Avatar the Last Airbender Fire Nation Rising is a new cooperative board game from The OP that lets you play as team Avatar facing off against Ozai and the fire nation. The events of the game are the lead up to the Day of Black Sun and then the events afterwards. Recently the OP sent me a copy of the game to play and as a big fan of the show, I was excited. It was fun overall, but it could have used a little more refinement to push it from a good game to a great game.
Let’s start with the quality of the game. Overall, the quality is high. The miniature you get for Ozai is incredible and makes for an imposing figure in the middle of the board. With how impressive that miniature is, I really wish that each player character could have had their own miniature. Instead you get a token to represent where you are currently on the map. This isn’t a huge problem as you only stay on the map for your own turn, it still would have been nice to have something a little more detailed for the players to use. Other than that though the board is simple and easy to put together and the cards don’t feel like they will fall apart just from shuffling. There are also pai sho tokens that also feel like they are made to last and the box is well designed to hold everything neatly. Sadly, the rulebook could have been laid out better. There was a lot of confusion in my first game because there were details that got missed because of strange placement in the rulebook, so be sure to read it carefully before starting. Also, there were a few card effects that were confusing in how they were written with no clarification in the rules.
The overall gameplay idea for the game is good. The board is divided into three sections with each section having three different characters to interact with. These can either be heroes to recruit or villains to defeat. You pick a section you will play in and then Ozai will randomly turn to face a section, activating each villain in his location and damaging you if you are in it. From there you have a dice pool and through a series of rolls you will either recruit heroes, deal damage, advance your balance track, or do absolutely nothing if the dice gods are not in your favor. You can collect pai sho tokens along the way that have a variety of effects including standing in for symbols you might need to roll. Different things will affect the villain track and once either the villain track or hero balance track fills up, you will trigger the Day of Black Sun. From there, you will need to complete three missions in order to defeat Ozai before too many of your heroes are defeated.
I have two big complaints with this game, the difficulty of recruiting heroes and how it feels impossible to complete the balance track before the ruin track. Your starting pool of dice is 4 for each character. There are lots of heroes that require you to get 4 symbols, meaning you would have to roll perfectly to get them. There are ways of increasing the number of dice you can roll, but it will require you to recruit heroes and some of them are very difficult to get. Pai sho tokens certainly help, but they can be difficult to acquire. If you spend your whole turn and achieve nothing, you get a single pai sho token, but then you’ve wasted your entire turn. When heroes on the board are quickly having their health whittled away, missing out on recruiting someone could mean they are defeated by your next turn and that contributes to the loss conditions. Once you get your engine going this is a moot point, but it can take a really long time to get to the point where you feel like you can really contribute to the game. And this is bad for my next complaint.
The balance track is extremely difficult to fill while the ruin track fills up very quickly. The balance track has various conditions to fulfill, sometimes it’s as simple as rolling a certain symbol to the more difficult of recruiting someone from a specific kingdom. Meanwhile, the ruin track is filled by cards that show where Ozai will be looking. When you go through that deck once the ruin track will become filled up. It happens really fast, and when you have to take a while to build up your dice pools to be able to really do anything, it feels impossible. There is also a lot of luck with the recruiting step on the balance track. The first game I played we got completely stuck because there were no Earth kingdom people on the board for us to recruit. I hadn’t been able to build up the dice yet to effectively recruit every turn and every card we were able to flip over was not the correct kind of card. The ruin track filled up before we could get past that step, it was really frustrating. If you are able to fill up the balance track first you get a huge bonus of instantly defeating certain villains and keeping them from being placed on the board, so it can be frustrating to feel like that is completely impossible.
Overall, I did enjoy this game. I really like cooperative games and Avatar The Last Airbender, so it was automatically going to be good for me. Sadly, there were a few frustrations and confusing rules so I can’t score this game as high and I was hoping to when I first saw it. I would give it a 6/10.
