I Read Games reviews are me reading games when I have nothing better to do, like read a module or write or play a game. I don’t seriously believe that I can judge a game without playing it, usually a lot, so I don’t take these very seriously. But I can talk about its choices and whether or not it gets me excited about bringing it to the table.

I was going to tidy the garage of the mess that inevitably accumulates, but I walked in and was overwhelmed, and instead I read Armour Astir: Advent. A lot of the games I’ve reviewed have been funded through Kickstarter and are showing signs of similar problems that could be attributable to the funding method. After my thoughts in my review of Mountain Home on slowfunding, I decided to look at other large-scale projects that slow-funded, and Armour Astir is one of those projects. Armour Astir is a 172 page game by Briar Sovereign about magical people and the mechs they pilot.

I don’t usually start with layout but I really struggle with Armour Astir’s layout, so I’m going to talk about it up front and forget about it. It’s in single column, small point A5, and I genuinely find it difficult to read. This is a game in desperate need of white space, or spot art, to break these walls of text up. I usually read on my phone, but I printed this one because that was actually impossible, and it was marginally better in text. My eyes glaze about a third of the way through every page. Admittedly I am perpetually tired, but the layout choices cause a barrier here that simply doesn’t need to exist. That said, within these challenges, it’s well broken up by headings and easy to navigate; these strengths just get lost in my overall difficulty with the text at large. I shall persist, despite the struggle.

Armour Astir is Powered by the Apocalypse, and in basic terms doesn’t stray from the template set 15 years ago, It does feature some cool innovations (I can’t speak to whether they are new here or not), such as confidence and desperation which are new ways to be at risk or advantage, which are tied to hooks which define your character. The basic rules are explained in a page, but the “main concepts” section is a long list of mechanics that admittedly blur into each other a lot, despite individually being quite neat. There are tokens that are downtime currency, gravity which are clocks that cause relationship conflict, and dangers and burdens which replace harm in sorties and downtime phases respectively. I’m hitting maximum new terminology threshold quickly, and am in danger of overheating.

We move on from the rules summary to Setting Up, which is a collaborative world-building exercise. The collaborative world-building is not a difficult or challenging process in and of itself — it takes two pages — but I happen upon a problem in Armour Astir where it feels like it has some specificities — magic mechs called Astirs, channelers, stuff like that — but then wants us to generate the rest of the world ourselves. For me and my table, I need a little bit more. It would be sufficient to give me an actual foe and organisation, and go from there. Unlike in say, Apocalypse World, where being surprised by the world is part of the appeal, here we’re rebels against some kind of empire, and so it makes sense to just give us that empire to kick start things. If I were to actually do some collaborative world building to lead into Armour Astir, I think I’d need to do something very different — perhaps a set up session of another game like Microscope — because this doesn’t quite get me there.

I’m not going to go through the whole moves listing here, but it’s pretty typical for a Powered by the Apocalypse game — they always feel a bit much to be honest, but a necessity — and these all have accompanying commentary which, again, is a longstanding tradition but one I don’t really love. I feel like your design should speak for itself, and I value brevity, so designer commentary is not something I appreciate. When I think Powered by the Apocalypse moves, I think juicy moments that spur difficult and dramatic decision-making, like the ones in Gran Guignol, Under Hollow Hills, or Pasión de las Pasiones. These are not moves like that: instead they leverage the mechanical set up in the core mechanics section, and do this quite well, in a way that feels reminiscent of Blades in the Dark. Now, this diverges from my expectations, but it’s not a bad thing — it just places this closer to Beam Saber in intent than it does to Firebrands, something I didn’t expect. Another interesting side-effect is that it moves interpersonal relationships squarely into the spaces of gravity clocks, hooks and desperation/confidence, setting up a separate “relationship economy” that operates in tandem with but influenced by the action that occurs, and creates interesting in game prompts. I suspect that in-game, we’d also have opportunities for characters suited up appearing in the middle of the battle because a hook was activated by a desperate move, which is very very gundam. Playbook moves largely follow the same pattern, although there are a few exceptions, like the Firebrand move for the Paradigm, and the Captain’s Force Multiplier, both of which introduce some of the more juicy narrative twists I expect when I hear Powered by the Apocalypse. I get excited about these kind of moves, but they’re largely narrative and dramatic and not relational, maintaining that dichotomy between systems.

An interesting addition that also feels inspired by Blades in the Dark is the Carrier and downtime, which runs on a token economy in which the Director (the GM role) gets their own tokens to interfere and interact during this phase. This makes for a fun, active downtime without need for that ambiguous “free play” blob that confused so many in Blades in the Dark. There is a lot of punch in this very brief list of actions, and I like this system a lot.

I mentioned the playbooks, but one feature of them that I really like is Gravity Triggers, which effectively give each playbook a different reason for conflict in their relationships. This is a neat way to differentiate playbooks based on their personalities, and adds some relational uniqueness and fuel to otherwise fairly mechanically inclined playbooks.

Ok, conflict is a big one, and is pretty complex actually. A combat system, where there are five approaches, and different ranges, which determine who is acting desperately or with confidence against whom. These approaches are assigned by your playbook or astir (your mech). Tier exists here to help differentiate scale — a Unicron-style planet cannot be defeated by a mech, and a mech cannot be defeated by a lone human. This, again, feels inspired by Blades in the Dark, and leans into the mechanical combat in Armour Astir.

