Back in 2017, a game was released that changed the entire landscape of board gaming. Bursting onto the scene with its fully cooperative campaign, dungeon crawl miniatures, and crunchy Euro-style hand management combat, it was an epic game packed with ambition (and that’s to say nothing of the required table space).
I’m talking, of course, about Gloomhaven. It might seem strange to start a review for Agemonia by talking about a different game created by another publisher. But Isaac Childres’ massive game kicked off a run of similar games all claiming to be the ultimate ‘cooperative campaign’ experience, and Max Wikström is no doubt hoping that Agemonia can live up to that title.
And the comparison here is not an unfavourable one; in some areas, Agemonia is as good as its forebear, and I’d go so far as to say that for some players, it might even be better. That said, not everyone reading this review will have played, or even be aware of Gloomhaven or the many other games it inspired. So, let’s start at the beginning. What even is Agemonia?
The journey begins
Agemonia is a fully cooperative game for 1-4 players, where each player takes on the role of a different character set in a fantasy world. Each game usually consists of the players taking on one of 38 scenarios, which are chained together in a campaign (a few branching paths means a campaign is closer to 30 scenarios long). There are 9 characters to choose from, although the box contains miniatures for a further 2 characters who can be bought separately.
One of the great things about Agemonia is that, for a game with so much going on, they’ve done a great job of easing the on-ramp for new players. The first three scenarios of a campaign are tutorial scenarios, with a campaign book guiding you through each scenario, and new rules being gradually introduced over the three scenarios, so that players new to this kind of experience aren’t overwhelmed (at least, not at the start).
After the first three scenarios are complete, the game begins to open up. In between scenarios, the players take part in a ‘city phase’, where they can visit shops, rest up to heal, recruit helpers in later scenarios, and all that other stuff that you might normally pretend to do while visiting Waterdeep during a game of Dungeons & Dragons. After completing a certain set of scenarios, players will level up, getting stronger and unlocking new abilities, as you might expect.
So far, so cooperative campaign game. But, what’s the difference between this and all the other Gloomhaven-style games that now exist? There are two key elements that set Agemonia apart, for me at least: one is the stamina and damage system, and the other is the emphasis on exploration.
What’s the damage (or stamina)?
In Agemonia, a player’s turn is made up of one manoeuvre, usually used to move or recover stamina/damage, and an action, which might be something more interesting like a big attack. Each character has a stack of stamina chips, which represent their ability to do stuff during the game. For example, most characters can move a certain number of spaces with their manoeuvre, but can spend stamina to move further on their turn. Some other actions, such as certain powerful attacks, might also cost stamina.
When a player spends stamina, it is removed from their stack and placed in a separate stack of ‘spent’ stamina chips. Instead of moving, a player might use their manoeuvre to recover some of that stamina.
However, these stamina chips are double-sided, with a damage symbol on the other side. When a character takes any damage, they take that many stamina chips from their stack, flip them over, and put them into the damage pile. If you don’t have stamina chips in your unspent pile, they’re taken from the spent pile instead, and if you still don’t have any…. well, bad stuff happens, as you might expect. You’re not dead, but you get a nasty injury and will have less stamina available for the rest of the scenario.
This dual use of the stamina/damage chips leads to an interesting decision when resting, since characters can usually use a manoeuvre to recover either stamina or damage; healing damage comes at a lower rate, but it heals the damage back to your stamina pile, meaning you can spend it as stamina and still use it as a buffer against future damage. I’ve spent more than one turn agonising over whether I should heal damage or stamina (and I’ve usually made the wrong choice either way).
“I wonder what’s over there…”
The other key thing that elevates Agemonia to the upper echelons of cooperative campaign board games is the emphasis on exploration. As characters make their way around the map, they will come across certain spaces marked with letters or symbols, along with a range of spaces that it can be seen from.
As soon as a character gets close enough to one of these spaces, the players must immediately reveal the corresponding card from a deck of scenario-specific cards. You might find a scared dwarf-like character hiding behind the bushes, or spot something glinting at the bottom of a well. Most of these cards require a skill test in order to interact with them; each character has 3 basic skills, and skill tests work how you might expect them to from other games, rolling dice equal to the value of your skill, and trying to hit a certain target.
The nice thing here is that there is no actual 0 on the dice; the closest the dice get to a failure is rolling a symbol that lets you spend 1-2 stamina for 1-2 successes, which is nice, although you’ll need that stamina for plenty of other things too. There’s also a ‘rolling critical’ face on the die, which lets you roll another die, and this effect stacks, so that weak character with only a 1 fight might be able to hit that 6 on the skill test just by rolling into critical after critical. Sure, the odds are low, but when it does happen it’s the peak cooperative campaign board game experience.
The best thing about exploring around the map to find these cards is the way that they interact with one another. You might discover some markings on a tree which mean nothing to you, only to later find another set of markings on the other side of the map that allow you to translate. You might, like us, have a playgroup where 3 of the players are committed to fighting the massive monster, while one character just wants to walk around searching through the campfire. But Agemonia uses this emphasis on exploration in fantastic ways; that player wandering around in the ashes just might find a secret relic that can be used to calm the monster or call down an army of goblins or something (I’m making these up to avoid spoilers, but they’re not that far off).
You might be worried that, over time, players might memorise maps and the location of specific cards, and it’s a concern that I had going into the game. So far, we’ve found it hasn’t particularly mattered as you play so many scenarios that you soon forget exactly what was where. That said, memory of a previous campaign might give you a sense of what needs to be done, and where you need to go to do it, especially if it hasn’t been that long since you played. There is randomization in Agemonia, through the success or failure of skill tests, and some other details this review hasn’t covered such as turn order and enemy actions, but exploration is a key element of Agemonia and the location of certain key cards or tests are static. If you’re someone with a good memory who will be looking to play regularly, you need to know this going in.
Pack up your troubles
I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least spend some ink on the topic of setup and pack down, as this activity sometimes takes as long as the actual game for large-scale campaign games like this. And there’s no getting around that setup and packdown can be a chore, but the publisher has done just about everything it could to ease this.
The box contains very useful trays and boxes for everything, regardless of whether you have a Kickstarter version or a retail version, and it includes a labelled diagram of how to pack the game away again. It also contains ‘player trays’ that will hold all your characters relevant items, gems, player aids, action tokens etc, with a handy lid that holds it all together, which does save a lot of time.
It does mean, however, that trying to run two campaigns at once adds a lot of additional out-of-game upkeep, as every time you want to switch to the other campaign group, the game owner will have to record who has what in their trays, remove everything, and then setup for the other group again. And that’s before you’ve actually started setting up for the game session itself.
There is a companion app which we thought might help with this, but it doesn’t really track all information for a character, just which scenarios you’ve unlocked and a few key party achievements. It does have narration for the scenario introductions and other cards for players who are interested in such things. We used the app for a few scenarios and then stopped bothering, as we could do it all ourselves using the included party sheet, and playing with the cardboard and figures is really part of the point for us.
Final thoughts on Agemonia
We’ve been having an absolute blast playing Agemonia; I’ve been playing through a two-handed 4-player campaign with my son and it’s been some of the absolute best father-son time we’ve had this year.
If you’re looking for a cooperative campaign experience which feels epic but is more manageable than the 60-70 scenarios of Gloomhaven, with a focus more on exploration than combat, Agemonia is an absolutely fantastic option. It’s complex, but the tutorial scenarios do a great job of getting players prepared for the full campaign, even players new to the genre.
