Avatar: The Last Airbender: Aang’s Destiny | Cooperative Deck Building Board Game | Strategy Game | Fun for Family Game Night | Ages 10+ | 2-4 Players | 60 Minutes

Amazing board game, love the Avatar theme
This game is great. Right off the bat I want to say if you enjoy Avatar and you want a board game for it you should get this.This game is super easy to learn, new players could easily learn by watching someone else play, and I have tested this myself.Somewhat difficult with 2 players. Some levels are harder then others but generally if you prioritize keeping the ship back at all cost you’ll never lose but the game is challenging enough that it’s always possible and I’ve definitely lost a few times, which is good, it wouldn’t be fun if you breezed through it.Overall the story holds in card game format and I had a blast playing this with my girlfriend, highly recommend.

Fun, and Great Nostalgia for Airbender Fans, but With a Few Flaws
If you’re a big fan of the OG Last Airbender show, then you’re going to get a huge dose of nostalgia joy when you play this. The game takes over a series of individually boxed adventures, each one representing a story arc in the show. Getting to play as Aang, Sokka, and Katara, while facing off against Zuko and Zhao in the leadup to the siege on the Northern Water Tribe in the first box immediately hit those dopamine receptors, and the following boxes provided an even bigger hit as the cast increased and other big moments from the series take place. We haven’t made it through the whole set of boxes yet, but we’re excited to get the chance to see them.That isn’t to say the game doesn’t have a few flaws. The biggest one is how tough the set up can be. There are a lot of cards that all need to go in the exact right decks, from starter decks for each character to the item deck and bending deck, mission deck, etc. And they all look very similar. I can understand them all having the same back since they all need be able to go into the player decks without the players being knowing what they are going to draw. But I feel like the cards should be easier to distinguish for separation on the front. The only way to tell what goes in a starter deck is the character’s name on the bottom, but you ALSO have to make sure they are not a reward card, because those will also (sometimes) have the character’s name on them (since they are starter cards in later chapters), and the only way to tell that is to look for a little star in the corner. The cards do come (mostly) in order in each deck for the first time you use it, but as you get to later chapters and need to pull certain cards from the previous ones, if you ever want to replay a chapter, or if you just accidentally get them all shuffled up because you are clumsy (hello), separating everything into their proper decks can be difficult and can require making several passes to find the cards you misplaced.Another minor gripe is that it becomes very easy to death spiral. All it takes is a few bad draws to move the fire nation ship tracker to the mid point, at which point you start drawing two fire nation cards a turn, which can beat on your characters faster than you can recover, which then causes the ship tracker to move further, and so on until you lose. This is the only co op board game my group has ever tested where we lost the tutorial mission (which is basically how Box 1 was set up). We basically learned that if the ship tracker ever gets to a certain point and we’re not in position to win the game in the next couple of turns, we’re basically doomed because we can’t move the tracker back faster than it goes up while getting beat by two cards a turn.But even with those critical notes we still had a great time with it and intend to push our way through the entire set of adventurers. It is nice to relive The Last Airbender storyline in this way and combine it with our love of boardgames. If you’re a fan of the series, I’m sure you will love this.

Family Deckbuilder Campaign – With Very Bland Art
There’s a lot of “family” games out there that are postively intimidating with their initial complexity, such that I don’t blame people new to board games beyond Monopoly for giving up after trying to setup. This game’s learning curve isn’t perfect, but it’s about as good as it gets for an introductory family weight game.This game is a modified “big store” Deck Builder (you acquire cards from a bunch of piles) with threats to be neutralized and conditions to be met (this may remind people of a game such as Clank! where you defeat enemies and upgrade abilities (minus the map).Most campaign games have a LOT of fiddly bits and cards to setup and can be quite confusing to a the newbie. While this game isn’t perfect, it is very light in that aspect compared to most. The rulebook is lean and for the most part straightforward (the setup illustration with steps to go through is excellent). Where setup stumbles a bit is differentiating some of the cards that have the same back (the bending, general, and upgrade cards all have the same card back). Fortunately the upgrade cards are referenced in the mission listed rewards AND have a star symbol so you can figure out which go where, and upgrades and bending cards have pretty clear iconography. That said…You may want to have a board game veteran play this one with you, because if you haven’t played deckbuilders or campaign games this might be confusing, but a veteran of games like Dominion, Seafall, Pandemic Legacy, etc., might find this game trivially simple to learn and play.Personally, I enjoy simple games as much as complex ones, and enjoy cooperative campaigns. I also appreciate that this game is not legacy (you can reset boxes fairly easily if you are a veteran player), and there’s not a ton of stickers and rule changes with every new box (which is a weakness of games like Clank! and Pandemic in their Legacy campaigns).If like me, you enjoy the story of The Last Airbender, you’re likely to enjoy this game. Just don’t expect a reinvention of the genre, or any really deep or dynamic gameplay if you’ve already played lots of campaign games and deckbuilders.I think the lack of board bling is the reason why this game is selling for pretty cheap now. Inside the box you’re basically just finding a small amount of cardboard tokens (very manageable), a board, and a lot of cards in some boxes. The molded plastic board insert is minimal but that plus the dividers should make keeping the game organized very easy.Only a board game newbie would ever complain about setup. This game is easy to setup even compared to Dominion. It might be the simplest big store deckbuilder to setup I’ve ever seen.I do think, the biggest weakness of this game is that the game board is bland. REALLY bland. You can clearly see it in screenshots, it’s almost just a white board with some icons. I’m not sure what it needs, but the board really needs a little more artwork and flavor. I think a sprial-bound book style chapters format for the story would have been ideal, and a lot of games are doing that now, but this board is perfectly functional, just barely more than a white sheet of paper with some card symbols. If that doesn’t bother you, the board barely being a board, you should enjoy the game.