We then go onto a long equipment list. Here, again, we have hints of a world in the mind of the creator that we’re not privy to. This is all pretty juicy and more heavily illustrated than anywhere else in the game; this is all very good, and it makes me wonder why it starts with how to make an Astir rather than with the list of Astirs and a “by the way you can make one”. And actually, that’s not accurate: I know why, because a guiding principle here has been make it yourself here, and so of course it holds here too. The high quantity of art here makes me feel like in an earlier draft the lists weren’t there, but were added on request by play testers.

The Conflict Turn is a heavily structured faction turn, and this, I must say, I like a lot. A lot lot. The divisions of the Authority all acting out of concert but against the resistance is stellar, their automatic moves are stellar, it really gives a strong sense that all odds are against the player characters. The Cause works differently, because it’s in isolated cells, and become exhausted with activity limiting when it can provide aid. They both fight over pillars — major places and people — which I suspect will be the driving force for the missions that the player characters go on. In the conflict turn, everyone switches sides and plays out cutscenes of the authority or wider cause’s actions, which is cool and fun.

We next come to GM tips, which are pretty typical to be honest aside from some optional rules and a cool mechanic for rivals. These principles and moves don’t leave me shocked and awed, but they’re functional. More interesting are the mission hooks and factions that follow — there aren’t enough of them, but they’re really, really good. The appendices are also really flavourful and useful.

One of the big impressions I’m left with in Armour Astir is that I’m really intrigued by the world that is implied by everything in this book, but the book doesn’t want to tell me about that world, it wants me and my friends to make up my own. The mechanics imply a lot of interesting things well, as do the naming conventions. It’s pretty rare that I ask for more lore as I am, in general, a lore disliker, but there are exceptions, and this is one of them: I’d like more support to play this game, and it’s not given me here. I’ve been speaking a lot about Heart lately, something I reviewed a long time ago, and I said that it has “impeccable vibes”, by which I meant that the art and non-technical writing was really, really good at communicating a sense of place. Armour Astir gives me hints, but refuses to communicate any sense of place, and for me, that’s what I need. It’s not a mistake, its the author’s intent, but it’s a design direction that just doesn’t work for me. Apocalypse World, for example has a similar amount of guidance, and I don’t bounce, and I have roughly equal familiarity (that’s some, but not a lot) with the genre it approaches. Why? I have a working theory, and that’s that the playbooks and equipment lists don’t communicate as much here about the world itself, because they’re really focused on the more complex systems at play, rather than the narrative. In Apocalypse World, the playbooks are roles in the world, but here they’re roles in the carrier: They don’t teach us about the world outside the carrier. They don’t automatically imply anything, even by their lack of existence. Where in many games, the absence of a Paradigm might been no gods in this world, here divine power is in the approach chart. The psychic maelstrom looms over every playbook in Apocalypse World despite it being vague, but it’s a very specific thing that bring mystery and danger and potential, where the Authority and the Cause are known and necessary causes. The focus here on known and necessary world building instead of world building that activates and implies always of a familiar world, is, I suspect, why I feel left wanting.

I honestly was surprised by what Armour Astir is, which is a mech combat game where that conflict is a means to resolving relationships. Saying that, I’m honestly feeling like I missed the memo: Obviously this is what it should be. That is Gundam. What I expected it to do is take the other angle: Be a drama primarily, that was also about mechs sometimes. This was initially jarring to me, and I’m still not convinced it’s the right choice; it feels like the game I imagined this would be would be a better fit for a Powered by the Apocalypse game, and the game it is would be a more natural fit for a Forged in the Dark game. Potentially the author agrees: Her current project is a Forged in the Dark mech game. But the very heavy modification and broad inspiration taken here makes what it actually is a very interesting beast all of its own, mainly because it feels like an old mech kept running through ingenuity and spare parts, and yet it still fights well. It’s full of small elegant innovations that help achieve its sideloaded goals. A remarkable achievement.

I think the biggest error with the design approach is that because it’s so combat forward (which it is, in my opinion, despite clearly trying not to be), thematically it comes across a little garbled. In many ways, making this about a high school would be clearer than making it about a rebellion, because the impact is that you bring your own theme rather than are supplied one. It’s characterised by what it tries to emulate rather than its own perspective, and while cool, and I suspect it will be very fun, it rings a little hollow as a result. Games are usually at their most interesting when the author has their personal perspective and story rooted clearly in the text, and hence this feels awfully board gamey in its sterility and reluctance to give you a glimpse into the authors psyche. But, board games are still fun.

Does this bear out my theory about slowfunding games? My opinion is a little muddled as I adore this less than Mountain Home, but I think so, yes. We have a similarly unflashy, often workmanlike approach, with a clear understanding of what it is and innovative approaches to doing so, and is a little idiosyncratic in its inspirations and its interpretations of those inspirations. It subverts Apocalypse World in a similar way to how Blades in the Dark does. What it definitely isn’t is bloated or poorly organised, although it’s cleverness in information design pales in comparison to Mountain Home’s. It does show that one disadvantage of the slowfunding approach is the likelihood of bringing those extra team members on board: This could’ve used a layout artist, in my opinion. But it lacks the bloat and aimlessness characteristic of crowdfunded work.

Overall, would I bring this to my table? I think I want a little more than this provides. Is almost there, but not quite. I think the combat would be thrilling, and I can see set up for some really exciting moments and conflicts, and the pieces of this game — the conflict turn, the interactive antagonistic downtime — I will probably hack into other games at some point. But I have to build the world myself, and at that point I’d rather write my own emotion-forward mech game, the inverse of this: Pasión de las Pasiones in high school with mech escalation. But, if the perspective this takes on the genre is one that vibes with your own understanding of it, and you don’t mind the extent of the world-building required, then Armour Astir: Advent just might be right up your alley.

Idle Cartulary