1449: From the Game Shelf: Ascension: Storm of Souls

Ascension: Storm of Souls

Publisher: Gary Games
Designer: Justin Gary, John Fiorillo
Released: 2011
Players: 1-4 (1-6 with expansions)
Recommended Ages: 14+
Play Time: 30-60 minutes

Theme: Fantasy
Mechanics: Deckbuilding
Randomness: Moderate to high
Luck factor: Moderate
Strategy: Moderate
Interaction: Low

Ascension: Storm of Souls is one of several games in the Ascension series of fantasy-themed “deckbuilding” card games. In contrast to “customisable card games” (CCGs) such as Magic: The Gathering, Ascension: Storm of Souls comes with everything you need to play in a single box without the necessity of purchasing booster packs, and you build your deck naturally through the course of gameplay rather than prior to beginning play. This means that each time you play, things will likely proceed noticeably differently to previous encounters.

The rules of Ascension are also considerably simpler than games such as Magic and its ilk, making this an easy game to pick up and play, and a potential gateway into more complex card games.

How it Plays

In Ascension, you deal with two main resources: runes and combat power. Most of the cards you play will provide you with either or both of these resources, which may be spent on your turn but not stockpiled. Runes are generally used to purchase cards to add to your deck that will be of benefit to you in the future; combat power is used to defeat monsters, which are immediately worth “honour points”, and in some cases may be kept as trophies to be cashed in for an additional benefit later. There’s a set stock of honour points available at the start of the game according to the number of people playing, and when this is depleted, the game ends.

The cards that you either purchase or defeat are placed in the centre row on the game board, meaning that six are available at any one time. Purchasing or defeating a card immediately replaces it with another one, and there are several cards that are always available regardless of what is in the middle row. These are generally less effective than the more specialised cards from the middle row, but acquiring some of these is often a sound early-game strategy.

Since there are only two real mechanics to learn — how to buy things and how to kill things — and the remainder of the game involves reading the cards themselves to make use of special abilities, Ascension is a very quick and easy game to learn. The Storm of Souls version adds a couple of additional elements to the basic Ascension game that began with Chronicle of the Godslayer — specifically, the addition of “Event” cards, which stay in play until replaced by another one and have a constant effect on gameplay in some way, and the aforementioned “monster trophies” rule. These additions aren’t hard to learn, though it’s easy to forget the effect an Event card has, so be sure to check it each time your turn comes around.

At the end of the game, players add up the honour points they have earned through killing monsters and add the number of points they have on the cards they have purchased, and whoever has the most is the winner.

Bits and Pieces

Ascension’s main component is, of course, its deck of cards, which are made of good quality material, stand up to repeated shuffling and are of a standard size, so may be sleeved if you wish to protect them. The cards are designed in a similar way to standard customisable card game cards such as those seen in Magic and its ilk, with artwork at the top and descriptive text explaining special actions at the bottom. Iconography used is clear, simple and easy to learn, so most players will be able to pick up and play fairly quickly.

Aside from the cards, many new players’ eyes are drawn to the plastic gemstones that represent the pool of available “honour points”. These look nice, and it’s satisfying to acquire your own little collection of them — plus they provide a clear and simple means of determining how many points each player has earned through combat, though of course it’s important to try and remember how many points each player has on their cards, too — something which can only be determined by keeping an eye on which cards they buy and play.

Ascension also includes a pleasantly chunky gameboard with appropriately labelled spaces for the middle row of cards, the always-available cards, the draw deck, the event cards and the “void” (discard pile). This isn’t really necessary, but it provides a nice centrepiece to the game, makes setup easier and is also helpful when teaching the rules.

Is it Fun?

The deckbuilding nature of Ascension leads to a strong degree of randomisation, which makes the game very replayable. As with many other deckbuilding games, however, it’s more difficult to come up with a long-term strategy if you’re not sure exactly which cards are going to come up when — it’s not like Magic where you know what cards are going to definitely come into your hand at some point regardless of what you do.

This may frustrate players who like to come up with strategies in advance, but it does help level the playing field somewhat: everyone has an equal chance of getting their hands on the “best” cards, and it’s still possible to focus on purchasing specific cards with a particular strategy in mind rather than simply grabbing the first ones that become available: the various different categories of cards each have their own specialisms, so the most effective decks will take advantage of this.

Ascension is a satisfying game to play. There’s a wide variety of different cards that will come up over the course of the game, and playing a particularly devastating combo of cards that allows you to score a huge number of points in a single turn is very enjoyable. For those who find the base game getting a little stale, however, it’s possible to combine any of the Ascension games together for a wider selection of cards and some potential rules tweaks — later expansions and standalone sets add additional rules, while earlier sets simply add more cards and consequently more variety. Adding more cards to the mix also allows the game to support more players — up to six maximum — though it does significantly slow down with more players, and with interaction practically non-existent this can lead to some downtime.

Ascension actually plays best with just two players, because the more players you add, the more the centre row changes before it comes around to your turn again, making it harder to devise long-term strategies and turning the game into one where you’re more responding reactively to the situation you’re currently in rather than trying to think a few turns ahead. Playing this way isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is worth noting that it’s a very different experience to duelling it out with just two participants.

