are different things that will happen to the game, making your life a little harder. Alternatively, it might also give you variable number of monsters depending on the player count. So, right now, we're in a tough spot. We have a bunch of enemies in our spot and we only have one action left right now to try to do something about that. We could try to just stay in the space and take the damage. It's not great. We might have him try to head through and try to save us. Alternatively, we can go ahead and make a melee attack using a wild action. This is a wild action. Make a melee attack you dealing strength damage. Although, I realize I forgot all this. I forgot to do the first step of the turn. I forgot to build my bag, which is such an important part of the game. You're supposed to be building your bag. So, I'm going to pretend that I took this three over here and dumped into my bag because that's going to build up my tableau over here. Because I did that, my strength damage is three instead of two. Granted, I'm cheating a little bit.
I should have done it at the beginning of the turn, not now when I know what I'm doing. But, nonetheless, we can now use this wild chip over here to make a melee attack dealing strength damage. And so, we can straight up deal three damage to one of these beasts, which means I would want to do it to the vile beast over here cuz that would instantly kill it. It only has three health. But, he has flying, which means he can't take damage from melee attacks. Which means we're going to deal instead to the ancient Harpy over here. He has five health, but then he has armor. Armor means he negates any damage above two, uh which means uh my attempt to cheat and retroactively increase my strength had no effect anyway. We'll put two damage tokens on him over here. Two damage because he has armor and he only takes two at a time, making him hard to kill. That's basically a starting turn over there. We did our turn over here. We did our actions. We did all the things and that's going to be time for the next character to take their turn, which I didn't set up over here, so I can't show you that. But, that's the general idea. You're going to draw chips. The first step you're going to do is you're going to move an action chip from your ability board to your bag.
That's going to slowly build up your stats over here. For example, as you build this up, you eventually get to a point where you can draw four chips a turn and get item cards along the way. As you uncover things, you're going to get things, stat bonuses, increased chips, increased values, all of that. Then, you draw action chips equal to your intellect and then you take actions using your action ship board over here, and also being mindful of your special ability that your character has. And you could, if you wanted to, hold over one chip turn to turn in this held action spot. That's what you do on your turn. All the players take their turns, and then the enemy takes their turn following this little track over here, the great beast turn. Activate all aberrations clockwise from the north. Now, we're going to pretend that this guy managed to go ahead in here and walk over here and somehow managed to kill this guy. That would also give us a reward on the bottom of this card. You can see you get an item card. Uh but then after you've done all that, the enemies are going to take their turn, and they're going to try to activate attacking us and moving towards the center over there. So, enemies are going to attack us. They're going to go ahead and advance all aberrations clockwise from the north.
So, you're going to move over here to the north moving around the board activating all our aberrations. Aberrations just means the general enemies that aren't the shadows themselves, but the miniatures in this case. They're going to be attacking and moving towards the center, which will slowly increase your fear track if they get to the center. Meanwhile, we're by the way, we're trying to increase the survival track by accomplishing objectives and firming up these various outposts over here. When you are next to an outpost, you can trade in the specific chips to go ahead and flip it, which will go ahead and give you a spot that you can assign people to outside of the central village over here, and it'll also increase your survival track at the same time. You're trying to get your survival track to the max before your fear track goes to the max. Then when you're done with that, you're going to activate all shadows. Shadows are also going to creep to the center, and you might think just leave the shadows as they are. If you never see them, they can't hurt you. Except that's not how shadows work. If you never see them, they absolutely can hurt you. As they wander through the center, they're even more damaging if you haven't possibly dealt with them. Again, on the flip side is if you flip them over, you have negative effects and a creature to fight. If you don't flip them over, they're just moving to the center slowly causing your fear to rise.
Then you're going to draw and play a great beast card. This is going to be the thing that has effects as well as putting new shadows onto the board. This tells us what enemies to upgrade, so we're going to upgrade this enemy over here. Enemies start at a certain tier depending on the difficulty level you're playing at. For example, I have all of mine starting at two right now, but they're going to move this to the next tier where he just got stronger. And yes, that impacts them even if they are currently on the board. It's a good thing we fictionally killed it over there. Then you're going to go ahead and have the effect each player adds a transformation chip to the hero bag, and then spawning number of heroes plus one starting from the south and working our way around the board. That is a general hero turn. At this point you've seen most of the general elements that are in play. There's a bunch of other things to get to go through. There's going to be item cards that give you a bunch of rewards. Again, different ways you get them. You start with some. You're going to get them as you upgrade. Different effects can give you them. Uh getting them from killing certain enemies can have them. Uh then you're going to be trying to deal with objectives.
