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One upon a time in 2023, there was an amazing boardgame designed by Chris Matthew where players were able to take the role of one of the five gods watching over the human population of Eldranir. Being one of the gods in a large pantheon is never easy, in particular when your powers are as strong as the number of mortals that believe in you and your right to rule the pantheon depends on how many followers you have among the humans.
As a result of this struggle to rule over the world, the gods started walking through the regions of Eldranir, channelling their energy in order to support mortal development and gain followers. In the original boardgame “An Age Contrived”, this can be achieved by helping growing human society through the creation of massive monuments and the development of the pillars of their civilization.
However, as the fight for the supremacy gets heated, the gods will need to find new ways to influence the humans to gain their trust and this will soon take the form of a new expansion to the original board game: “An Age contrived – Folklore and Pilgrimage”.
I also had the great opportunity to be among the many play-testers of both the original boardgame and the new expansion thanks to Chris's kindness and I would like to share my personal thoughts on the new expansion coming to Kickstarter on the 4th of February 2025. Spoiler alert: I loved An Age Contrived as I think it offers the good level of challenge you would expect from an Euro-style game while still being very fun to play. Most important, an Age Contrived is among the most stunning games I had the chance to play and I love bringing such a high quality game to the table.
Where it all started: An Age Contrived Core Game
To discuss what the new Folklore and Pilgrimage expansion brings to the table, we need to start from a quick overview of the main game. Feel free to skip this section if you know the game and you have already played it a few times.
At its core, An Age Contrived is a Euro game based on engine building and action management mechanics. Each player takes the role of one of the five gods in the game and takes turn to use their asymmetric abilities to score as many victory points as possible. Each player starts with a limited amount of energy tiles and a “transmutation device” that allows their god to perform some actions and to send their energy into the physical world in order to influence it. The more these deities impact the reality, the more they are worshipped by the mortals and the more energy they gain.
One of the main ways a player can gain Victory Points (VP) is to send their energy to help the humans creating new monuments. In the game, each monument is composed of multiple cardboard parts that are magnetized and can be attached to small metal frames in order to created a beautiful 3D monument on the gaming board. Together with being a very nice and visually enjoyable part of the game, this mechanic is very strategic as each energy attached to a monument can be activated to generate additional effects once a portion of a monument is completed. In essence, the more energy you spend on monuments, the more effects you can trigger.
Together with building monuments, players can gain victory points and additional effects by moving the miniature representing the god around the map, Moving your miniature can provide some additional bonuses (in the form of bridge tokens) but it also provide access to different Pillars of the civilization. Energy can be then spent at each of these pillars to generate Victory Points directly. Last but not least, there are a few achievements in the game that can provide a further way to score additional VPs. All these different ways of generating Victory Points create a lot of strategic variability during the game while each player designs their way to beat the opponents.
The other key strategic aspect of An Age Contrived is the fact that the energy tile the players use to score points is also the same energy they need in order to take their actions every turn. Managing your reserve of energy tiles efficiently is therefore a very key aspect of this game that can be extremely important in particular during the first few turns when players do not have many tiles.
Folklore and Pilgrimage
As mentioned, the Folklore and Pilgrimage expansion focuses on the alternative ways the Gods have found to gain favour among the humans. In the first case, they are performing epic deeds among the mortals and leave a tangible artefact behind so that myths and legends will spawn around it. In the second case, they will grant special favours to the pilgrims that venture into a journey to Mount Eldranir.
In terms of components, the Folklore module comes with an extended player board, a few Folklore cards and cubes and a beautiful set of artefact miniatures. All these artefacts are different and designed to match the colour and the iconography of their corresponding god bringing even more quality to an already impressively eye-catching board. The Folklore gameplay introduces the possibility to place one of the three player's artefact on the board after moving your player miniature. The are of course a few placement rules to follow and the most important one is that an artefact needs to be “primed” first by consuming a “Recharge your Channel Marker” action.
Once the artefact placed, the player can trigger one of the options available on any of the three cards they randomly received at the beginning of the game. The options can provide short term benefits or longer term abilities or eventually allow the player to score Victory Points on the Folklore board.
