If you ever wanted to play through the adventures you know and love from Avatar: The Last Airbender, you finally have the chance. The Op Games presents Avatar: The Last Airbender—Aang’s Destiny, a deck-building game that takes you on a journey across all three seasons of the series as you try to evade the Fire Nation and defeat Fire Lord Ozai.
What’s In The Box?
- 1 Instruction Booklet
- 1 Game Board
- 4 Player Boards
- 35 Attack Tokens
- 25 Purpose Tokens
- 10 Health Trackers
- 16 Bending Tokens
- 1 Fire Nation Ship Token
- 7 Game Boxes
- 15 Divider Cards
How to Play Aang’s Destiny
For the purpose of this review, we only played Box 1 of Aang’s Destiny. After setting up the board and choosing your characters, the players work together to defeat all Fire Nation adversaries. If the Fire Nation manages to track the players down, Aang is captured and they lose the game.
The first active player reveals and resolves the fire nation cards. These cards can move the fire nation closer to the players, prevent players from drawing cards, and knock down a player’s health. After resolving the fire nation cards, players resolve the adversary abilities, which may help and/or hurt the player’s mission.
Next, the active player plays their starting cards and takes actions against the Fire Nation. They can gain Attack and Purpose tokens, using those, in turn, to attack the current adversary and acquire Support cards to boost the power of their deck, respectively.
When a new Support card is acquired it is placed in the discard deck, where it stays until the player runs out of cards. The discard deck is then shuffled and used to replace discarded cards in a cycle that ends when the game does.
At the end of the turn, any defeated Adversary is replaced, all played cards are put in the player’s discard pile, all tokens not used by the active player are discarded, and they draw a new hand of 5 cards for their next turn. The next player follows the same steps as the first until all of the objectives in the Box are finished or the Fire Nation Boat Token reaches the end of the path and Aang is captured.
What We Thought
If you don’t have the time or stamina for multiple game nights or an all-day marathon, this is not the game for you. The setup alone takes quite a while when you’re doing it for the first time, and while the instruction booklet is sufficiently detailed and well-organized, it’s still very dense with information that players need to absorb very quickly.
This isn’t to say that Aang’s Destiny is no fun, but it is tedious for the first few rounds when you’re trying to get the hang of things. There was a lot of flipping back and forth through the instructions to make sure that we didn’t miss anything among the many moving parts. To be fair, this is nothing compared to other, more complicated deck-building games, but there is a patience required here that not everyone always has.
Critiques aside, Aang’s Destiny is still a very well-made game in terms of its physical components. All of the pieces are high quality, and while the different cards could do with a bit more distinction on the back (specifically the starting, support, and objective cards) they all have great art that is either directly lifted from the series or appropriately derivative of it.
Overall, Aang’s Destiny is perfect for a long sleepover, an all-day power outage, or any time you need to get your kids away from the screens we’ve all gotten addicted to for more than a good 90 minutes. This game is long, but if you love ATLA, it’s worth it, and even the longest game will be time well spent.
You can grab Avatar: The Last Airbender—Aang’s Destiny from The Op, Amazon, or your FLGS at an MSRP of $49.95.
Images and Review Copy Courtesy of The Op Games
Have strong thoughts about this piece you need to share? Or maybe there’s something else on your mind you’re wanting to talk about with fellow Fandomentals? Head on over to our Community server to join in the conversation!