This is a personal, largely spoiler free (or spoiler-vague) review of the Ages Unwound custom campaign by Olivia Juliet for Arkham Horror the Card Game.
In Ages Unwound, the investigators find themselves targeted by a gang hit - which ends up dragging them into a fight against a cult trying to unmake time and reality. Rather than a hop in a ton of different time periods (which does happen for one scenario), this campaign is focused on a single time loop and the events around it.
Ages Unwound skips straight to the point - there's little in the way of story text and set-up, instead diving right into the meat of it. Your investigators are being pursued by gangsters who have burnt down your home, you don't know why, and you have to deal with it. This ends up dragging you into the plot of a time-unraveling cult, and before you know it, you're in deep. Ages Unwound recognizes the tropes it's playing with, and it knows you recognize them too - it doesn't need giant blocks of text or huge explanations, often working with just a knowing wink that you understand that's going on.
This knowing invitation is one of the many places Ages Unwound shines - right from the get-go when it asks if you want to accept "Strange Assistance", there's a clear understanding of what this will mean down the line even though nothing is told to you directly. The theme of borrowing from your future to strength your current situation - or suffering in the present to help reinforce your future - is all through the game, from story choices to encounter cards. Despite taking on such a potentially massive topic, the campaign also does a great job in restricting its scope in a solid way - it never get bogged down with so many alternate choices or paths, instead giving you a very clear showing of cause and effect. You know what's happening, you know why it's happening, and you know how that's your fault. It would have been easy for a time travel plot to get in over its head, but that never happens here. Even down to the campaign length, with only 7 scenarios, the creator clearly was careful to only include what felt important.
The mechanics likewise stay reasonable all through the campaign, but never boring. Again, it's all about restraint - giving you unusual choices and penalties, but ones you easily understand. Encounter cards offering you different trade offs of bonuses and penalties is a big theme, and Ages Unwound makes its mechanics weird not through being complicated and cumbersome, but by doing unusual things, and giving the player a lot of control. The campaign feels hard, but not particularly unfair or punishing in ways you can't circumvent - you're more likely to blame yourself than the game. I wouldn't be surprised if someone lost it, but it seems more likely to provoke a response of "Ok, THIS time, let's..." instead of "Screw this, this sucks". It also helps that the campaign shows its hand early - by the third scenario, you've seen most of the mechanics that will be thrown at you, and there's not going to be particularly big "gotchas" at that point, even though there are surprises.
Ages Unwound's scenarios start out good, if a bit plain. The first two scenarios aren't really doing anything particularly new or exciting, but that's good for the start of the campaign - they're easing you in with little things, and preparing you for what will be required later in subtle ways. By the time the third scenario comes around, you know exactly what the campaign is leading up to - it's building up anticipation for the eventual climax. The way the stakes get ratcheted up is brilliant - Scenario 5 is an, amazing scenario, maybe one of the best arkham scenarios I've played, but it would feel flat as a stand-alone. It's what comes before, and the promise of what comes after that makes it work - and that promise pays off all the way to the last scenario. Sure, it's a climax that resembles many we've seen before - but it's a fresh, interesting take on the idea that suits the campaign's themes.
All of Ages Unwound's best scenarios only work in the context of the greater campaign - meanwhile, the scenarios that would work best as standalones are the weakest (albeit still good!). There's no real "down" scenario here when played as a campaign, although after the first two, you might not "get it" - just thinking "this is good arkham" instead of "this is amazing arkham". There's nothing wrong with scenarios 1 and 2, but they haven't let you get to the truly wonderful parts yet - and playing through, it's hard to see that as a mistake.
Rules wise, things also hold up well. There's only two times through the entire campaign I had to check myself - one of which from an encounter card that interacts strangely with assets, and another because of how Tabletop Simulator streamlines set-up it's easy to miss an important location that has to come into play. Things feel tightly designed, with no real hitches to it.
Ages Unwound is a fantastic campaign, and it's hard to sing its praises enough. I highly recommend everyone give it a try.
More on Ages Unwound:
Ages Unwound: Spoiler-Light Review