AVATAR THE LAST AIRBENDER FIRE NATION RISING is a fun co-op game that could use a little more polish

Avatar the Last Airbender Fire Nation Rising is a new co-op board game from The OP that lets you play as Squad Avatar taking on Ozai and the Fire Nation. The events of the game are the beginning of the Day of the Black Sun and then subsequent events. The OP recently sent me a copy of the game to play, and as a huge fan of the show, I was thrilled. Overall it was fun, but could have used a little more polish to turn it from a good game into a great one.

Let’s start with the quality of the game. Overall the quality is high. The miniature you get for Ozai is incredible and makes an imposing figure in the center of the board. With how impressive that miniature is, I really wish every player character could have their own miniature. Instead you get a token to represent where you are currently on the map. This isn’t a big deal as you only stay on the map for your turn, however it would have been nice to have something a little more detailed for the players to use. Other than that, the board is simple and easy to put together and the cards don’t seem to fall apart just by mixing them. There are also pai sho tokens which look like they are made to last and the box is well designed to keep everything in order. Unfortunately, the regulation could have been better structured. There was a lot of confusion in my first game as there were details that were missed due to a weird placement in the rulebook, so make sure you read it carefully before you start. Also, there were some card effects that were confusing in the way they were written without clarification in the rules.

The general 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 be heroes to recruit or villains to defeat. Choose a section you’ll play through and then Ozai will randomly turn around to face a section, activating every villain in his position and damaging you if you’re in it. From there you have a pool of dice, and through a series of rolls you’ll recruit heroes, deal damage, advance your balance track, or do absolutely nothing if the dice gods aren’t in your favor. You can collect pai sho tokens along the way which have a variety of effects including replacing any symbols you may need to flip. Different things will affect the villain track, and once the villain track or hero balance track fills up, you’ll trigger the Day of Black Sun. From there, you’ll need to complete three missions 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’s impossible to complete the balance track before the ruin track. Your initial dice pool is 4 for each character. There are many heroes that require you to roll 4 symbols, which means you should roll perfectly to get them. There are ways to increase the number of dice you can roll, but it will require you to recruit heroes and some of them are very hard to get. Pai sho tokens definitely help, but they can be difficult to acquire. If you spend the whole turn and get nothing, you get a single pai sho token, but then you have wasted the whole turn. When the heroes on the board are rapidly depleting their health, losing someone’s recruitment could mean they are defeated within your next turn and this contributes to the loss conditions. Once the engine starts, this is a moot point, but it can take a long time to get to the point where you feel like you can actually contribute to the game. And that’s bad for my next gripe.

The balance track is extremely difficult to fill while the ruin track fills up very quickly. The balance track has various conditions to meet, sometimes it’s as simple as rolling a certain symbol up to the more difficult of recruiting someone from a specific realm. Meanwhile, the ruins track is filled with cards showing where Ozai will look. When you cross that deck once the ruins track will fill up. It happens very quickly, and when you have to take some time to build up your dice pools to be able to really do anything, it seems impossible. There is also a lot of luck with the recruiting phase on the balance track. The first game I played we crashed completely because there were no Earthrealm people on the board to recruit. I still hadn’t been able to stack the dice to effectively recruit each turn and every card we managed to turn over was not the correct type of card. The run down track filled up before we could get over that step, it was really frustrating. If you manage to fill the balance track first, you get a huge bonus for instantly defeating some baddies and preventing them from being placed on the board, so it can be frustrating to think it’s completely impossible.

Overall, I enjoyed this game. I really like cooperative games and Avatar The Last Airbender, so that would automatically have been good for me. Sadly, there were some frustrations and confusing rules, so I can’t score that high on this game and was hoping to when I first saw it. I would give it a 6/10.