Objectives give you specific things you're trying to do. For example, that one is defeat two aberrations on the south map tile. So we want to see these aberrations, explode them, and kill them. That will ramp up our survival track faster because again, the two main ways you ramp up your survival track are then clearing these uh outposts over here, as well as clearing the various uh aberrations or whatever the current objective allows you to do. Then you're going to go ahead when you're doing all of that, you're building up your bag. You've seen all that. You've seen the characters. Uh you have the you have a track, which is going to have you moving up. Whenever you draw your aberration ship, you're going to be taking moving up this track. Eventually, you'll hit a transformation part, which will give a bad effect, but also an ongoing good effect. You are powering up in this game. Something bad happens, but you also can draw two item cards. We have an unsafe mutation. When you draw this card, place a transformation chip into your hero bag. So you have different things that are happening that make you a little stronger and a little worse every time you draw a transformation, but get to the end and you die. And another way you die is if all the characters are dead. That's the basic idea of aberration. Uh aberration is structured as a scenario-based game, which means you have a kind of an intro starting scenario that takes some of the rules away. I believe it removes the objective cards, if I recall correctly.
It's been a while since I played it. Uh it and then you from there, I think once you get to scenario two, you're already we're dealing with the full rules. And then from there, it just adds difficulty level, length, complexity, adding more and more to the experience because the game is going to ramp up both in terms of the scenario guide giving you increased difficulty, but also in ways you can adjust the difficulty based on a set of rules to make the game harder or easier depending on what you're looking for. That is basically how you play Operation, which means it's time to dive into my review of what I like, don't like, and can see others not liking. Although, before I do that, let's talk about the expansions add. We have the uh Honk of Doom expansion. The Honk of Doom expansion basically adds new enemies. It adds a big uh larger aberration. I can't remember the terms, but we have the uh the monstrosity and the hordes over here. So, it adds a horde honk of doom, and it also adds a bunch of little mini geese. It adds new enemies to fight through. Then we have the Spellcaster expansion, which adds new classes. So, it adds new classes, new characters. So, it's going to modify the uh because in when you play the game, you can mix any character as well as any class board to give you a combination of abilities as well as your starting chips because these also define your starting chips in the game. And so, you're going to have that, and this gives you more of those as well as these new spell elements in the game. There's also artifacts, which are another element. There's a bunch of things to get into. Which leads us to what I like, don't like, and can see others not liking. Starting off with what I like. In general, the sheer variety of different things that are happening. Most particularly around how you build your character is going to be one of my favorite things in the game.
You start off with a combination of again, a character and a class board that gives you your own little puzzle to solve as far as how your character's going to operate, what they're going to do that helps the team out. And it gives you an entire list of different actions. You have You kind of have the standard idea of moving around and attacking. You often have a melee attack and a ranged attack and then movement. Those are the core elements you're going to find amongst all your actions. But the specific actions are different character board to character board, which means there's all these small minutia. Do you go ahead and move two and then do a melee attack? Do you move one and then two ranged attacks? There's different elements you have in the game, but your class board is going to totally change up the way you interact with the game system. And then combine that with the tableau building as far as how you build your character based around the current board state, based around what chips you need for which actions, and based around which stats you're trying to upgrade. That gives you a lot of strategy as far as how you build your character and how you feel more powerful as you develop your bag. Combine that with the fact that there is transformations over here.
