What Eon Altar is
Eon Altar is a local co-op role-playing game for one to four players, set in the dungeons and tunnels beneath Tarnum Fortress. You take a party of heroes down into the depths to deal with an ancient, malevolent presence stirring inside the Altar itself. The game is built around tactical turn-based combat, quests and challenges, and a story told across nine episodic installments. The world is an original sword-and-sorcery fantasy setting with its own gods, myths and legends, and the NPCs are fully voice acted while you supply the voice for your own character.
How your group plays it
Each player uses a smartphone as their character sheet. Everyone downloads the free Controller App, and the phones connect to the central game over local WiFi, so internet access is not needed. The phone gives you context-sensitive information, lets you upgrade and manage your character without pausing the action for anyone else, and feeds you private thoughts from your character that the rest of the group never sees.
That private channel is the heart of the social side. You decide what to tell your friends and what to keep to yourself, you can share information or use it against them, and you take part in player-to-player dialogue to pick apart the myths and legends you run into. Whether you cooperate or betray the party is yours to choose, and your choices shape where your hero ends up. Combat is tactical and turn-based, so coordinating movement and tactics from each phone matters as much as the talking.
Before you start
Everyone needs the Controller App installed on a phone or tablet, and all devices have to be on the same local WiFi network. The app runs on iOS 8 or later (iPhone 4s or later, iPad 2 or later, iPad Mini) and on Android 4.1 Jellybean or later with 512MB of RAM. The game supports Remote Play Together, and you can also play solo.
The story is released in episodes, with chapters and combat arenas spread across them, so expect to work through the content in installments rather than in one sitting. A Prelude is available to try first if you want to see how the phone setup and the turn-based combat feel before committing to a full session with the group.