These additional points and strategies offered by the module are however just the tip of a more balanced way to use the movement of their character to a player advantage. A lot of players already know that moving their miniature through the map is quite important in order to unlock the bridge tokens and to link some energy to the pillars. With this new module, moving your character will also bring more value to your strategy due to the abilities on the scoring cards and it can offer more opportunities to better exploit the Pillars and some of the Achievements.
On the other hand, the Pilgrimage module adds a different way to use your energy tiles. This second module introduces a new board representing Mount Eldranir, 8 new magnetized Shrines (and their frames), a few new tokens and cubes and 7 human pilgrim miniatures coloured as the god each of them worship. These miniatures are positioned on the Pilgrim board at the beginning of the path leading to the Mount and they can move at a variable speed every time a Shrine is build. As for the main monuments, players can place energy into a Shrine to complete it. However, once all energy slot filled, the completing Player is the only one that have to activate the energies. All other players can leave their energies in the Shrine making easier for them to gain benefits and build future shrines. The best part is that the completing player and all the contributing ones can move on the Pilgrim board every time a shrine is built. Once built, Shrines also provide additional value to any player's miniature visiting them including additional scoring cards and doubler tokens (that double the value of any energy bound to a monument or pillar).
At a first glance, this second module seems to stretch a bit more the stock of the players' energy but in reality, it offers much more value in return. While moving your pilgrim along their track can provide some valuable victory points at the end of the game, the useful effects obtained by visiting the shrines have immediate effect on the game and can strongly boost a player strategy. Moreover, any energy activated during the completion of a Shine can be used immediately on the main board in order to trigger for example the completion of a Shrine. As this mechanism can also work the other way around there are plenty of combos a player can design to get the best out of a single energy tile.
Last but not least, the new expansion also adds two new Gods to the Pantheon to add even more options in particular when you play at higher player counts. The first new Character, Chronari, allows more flexibility when using energy and transmuter tiles. Chronari's first ability, for example, allows the player to add any wild energy plus an additional one to a transmuter tile every time a wild energy is activated while the second ability allows the player to load new tiles from the end of the transmuter if they advance. Finally the most powerful ability of Chronari will allow a player to take down a portion of an already built monument in order to build a new section on a different one. That's the power of manipulating time flow!
The second new character is Valimod, “The Channeler” and his powers focuses directly on the tiles of the transmuter. He can in fact move in and out of the Tile Pool when a wild energy is activated and when a new transmuter tile is purchased triggering immediately the icons on it and teleporting freely to the any space on the map. Having tiles with Channel icons will benefit his play style as Valimod's main ability will allow the player to replenish the top row of two of their tiles as far as there are icons on them. Although they are not easy to master, the new abilities of Valimod can create longer combos and trigger a lot of additional bonus.
Final Thoughts: Is the new expansion right for me?
After playing An Age Contrived a lot, I can safely say that this game is frustratingly good. While the gameplay is not the easier to master and requires some learning, the depth of the game offers a rich and strategically challenging experience that I really enjoy every time I bring the game to the table. In particular, I love the different ways a player can achieve victory and the constant need to balance the gain versus the cost of each action. Of course, the amazing art and quality of the components can only be the cherry on top of an already incredible game.
With this in mind, I think the upcoming Folklore and the Pilgrimage modules are a great addition to the core game. They add variability with the introduction of the two new character but, most important, they strengthen and improve the existing mechanics without creating massive changes. Adding any or both the new modules is in fact pretty straightforward as the main setup or the main rules have not been changed. The modules add more options and more potential strategies without actually changing anything and players can chose to pursue the new feature of not. In a few of our play-testing games, a player actually decided to not place any artefact and to not make a step on the Pilgrim board and they still managed to win a few times. We all took this as a good sign in terms of game balance but, also, a great testament of the massive effort Chris and the team went through to really make this game amazing.
Last aspect to consider is the production value of the new expansion. If you played An Age Contrived, you know the components quality and the attention to the details was top notch. From what I saw, the expansion is looking to be as good as the main game. The materials are great, the miniatures well designed and the artwork on the cards is extremely evocative. Big shout out to the rulebook that is incredibly clear while being beautiful illustrated. Personally, I cannot wait to see which surprises Chris will have for us during the Kickstarter campaign and I am looking forward to back this game!