Again, if you've played games like Cthulhu Death May Die or whatnot, going crazy isn't always a bad thing. That's true with these transformation cards. They're a lot of fun and they make you feel more powerful. So, for me, one of the biggest uh weaknesses of the game is often I don't get enough damage in the game to be able to really level up my transformation. I rarely actually have a character die, but again, I kind of want to bump up and receive. You can receive up to three transformation cards powering you up at the cost of the various bad things. But, that's not the only variety, because you have variety in a ton of other things. You have variety in the objectives, the items, the specific scenario you're playing at, the combination of these. You don't always have the same ones available game to game. Those are going to give you different ways to assign your villagers. Uh the great beast turns over here. There's a giant deck full of these cards, and they're all variable as far as what uh actual uh consequences they're going to have. The various enemies often mix things up in different ways. Some more so than others, because ultimately they have an attack value and a health value. That's pretty straightforward. But, there's a small difference between dealing with an armored enemy that you can only deal a certain amount of damage to versus dealing with a flying enemy who you can't actually attack unless you do a ranged attack. They're going to have a bunch of things or, you know, regenerating enemies. There's all these small single keyword abilities that make them not too overwhelming to learn, but do provide small differences as to how you have to take them down. And then there's also the shadows. The shadows are going to have a variety of effects on them. We have insight, we have leap.
They're going to be different effects that cause the board state change in different ways. So, there's just a lot of variety to the overall puzzle that you're playing, both variety to yourself as the characters, as well as variety to the way the game is going to throw things at you. And then overall, I think there's a good difficulty ramping up in the scenarios, as well as a good degree of difficulty adjustments in terms of if you're having the game too easy or too hard, you can adjust those. Even just the level cards alone are a huge element as far as how strong the enemies start off uh being powered up by. As far as things I don't like in the game, first of all, I'll say the biggest thing for me, the biggest thing by far. There's the small elements, but the biggest thing that holds this game back for me is the game is nearly always too short to really grow into your character arc. In this game, in this board, for example, I mentioned Cthulhu Death May Die as an example, you have 20 different abilities you You kind of power up over here. You can bump up up to a maximum of 20 stats in theory. In practice, I think the longest scenario, I have to double check to make sure, but I think the longest scenario is only eight turns, which means you're going to get at most eight out of 20. And in practice, usually I don't have I think I usually win this game. I haven't tracked all my win-loss ratios, but I'm pretty sure I've either always won or mostly won, which means you're not even going the full arc. A a five-round game, I went might win by round three. An eight-round game, I might win by round six. Of course, you could go to the very end, but means best-case scenario, you're usually looking at somewhere between two to seven upgrades you're going to get in the game out of 20. And I don't even I don't even think I've ever gotten to seven. Again, granted, I can adjust that by making the game harder so that would force a a state of upgrades that I go to the very end, but it means there's less upgrading of your tableau, less customization of your board than I would like. You want to go ahead and get to
five actions on a turn? Great. That's going to be your entire game, uh your entire strategy in a in a full-round game. You're rarely if ever going to see that. And so, the game offers the potential of an upgrade path that is my favorite part of the game. Like the idea of being able to really power up, I love the idea of that, and yet it doesn't execute on that in actual practice. And again, the the earlier missions are like five to six rounds, and again, you still don't see all that. So, between like two to seven upgrades out of 20 possible upgrades, compare that to something like Cru Left Me Die. When I play Cru Left Me Die, I'm often getting between four to six upgrades out of nine. So, you're getting much more of your potential character arc as you go through it. I like the idea that you can't get it all because that would be like it would If you can always get it all, it removes the desire to experiment. So, I like the fact that you can't get it all. I'd like to be able to get 10 chips in this game, half my character board, explore different pathways, and you don't see that. And so, my favorite part about the game, the upgrade system and the way it integrates with your characters and the variety of your characters, is also an element that I never fully get to explore. That is by far my biggest critique of the game. Other small things are going to be first of all, the uh visibility of the action boards. The way this board is over here, it covers all the stats. Now, granted, I mean, these boards are the same, which is why I grabbed a different one. So, you just got any other board, look at those. But, the board kind of has this obfuscation of the various stats you're uncovering, and I don't think it's intended to be a memory game cuz you can learn it or just look at things, but I found that to be a small quality of life thing. And then the other thing I'll say is that player count-wise, this is a critique, but also a solvable critique. For me, my ideal way to play the game is as a two-player game, each player controlling two characters. That is by far my favorite
way to play this game. Because of the fact that in a four-player game, I just feel you're getting less things done. A one-player game, it it Again, you could three-hand characters. You could control three. I just find that a little overwhelming. I don't mind controlling two, though. Two's good. So, when I play it solo, I control two characters. When I play it two players, I control two characters. When I play it three players, I control one, and we at least have three players on the table. The reason for this is I find that the character synergies and the ability to help each other out is a key part of the game that really adds to the feeling and strategy. So, when my characters can work in tandem, I go ahead and uncover the shadow. I launch a little melee attack. You come to the same board. You launch a ranged attack. Then you finish them off. Working together is great. But, with only two characters in the game, you kind of have to split your focus a lot, so you lose some of the ability of that feeling of teamwork. Even at a three-player game, I feel you don't get the full sense of that teamwork element. To me, my favorite part by far is having four characters on the board working in teams of two. But, unfortunately, that You could obviously could adjust, move from board to board, but the general time, most of the time, two characters in the four characters on the board working in teams of two.
