Astro Knights

Frosted Games · 2025

Rework of rulebook + translation, English to German

Back in the second half of the 2010s, I bought Aeon’s End. It’s a cosmic horror boss battler oozing with theme, but the real kicker is and always will be its original take on deckbuilding: You never shuffle your deck. A decade and many expansions later, Indie Boards & Cards decided to reimplement the mechanics with a lighter, less desolate theme. Astro Knights overall evokes more of a kids’ space-hero cartoon feel, but is still a tight game with options to make it just as punishingly difficult as its storied ancestor. Frosted Games had already acted as Indie Boards & Cards’ licencee for the German editions of a range of Aeon’s End titles, so prior experience meant taking on Astro Knights made sense. Frosted Games has a habit of subjecting game rulebooks to substantial overhauls during localisation, so I was given the task of not only translating the game, but of drafting a reworked rulebook based on the German editions of the Aeon’s End counterparts. Unfortunately, no native layout files were available to mess around in, so I did the translation in Word and added literal instructions for formatting and text placement. It made for a very different kind of approach to translation from what I’m used to. Overall, I really enjoyed the job, especially as there were some shorter flavour texts I had free reign with. The Chief Editor at Frosted did go and swap over two of my terminology choices after I had handed everything off, and unfortunately missed a reference that would have needed to be changed to match, so players may occasionally run into some minor confusion. I always consider my terminology decisions carefully, getting back to me on why I chose as I did wouldn’t have hurt. But who knows, perhaps they’ve chalked it up as a lesson learnt.