1223: Chronicle of the Godslayer

One of my favourite iOS games also happens to be one of my favourite physical multiplayer games. Dubbed Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer (not Wrath of the Godslayer as I seem to keep thinking it is), it’s what’s known as a “deckbuilding” game, and it has numerous attractive qualities. It has simple to understand rules, it plays at a pleasingly rapid pace, and it provides a lot of the fun found in expensive collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering and its ilk without requiring that you obsessively try and collect rare cards via fair means or foul.

Okay, it doesn’t have anywhere near the depth of Magic, say, but it provides its own entertaining experience that is eminently worthwhile.

Here’s the gist of Ascension for those who have never encountered either it or a deckbuilding game before. You begin the game with a deck made up of Apprentices and Militia cards. Each of these is worth one of one of the game’s two currencies: Apprentices are worth 1 “rune” while Militia are worth 1 “combat”. The basic mechanic of the game involves you playing cards from your hand and then using the total accumulated value of “rune” cards to purchase new cards to add to your deck, and to use the total accumulated value of “combat” cards to defeat monster cards and score points. Once a communal pool of points has been exhausted, the game draws to a close and whoever has the highest total score acquired through both defeated monsters and purchased cards wins.

Simple, right? Where it gets interesting is in the fact that most of the cards you purchase or defeat in the game have some form of special effect that gets resolved when you play them. Some are “constructs”, which means that they remain in play and have an ongoing effect, in the Storm of Souls variant, there are also monsters that provide you with “trophies” to hold on to that can be redeemed at a later time for various benefits. The particularly fun thing about the game is in spotting which cards will be most advantageous to you and purchasing or defeating them. As you buy cards, your deck expands — this potentially provides you with more options, but at the same time makes it harder for “favourite” cards to come around more quickly; conversely certain cards’ special abilities let you “banish” cards from your deck to whittle it down to size if necessary.

Finding a good balance between acquiring cards and offloading trash is key, because simply having the biggest deck isn’t a guarantee of success; at the same time, though, the point value of the cards you have purchased is secret until the end of the game, so it’s entirely possible for someone to have been apparently ahead of you on points for most of a match, only for you to swoop in and defeat them with the value of the cards you’ve acquired over the course of the game.

The nice thing about the iOS version of the game is that it’s a totally faithful recreation of the card game experience, only with nice 21st-century benefits such as asynchronous online multiplayer — play your turn when it’s convenient to you — and, well, the ability to play without faffing around with all those cards. (That said, there is something rather pleasant about playing a card game’s physical incarnation.)

The iOS version of Ascension is developed by a company called Playdek, who are also responsible for a number of other excellent board and card game ports for iOS, including Nightfall, Summoner Wars, Can’t Stop, Penny Arcade: Gamers vs Evil and Fluxx. They’re also responsible for the upcoming iOS version of Agricola, which I’m hoping will help me end my long-standing losing streak on that bloody game by allowing me the opportunity to practice a bit more regularly. If you’re an iDevice-toting board game fan, you could certainly do far worse than check their various pieces of awesomeness out.