Aberration
- Board's Eye View
- 3 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Designed by Peter Lee and published by Ghostfire Gaming, Aberration is a tower defence game where the 1-4 players take on the role of village defenders against the invading monsters. The villagers that you are trying to protect aren't mere hapless sheep, however; one of the most interesting aspects of Aberration is that you can deploy villagers to particular areas and give them tasks to aid in the village's defence. The player characters all represent traditional D&D archetypes so in our plays at Board's Eye View, Aberration was described as 'D&D meets Seven Samurai'.
This is a fully cooperative game where players are firefighting by battling the invading horde of monsters. Players also have objectives and, along with liberating 'vantage point' locations, it's fulfilling these that move the players up their Survival track. You need to get to the end of that track to win, and likewise you need not to get to the end of the Fear track.
Aberration is played on a modular board facilitating multiple scenarios, so this is a game you can play many times without repeating the same experience. The core mechanism is 'bag building', with players adding tokens to their individual bags, drawing them and removing tokens from their boards for the actions they want to take. In addition to the hordes pressing in on the centre of the village, there will be 'shadow' tokens advancing. These are mostly bad but a few tokens are helpful by adding villagers; you won't know what a token does until you end your movement in a shadow token's location or it is illuminated by one of the fire markers on the board.
The game has been designed to escalate in difficulty because whenever the monsters have a turn one of the creature types levels up! The deck dictating this also functions as a game timer; you lose if you haven't topped out on the Survival track before the monster deck runs out. The interactions with the hero characters also gives each game a distinctive story arc; whenever you take damage you advance along a track and at various points on that track you're required to draw a Transmutation card that will affect your character, possibly for the good but usually with a negative sting in the tail. This gives the game an additional burst of excitement and anticipation, reminiscent of the mutation effect in Shadows of Brimstone (Flying Frog). And as the rules warn: 'He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster'.
Tho' the monsters are pretty monstrous, and their onslaught can seem relentless, Aberration isn't hard to play. It plays in a little over an hour and it isn't too hard to beat, at least in basic mode. If you find you win too easily, however, the rules provide a ready way of stepping up the difficulty by starting the monsters off at Level 2 or even higher...
Aberration launches on Gamefound on 18 August. Click here to find out more.