But, if you do that as a four-player game, you're just doing less things in the game. So, for me, the best way to play this game is a two-player game with two-handed each person. Every other, I think three players my second favorite way to play, three player with one character each. And everything else feels a little bit like compromise. One player with two one solo with two characters feels like not enough. Solo characters feels like too much to handle. And four players with one character each feels like you're not doing enough in the game. So, again, all that balance over there. As far as what I can see I don't not like in the game, mostly comes down to the random elements. These shadows can cascade in ways that are horrifying. I remember one game I met I don't remember exactly what happened, but I managed to have it that I had three levels of influence pushing us towards the center, which almost pushes you to a place where you possibly could lose right away if the influence encroaches on the center, and it's just rapid-fire. Just the way the chips came out, the way they overturned, it just was a horrifying sequence of events. And you could have a bunch of chips that really mess with your strategy for better or for worse, and that's definitely a factor. Even that first turn, even when I drew that villager, as much as that's a good thing, it messed with my strategy because I was planning on trying to attack things on that board. So, the randomness of the chips is definitely something that can hurt and can have a punishing effect. And then also getting stuck in a bad draw.
Sometimes you draw chips that just don't work with the actions you're trying to take this turn. The game always does have some catch-all actions that are usually helpful in some way, but then also it's like dumping one chip there every turn is not a bad thing. Saving a chip every turn is also a good thing, but you certainly can get stuck with a bad draw that doesn't help the current board state. As far as final thoughts on Aberration, overall, I really enjoy what Aberration is doing. For me, there's a lot of fun to be had in terms of the general tower defense system mechanic in a genre that I like, and I feel is underdeveloped in the board game space. I feel not enough games really lean into a good tower defense engine. And so, I like that general element as far as what the game is doing, but unfortunately, because you don't fully lean into how much you can actually build up your character, the best part of this game is handicapped by the length and structure of this game, and I don't think making the game longer is the solution. I wish you could power up faster. I wish the game was balanced around taking two chips a turn, and then somehow the game was stronger to compensate because obviously that would be a big factor.
So, for me, that's the biggest element in this game that holds it back. For me, I'm still coming in at a 3.5 out of 5. There's a lot of things I like. A note on the expansions, I would say The Honk of Doom is to me kind of take it or leave it. I like having more monsters, but honestly, it's not the thing that makes the game more fun. Whereas the Spellcasters expansion, I definitely recommend picking that up if you like this game. It gives you a lot more ways to play with different characters and enjoy the synergies that those characters create. As far as other game recommendations, if you're looking for another tower defense game that I think is great, definitely check out Kingdom Rush from Lucky Duck Games. There's both Kingdom Rush and Elemental Uprising. I think they're both fantastic. And also check out Zombicide Black Plague. If you just like the grim, dark feeling of things and just want to hack and slash a lot more, Zombicide Black Plague will have you covered. And then I mentioned that All Play is a channel sponsor. If you go to allplay.com, you can find a variety of games both from All Play as well as partner publishers. If you're looking for a totally different cooperative experience in which you're trying to rescue monsters instead of destroying them, check out Leviathan Wilds for a game which you're going to be climbing various colossuses and trying to help them from whatever state they're in. In any case, until next time, I'm Alex Radcliffe from Board Game Co. I hope you found this review helpful and as always, I hope you have a good one.