Like all deck-building games, the first step when you open up the box is to unwrap all the cards, sort them out, and find some plastic sleeves for them. If you're going to play any of these games, Dominion, Thunderstone, or Ascension, you really want to include room for card sleeves in your budget. You can play without them, but this is a game about shuffling and reshuffling cards over and over. An ounce of prevention will keep this game going a lot longer.
Anyway. Unlike its older brothers, Ascension includes a board. You don't need it. Really, it's just a player aid. But it's a reasonably well laid out and helpful player aid, so we'll give it credit there.
Gameplay is very simple. It's basically the Dominion formula, except even less structured. You start the game with a deck of 10 cards. 8 cards are apprentices that provide runes (money) and 2 cards are militia that provide strength (also money, but murder money). Each turn you start with a 5 card hand. You can play all of your cards each turn and buy any number of cards you can afford, unlike the strict limits of Dominion. Some of the cards you play provide runes; the cards that you buy with runes go into your discard pile and are now permanent parts of your deck. Some of the cards provide strength; the cards that you defeat (read: buy) with strength give you an immediate effect and then go to the trash pile and never enter your deck. Some cards give you honor (victory point) tokens when they are played or defeated. Like Puerto Rico or Race For the Galaxy there is a pool of points that ends the game when it's empty. Many cards have special abilities when played. Most cards that you purchase into your deck have honor values on the card, and give up their points at the end of the game. The winner is whoever has the most points, from earned tokens and purchased cards combined, at the end of the game.
Mechanically, everything works fine. There are no huge combos to slow the game down like Dominion, which may make the game more appealing to casual players. The special abilities on the cards are very clear and straightforward; the influence of the M:tG players on the design team really shows in that regard. The costs and values of the cards seem to be balanced well. So far, nothing has come up that I can point to and say "this is broken."
While the rules are fine, the rulebook is not. After the fiasco of Thunderstone and its four (well, I stopped keeping track at 4. Maybe there have been more revisions) rulebooks, you'd think that game designers and publishers would be very careful to double check the rulebook. It's not like there's even much to proofread: The actual rules only amount to about a page or two, the rest of the book is devoted to labeled pictures of the cards and a glossary.
But sadly, the rulebook is clearly several edits away from a final product. Several rules are simply missing: For example, in the section about spending strength to defeat a monster, it says that after you defeat the monster, you discard the monster and immediately replace it with a new card from the draw pile. Then it refers you to the previous section of the rules, the section about buying cards with runes, for more information. But that section doesn't mention replacing purchased cards at all! Also, one of the cards, the cultist, is a special monster that is never discarded no matter how many times you defeat it. But the rules don't actually say that, so it appears to just be a bonus for the first person to scrounge up 2 spare strength to kill it.
I suspect the rulebook was due another revision before printing, but never got it. In the setup description it calls the draw pile the "center deck", but the board calls it the "portal deck." This sounds to me like a few changes got made that never made it into the rulebook. Or maybe it just wasn't proofread enough. Always a possibility. Still, once you've got those missing rules, everything runs smoothly.
One major difference between Ascension and Dominion (or Thunderstone) is during setup. In Ascension, rather than coming up with a selection of cards to be available each game, you basically just shuffle everything together and turn 6 cards face up. This means that from turn to turn you have different choices, but from game to game it's always the same cards that could show up. In practice, this makes it hard to plan out a long term strategy; on your turn you just buy what's available. If you're lucky it pairs up with stuff you already bought. Being allowed to purchase as many cards as you can afford each turn means your decks grow much more quickly, which reduces how often you cycle, so you may not even see the cards you're buying for quite some time. There are cards that trigger off of each other, such as construct cards (cards that remain in play) affecting other construct cards, but in practice you're lucky to see these combos actually happen. On the other hand, the costs of the cards seem to be balanced with that in mind; you don't really pay extra for abilities that may never happen.
Some random thoughts: I really like how the Cultist card works in this context. It's the card I mentioned earlier that's always available to be defeated. So even if there's nothing else out there to fight, you can always spend 2 strength to get 1 honor token. You can do this as many times a turn as you can afford. It helps prevent the feeling of not being able to play because your entire hand is strength cards and all the available cards require runes. It also means there is a constant drain on the honor point pool, moving things along toward endgame.
Random thought the second: Like Thunderstone, Ascension tries to be Dominion With Theme. In Ascension's case, they go for M:tG style blurbs on each card. The simplified battle mechanics in Ascension (pay strength, defeat monster, get reward) actually feels a lot more thematic than Thunderstone's somewhat counterintuitive system. On the other hand, Ascension doesn't have much of a feeling of progression. You don't upgrade your heroes and items, you just get more of them. You don't really take on tougher and tougher monsters, you just fight whatever's available, and the tough monsters just sit there taking up space until someone gets a good draw. Most disappointing, despite the avowed goal of the game being to slay the evil god Samael (Chronicles of the Godslayer and all that), you never actually slay any gods.
Who should get Ascension? If you thought Dominion looked interesting but too daunting, Ascension is probably an excellent gateway game. It's certainly simpler that Dominion, and the honor token pool puts a time limit on the game that keeps things from dragging out. On the other hand, it probably won't satisfy the itch of more hardcore gamers. There just isn't that much depth to the game.
No comments:
Post a Comment