Aberration Board Game Review
WBG Score: 8.5
Player Count:1-4
You’ll like this if you like: Tense co-ops with a monster theme!
Published by: Ghostfire Gaming
Designed by: Peter Lee
This is a free review copy. See our review policy here.
A tense cooperative survival game that feels brilliant in the moment, even if its long-term staying power is less convincing.
There is a point in almost every game of Aberration where the board looks manageable, the heroes feel capable and everyone believes the village might actually survive. Then a Shadow reveals something horrible, Influence takes away another section of the map and a monster suddenly barrels towards the centre. Within minutes, the group has gone from calmly discussing options to desperately trying to prevent four different ways to lose at once. It's delightful!
That is where Aberration is at its best. It is tense, dramatic and wonderfully good at making every action feel important, even though the individual decisions are often quite straightforward. It can feel like a ten out of ten while you are playing, but does it stack up to repeat plays?
But why are we reviewing this game now? "It came out in 2025, and WBG only reviews the hotness, right!?" I hear you cry. Well, yes. This is the 2025 retail version. No extra miniatures or fancy upgrades. And that is available to buy right now. But there is also a fancy new version coming to crowdfunding soon, with new wooden tokens for the fire, stun, and damage tokens (which I really want!) as well as an updated box cover, revised rulebook (which it needs!) with some rules clarifications (no rules changes), and they are looking to tweak a few of the scenarios in the Scenario Booklet to make them a little more tense and exciting. Wait, more tense!!!!? Oh, and the miniatures now come as standard, all in one box!!! Well worth checking out I would say. But, back to this version, let's get it to the table for some fun!
Setting up the nightmare
Each scenario uses four map tiles arranged around a central village, with paths leading in from every direction. There are six tiles in total, and all double sided, so lots of variety. Vantage Points, fires, Shadows and scenario-specific elements are placed across the board, while the various enemy types (different for each scenario) are organised beside the Great Beast board. The setup is not especially difficult, but there is enough sorting and placement involved that it feels slightly disproportionate when playing one of the shorter scenarios. But after a few games, you will get a lot quicker at this. And the scenario booklet does a great job letting you know which map tiles, monsters, and other things you need for each set up.
Players each combine one of six Heroes with one of six Classes, creating 36 possible combinations in the core game. Your Hero provides a unique powerful ability (including original stuff like dice re-rolls!), while your Class determines most of the actions available during play, each with their own ubique combination of powerful actions. Mainly - fightin'!
The included standees are perfectly good, easy to read and attractive enough that I never felt the game needed more plastic with the minis, but I would obviously prefer them. The artwork is lovely throughout, the dark fantasy setting is immediately clear and the map gradually becoming corrupted gives the table a suitably grim sense of collapse. Setup, everything looks great. Deeply thematic. And very appealing.
Drawing plans from a bag
At the start of each Hero turn, you move one Action Chip from your Ability Board into your bag. Removing that chip may improve one of your attributes or reveal an Item reward, while adding it to the bag gradually alters the actions you are more likely to draw. Put in a red strength chip, and your strength will grow from two to three fairly quickly. Also, with an extra red chip in the bag, the chances you will pull a red chip and be able to use your strength to fight will also grow. It's a lovely symbiosis. You then pull chips equal to your Intellect, so three to start with, or four in a solo game; and spend them on matching actions from your Hero and Class boards. Whites count as wild. Blacks, which are added due to various bad things happening to you, can only be used as your top wild action, which generally will be to move or fight. But each time you draw a black, you take one more damage.
The four main colours cover Intellect, Strength, Speed and Command. These broadly govern manipulation and traps, melee damage, movement and ranged combat, and assigning Villagers to useful jobs. Every Class also has flexible top actions that can be paid for with any chip, which means an awkward draw rarely leaves you unable to contribute.
This bag-building system works well because every chip has two purposes. Moving one from your board improves your character while also shaping future turns, forcing you to decide whether you want stronger statistics or a more focused bag. The system is clever and satisfying, although the development arc is relatively restrained and your turns do not transform as dramatically as the visible progression initially promises. But each game, you need to tailor which chips to add to your bag, based on the scenarios requirements, and your characters strength.
Items help add some flexibility. Each one can either provide a larger benefit on your turn or be discarded for a smaller reactive effect - shown on the bottom of the card, such as preventing damage, rerolling dice or adding to an attack. You can play item cards anytime, on any players turn, helping yourself, or any other player. These shared interventions create some of the game’s best cooperative moments, especially when another player produces exactly the card needed to rescue an apparently doomed plan.
Something moves in the dark
Enemies usually enter the map as facedown Shadow tokens rather than visible monsters. A Shadow is revealed when it meets a Hero, encounters fire, or is exposed by a special effect, at which point it may spawn one or more Aberrations and trigger an additional penalty. You know something is approaching, but not whether it is a manageable Horde, a dangerous Monstrosity, or another chunk of Influence waiting to ruin the landscape. Sometimes, it may even just be a lonely returning villager.
The fog-of-war element is one of the strongest parts of the design. Placing fires is not merely a defensive convenience, but a way of controlling when and where threats become visible. Heroes who can reveal Shadows safely feel genuinely useful, particularly once the available enemy standees are already on the map and another reveal could cause existing creatures to activate immediately. There are a lot of knock-on affects like that in the game, where one bad token flip and boom! Disaster.
Influence is even nastier. It permanently removes spaces from the board, pushes future enemies closer to the village, and can corrupt secured Vantage Points. Fill an entire map tile with Influence, and the game ends immediately, so the forest itself becomes another enemy that is gradually closing around you. Influence is added by various effects, mainly the aberrations appearing themselves, and also the end of round Great Beast cards. More on that soon.
Defence is only half the job
Despite appearances, Aberration does not feel like a traditional tower defence game. Monsters move towards the village and must be stopped, but simply killing everything will not win the game. Victory comes from advancing the Survival track by completing Objectives and securing Vantage Points, which makes this feel more like a tense turn-optimisation puzzle wrapped in tower defence clothing. Fighting the monsters can be secondary in most games. Crucial, unavoidable, fun, and tense. But secondary.
That distinction matters because the most important decision is often not which monster to attack. You may need to ignore an approaching creature so that someone can reach a Vantage Point, assign a Villager or complete the current Objective before the Great Beast deck runs out. Every turn becomes a question of how much danger the group can tolerate while still making progress towards the only actual victory condition. Because if you don't focus on that, the game will defeat you. Time is very much of the essence in this game.
Vantage Points are particularly effective because they offer both immediate and ongoing rewards. Securing one grants Survival (the only way to win the game) and unlocks another Villager assignment, potentially allowing the group to heal, draw Items, reveal Shadows, place fire or attack enemies. Villagers return to the centre each round, so allocating them becomes a small but useful worker-placement puzzle layered over the main crisis.
Objectives are more uneven. Many encourage behaviour that fits naturally with what the group already wants to do, but others can feel much easier or harder depending on the current board state and player count. Because Survival depends so heavily on completing them, a favourable Objective can accelerate a victory while an awkward one may leave the group spending precious actions to replace it. Some items cards let you switch them out though, and in truth, most are easy enough so that even the troublesome are completed and replaced without too much hassle.
Everything is fine until it absolutely is not
After every Hero has acted, all visible Aberrations activate, followed by every Shadow. The Great Beast then strengthens an enemy type, resolves an event and usually throws more Shadows onto the map. These turns move quickly, but they can undo an entire round of careful planning with frightening efficiency. Each enemy piece moves one step closer towards your village, and if it enters it, you gain fear. You have very little fear to play with, and reach the top threshold - game over.
There are numerous ways to lose. Too much Fear ends the game as we just mentioned, but so too does a full tile of Influence, if ever one of the four main tiles that make up the b are full of Influence tokens. Also, the death of any Hero ends the game and running out of Great Beast cards ends the game. You will only ever have four to nine of these cards, which equals the total number of rounds in that scenario before, yes you guessed it, death and failure! Deaths can arrive suddenly, especially when several enemies activate in sequence or an unlucky Shadow reveal causes another chain of attacks.
The Great Beat cards are drawn at the end of each round, and each show three main things. First, which enemy is boosted. Such as above, on the Rapid Corruption card where you can see the level one cards are increased. These means switching the card shown to represent this card up a level. Each enemy has six levels and moving up through them will increase their attack, defence and special powers. You can see this below with the Raging Bear, through their level one, three and six cards.
The Great Beast card will then show you a specific action to do, generally bad—but some can help, such as the final card here, which asks you to move a Strength chip into your bag from the discard, which may help your next turn. But of course, if you don't have one, damage! Finally, new enemies are spawned. So even the most effective team, who cleans up all Aberrations each round, will find new monsters to fight and occupy their time away from survival-gaining missions and objectives every round. And each enemy has only three standees for it, just one for the Monstrosities! And if you have to spawn one when you have no available standee to place, all other monsters of that type already on the board will activate, which will be three when a Horde. Activate means fight or move closer, so the knock-on effects really do escalate if you don't keep things under control.
Taking damage is not entirely negative because Heroes gain Transformation cards as their health deteriorates and they reach certain milestones in their failing health. These mutations usually provide a useful new ability alongside an immediate penalty, creating a neat thematic tension between becoming stronger and moving closer to defeat. It is a clever system, although the harshest transformations can feel like another problem added to a situation that was already going badly.
The result of all this is a game that frequently feels one mistake away from disaster. That pressure is exciting, and the group satisfaction when a plan comes together is genuine. Winning is less a huge cinematic celebration and more a collective exhale after squeezing through a rapidly closing gap. It can often be seen coming a few turns away, after a real tension that precedes that, so can sometimes fall a little flat. But losses often come completely out of the blue from a series of unfortunate cascading events!
A long night, perhaps too many nights
The scenario book is ambitious, with 16 scenarios of different lengths and complexity. Different enemy combinations, layouts, and special rules provide variety, and the Hero and Class system gives groups plenty of combinations to test. On paper, there is a substantial amount of game here. And eight games in, across six scenarios (lost a few and tried them again, you don't have to, but I am a completionist!), I can say I am quite hooked.
I am less convinced that many groups will play enough sessions to see everything. The core rhythm remains largely unchanged, and the available actions do not vary dramatically from turn to turn. You move, attack, assign Villagers, reveal Shadows and attempt to complete Objectives, with the pressure changing more than the basic decisions.
That repetition becomes clearer when several games are played close together. Aberration remains enjoyable, but the sense of discovery can fade a little. Longer scenarios give the bag-building and character progression more room to develop, although they also make the repeated action structure more noticeable. I enjoyed it immensely throughout, but I can see how others may not. There are other things to do: build barricades, escort villagers, secure outposts. It's a bit like Pandemic in this way. It's a co-op game. You and your friends against the board. You won't always have the exact same puzzle to work out, but it won't ever be that different, and your turns won't change that much. But you need to optimize your moves to win, and if you do, the sense of satisfaction can be great. If you enjoy that sort of thing, this could be for you.
Pros
Excellent tension, with several credible ways to lose and very little room for wasted turns.
Strong integration between the theme, Shadows, fire, Influence and the collapsing map.
Flexible Hero and Class combinations supported by satisfying bag building and cooperative Item use.
Attractive artwork and perfectly serviceable standees in the standard edition.
Cons
Setup can feel lengthy compared with the duration of shorter scenarios.
Actions and tactical patterns become repetitive across multiple plays.
Objective difficulty can be uneven and may affect different player counts inconsistently.
Reaching the end of the Survival track can feel more relieving than climactic.
Final thoughts
Aberration is a highly enjoyable cooperative game that understands how to create pressure. Its overlapping threats, hidden enemies and narrow victory path keep everyone involved, while Items and Villagers give players enough ways to help each other without drowning the game in complexity. The theme fits the mechanisms beautifully, and watching the forest physically disappear beneath Influence is both clever and deeply unpleasant.
Its weaknesses appear over time rather than during the first few games. The scenario book promises considerable longevity, but the repeated actions and modest character development make me question how many groups will genuinely experience all of it. This is a game I would happily return to, but I would avoid playing it too frequently and exhausting its best tricks. Perhaps three scenarios at a time, each time.
While it is on the table, though, Aberration is tense, engaging and often excellent. It may not deliver a thunderous final showdown, but surviving by the narrowest possible margin still feels like an achievement. Sometimes saving the village is less about glory and more about making sure nobody becomes the Beast’s evening snack.
