With Ivion, Ape Games and Luminary have published not so much an individual combat game as a game system. There are now three 'seasons' of Ivion and each season contains three games. Like the similarly conceived Unmatched series from Iello and Restoration Games, any one of the Ivion games is immediately playable straight out of the box as a head-to-head card-driven duel between the two asymmetric fantasy-themed characters with their individual card deck and mini, but Ivion is designed for players to mix and match: buy any two of the Ivion games and you have three opponents to choose between for each of your characters; buy all three games in a season and you have all the permutations available to you with six different characters...
The Ivion story so far comprises:
Season 1: The Hound & The Hare
The Knight & The Lady
The Sun & The Stars
Season 2: The Ram & The Raven
The Fox & The Forest
The Rune & The Rime
Season 3: The Bear & The Badger
The Goose & The Noose
The Falcon & The Snake
The game may be card driven but it's played on a board which is in effect a 4 x 4 grid, and you'll be moving your character orthogonally around for best advantage, with some cards modifying areas on the board for specific effects. You'll need to spend action tokens to take the actions triggered by the cards you are playing but the cards may also generate or demand power tokens, so on top of the hand management there's a distinct element of resource management to the game. And this isn't just a hack & slash game: cards can also impose conditional 'control' effects on an opponent; for example, to slow their movement or temporarily deny them use of certain cards. You'll want to keep cards in hand that you can play as instant reactions on your opponent's turn to interrupt their actions. Of course, your opponent may have a card that interrupts your interrupt...
Tho' Ivion is designed to be played straight out of the box, there's more to it. As you become more familiar with the cards you can decide to modify and create your own deck rather than play using the starter deck in the box. Designers Aislyn Hall and Aaron Shaw describe this as 'hero crafting' because that's pretty much the effect of what you're doing by creating your own deck of 45 cards. If you've played any of the myriad of collectible card games you'll have the general idea but the beauty of Ivion is that the cards are all available to you in the box: there's no chasing here after rare cards in sealed expansion packs, tho' your hero crafting will be able to make use of cards from other Ivion boxes.
The Board's Eye View team have so far only played with the characters from Season 2, so we're looking forward to crafting heroes from Seasons 1 and 3 and further extending the story of the Ivion universe.
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