Second Look - Boardgame reviews in depth. Check out that cat.While at PAX East this year I came across a small booth from Zephyr Workshop. There they were showing off a prototype of the A.E.G.I.S. Arc Buster Starter Set, a strategic wargame with combining robots. After reaching out to them, they were more than happy to provided me with a similar prototype to review. Since they’re self publishing, I figured this would work great as a Second Look, instead of an article under my new Unpublished series.

A.E.G.I.S. has you controlling a team of 5 robots. You can customize your team in a lot of different ways, but my son and I just went with the suggested starter teams for our plays. Along with our 5 robots, we each had 2 combiner cards that each required two of our robots. During play you can combine 2-5 robots to create a more powerful one on the board. The starter set comes with a few 2 and 3 robot combiners.

agstarter-300x300The game is very simple to learn. Every robot has an amount of energy that recharges your energy pool. Every action you take, from moving, combining, attacking, and certain special abilities, uses energy. This, combined with a simple, dice-based combat system, makes for an easy-to-learn, fast-paced game. The closest thing I can compare this to is the Monsterpocalypse Voltron Game, though A.E.G.I.S. is a lot easier to get into.

I’m really interested to see the final product, which should be out in February of 2015. The Arc Buster Starter Set will also be sold along the Skyguard Starter Set. Each will be $50, and contain:

  • 3 Commander Unit Cards
  • 18 Level 1 Unit Cards
  • 6 Level 2 Combined Unit Cards
  • 3 Level 3 Combined Unit Cards
  • 30 Game Pieces
  • Rulebook
  • Fold-out Playmat
  • 12 Dice

A copy of the A.E.G.I.S. Arc Buster Starter Set was provided free for review by Zephyr Workshop