Players battle through the story of Avatar: The Last Airbender in a new deck-building game

5 Apr at 18:00

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Susana Polo
is an entertainment editor at Polygon, specializing in pop culture and genre fare, with a primary expertise in comic books. Previously, she founded The Mary Sue.

Avatar: The Last Airbender – Aang’s Destiny, the latest title from The Op Games, isn’t just a collaborative deck-building game. The way designer Pat Marino tells it, it’s a concerted effort to adapt Aang’s full adventures, from iceberg to Fire Lord, for the table.

Two to four players will “take on the heroic role of Aang and his allies and play cooperatively,” says The Op Games’ official description, “to defeat adversaries, complete objectives, and make their way through the Four Nations to restore balance to the world and fulfill Aang’s destiny as the Avatar.”

Polygon got an early look at a few cards from the game, featuring new custom art in the Avatar style, and got to pepper Marino with questions about what players can expect from Aang’s Destiny, whether they’re new to deck-building board games or not.

As in most games in the genre, Aang’s Destiny players will each begin with a small deck of cards and limited abilities but, over the course of play, will get various chances to add new cards to those decks, widening and customizing their options for each turn and ensuring that each game session plays out slightly differently.

“What sets this game apart from other deck building games,” says Marino, “is that it has seven boxes of unlockable content. The first box starts the story and introduces players to the core mechanisms of the game. Each time the players win the game they can unlock the next box, adding new rules, as well as additional content. This allows the story to unfold while also gradually leveling players up from a introductory deck building game to a fairly complex strategy game by the time they reach box seven.”

As a cooperative deck builder, Aang’s Destiny has players work together toward a single goal — that of the heroes of Avatar: The Last Airbender. And according to Marino, figuring out how to bake the familiar evolution of Aang, Katara, Sokka, and the rest into a progressive deck-building game was high on his list of design priorities.

“I don’t want to spoil too much, but I believe fans will appreciate the way allies and heroes change throughout the boxes.”

The art in those boxes is designed by The Op Games’ Patrick Spaziante, whom Marino calls “a master of the Avatar: The Last Airbender style. […] For [all the bending ability cards in the game] we drew inspiration from the Water Bending Scroll that Katara steals from the Pirates in season 1. We worked closely with the Avatar team to adapt this scroll style to create bending form illustrations for all of the unique moves in the game.”

Aang’s Destiny isn’t the first time Marino has worked on an Avatar game — in 2022, The Op Games published Avatar: The Last Airbender – Fire Nation Rising, a dice and card strategy game about putting together groups of heroes to defeat the Fire Nation during the Day of Black Sun, one of the major turning points of Avatar: The Last Airbender’s final season. And he says his team is doing their best to take everything they learned from fan reactions to Fire Nation Rising and pour it into Aang’s Destiny.

“Aang’s Destiny is a larger and more narrative experience [than Fire Nation Rising] that follows the entire story arc of the series so it allowed us to get a bit deeper into the characters and setting and to place an increased emphasis on bending.”

As a fan of the show himself, Marino says that one of the joys of putting Aang’s Destiny together was revisiting the series over and over.

“The game includes hundreds of cards, most of which are unique, so there was lots of opportunity to include fan favorite moments and characters. Whether you enjoy the big battles, tipping Cabbage carts or exploring the Secret Tunnel with Chong and his fellow Minstrels,” Marino said, “there is something for every fan in the box.”

Avatar: The Last Airbender – Aang’s Destiny is set to be released in fall of this year, and you can check out the striking box art below: