Aang's Destiny is fundamentally a reskin of another licensed game, Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle. But Harry Potter has become a toxic brand for many licensees. J.K. Rowling's own reputation seems disappointingly robust despite her shitty transphobia -- but in the board game world, publishers of Harry Potter products have faced everything from lagging sales to protests to boycotts. You can't blame The Op Games for deciding to attach a new property to their otherwise well-regarded game.
People who love Avatar: The Last Airbender really love it. And while those fans seem less enthusiastic about the live action adaptation, Netflix racked up enough views to renew it for two more seasons to complete the story. So it's an appealing license right now. It's not a "one for one" analog for Harry Potter -- but it is set in a world of magic, with a young "chosen one" whose friends help him stand against the forces of evil. Converting a Harry Potter game into an Avatar game doesn't seem like a big stretch.
Hogwarts Battle is one of the very few campaign games that my friends and I continued to play even after completing the campaign. It's the rare cooperative game where everyone has a chance to shine, and even experienced players can still be challenged by it. But I already own that game. I don't need an exact copy of it in Avatar clothes. And smartly, Aang's Destiny is not exactly that. The designers made two notable changes to the game. Both were interesting ideas for changing things up, enough to make the new, seven-game campaign feel like a sufficiently different experience. But I'd say both ultimately make the game a little less good overall.
The first change was a necessary one for an Avatar game -- a representation of bending, by tagging a group of cards with the elements of air, water, earth, and fire. These cards each have an additional effect for a player with the proper bending ability. It feels really good to play one and collect on that bonus; you feel powerful. But for players familiar with Hogwarts Battle, it amplifies the already-loudly-telegraphed strategies attached to each character. Even more than before, cards in Aang's Destiny clearly "belong" to specific characters, leaving you with the feeling of less tactical flexibility.
The second change was less clearly "necessary," but also seems inspired by Avatar as a property -- specifically, by the desire to portray its story as faithfully as possible. Hogwarts Battle captured the seven Harry Potter books with a series of boxes, opened one by one, gradually adding more content to the game. The game didn't mind if players encountered "what if?" variations that differed from what really happened in the books; for example, characters who died in one book could still show up in games based on a later book.
Aang's Destiny doesn't play so fast and loose. As you open boxes to progress through the story, you also remove content from the game, looking for marks on certain cards that indicate their time in the campaign is over. On the plus side, this allows each game to feel more like a "scenario" with unique gameplay. On the down side, it means that once the campaign is said and done, it feels less like you've created a "permanent state" for the game to live in for subsequent plays.
In a world where I'd never played Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle, I might have been more enamored with Avatar: The Last Airbender – Aang's Destiny. But that not being this world... well, I liked the game; just clearly not as much. I give it a B.
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