Overall, Ascension is a fun, lightweight card game that’s easy to learn, quick to pick up and speedy to play, making it ideal either as a filler game or an option for impromptu multi-game tournaments.

1447: From the Game Shelf: Guildhall

Guildhall

Publisher: AEG
Designer: Hope S. Hwang
Released: 2012
Players: 2-4
Recommended Ages: 12+
Play Time: 30 minutes

Theme: Medieval/Dark Ages
Mechanics: Set collection, hand management
Randomness: High
Luck factor: Moderate
Strategy: Moderate
Interaction: High

Guildhall is a card game themed around the concept of you opening… well, a guildhall. Your guildhall will play host to a variety of different professions, ranging from dancers to assassins; farmers to traders. The aim of the game is to score 20 Victory Points through a combination of point cards and individual points, and in order to do so you’ll need to collect sets of professions. There’s six different professions and five colours of each.

The rules of Guildhall are simple, straightforward and easy to follow and all the special mechanics are depicted through simple icons rather than text. Once you have your head around what all these icons mean, play is quick and snappy, making this an ideal filler game.

How it Plays

On your turn in Guildhall, you can take two actions. Your options from each action are to play a card to the table, which may trigger its special ability; to draw cards into your hand; or to use a completed “chapter” of your guildhall (all five colours of a single profession) to purchase one of the victory point cards, five of which are on offer at any one time. You are not allowed to play a card that is identical to one already down on the table — if you already have a red Dancer down, for example, you are not allowed to play another red Dancer, but you may play a blue Dancer instead if you have one.

Each of the profession cards in Guildhall has a different effect when you play it to the table, and each becomes more effective — or at least different — when you have more copies of that card in your guildhall already. For example, playing your first Dancer simply allows you to take an extra action; playing a Dancer when you have three Dancers in your guildhall already allows you to draw three extra cards and take an extra action.

Many of the profession cards allow you to mess with the other players to some degree. The Assassin card, for example, allows you to destroy cards that are in other players’ guildhalls, while the Trader forces another player to swap one (or more) of their guildhall’s cards with one (or more) of yours. Collecting sets is often a matter of manipulating what other players have available without annoying them too much — piss off an opponent and it’s very possible for them to exact amusing revenge on you with some well-chosen cards. If you want a quiet life, the Historian, Farmer and Weaver cards are handy — Historian lets you go through the discard pile, Farmer simply allows you to collect victory points at a slow rate, and Weaver allows you to play extra cards from your hand, perhaps in exchange for picking something up from your guildhall.

Take care with one rule when playing: cards played from your hand to the table do not go into your guildhall until the end of your turn — until that time, they are considered to be in the “action area” and as such chapters are not completed until your turn has ended. This means that you can’t play a card to finish a chapter and then immediately spend that chapter on a victory point card of sufficient value to win the game, for example. (You can, however, use special abilities of cards such as Weaver to complete a chapter before the end of your turn.)

Bits and Pieces

Being a card game, Guildhall’s box is largely taken up by, you guessed it, cards. There are two decks — a large one of all the profession cards and a smaller one of victory point cards — differentiated from one another by different backs, and separated into two distinct areas of the box insert, which leaves space for expansions. The only other components are a stack of victory point chips, used when playing the Farmer to acquire small quantities of victory points without buying cards.

The cards are good quality, of a satisfying thickness and pleasingly glossy. They’re standard-sized, too, which means they may be sleeved if you so desire. Artwork on the cards is distinctive, attractive and in keeping with the box art, while the lower half of the card is devoted to iconic descriptions of the various special abilities. It takes a little time to learn what all these mean, but there’s a handy guide in the instruction leaflet, plus all the card special abilities are helpfully summarised on a single page, too.

Cards can also be quickly differentiated by the icons in their top-left along with their large, prominent title text, and colour-blind players are catered to with the pennant down the left edge of the card, which displays a different piece of heraldry for each of the five colours.

Is it Fun?

Guildhall’s theme is mostly irrelevant to its mechanics, but the “collecting professions” concept helps put what you’re doing in the game into context, and the professions themselves mostly have thematically relevant special abilities: Assassins “kill” cards; Historians look back at what’s come before (i.e. the discard pile); Traders trade cards. Dancers, Farmers and Weavers have a somewhat more tenuous link to the theme of the game, but at least each of their purposes is clear and distinct from one another — every card feels like it has a use, and there’s little in the way of underpowered, “dead weight” cards to clutter up your hand — unless, of course, you just can’t get your hands on the right colour.

It’s a fun game that maybe takes a play or two to get your head around, but once you do it’s an enjoyable, quick and surprisingly cut-throat competitive filler game that’s well worth having in your collection — it’s just a bit of a shame it doesn’t support more than four players.

1446: From the Game Shelf: Dixit

Dixit

Publisher: Libellud
Designer: Jean-Louis Roubira
Released: 2008
Players: 3-6
Recommended ages: 8+
Play Time: 30 minutes

Theme: Abstract
Mechanics: Bluffing, communication, description, educated guessing
Randomness: Moderate to high
Luck factor: Depends on who you play it with!
Strategy: Light
Interaction: High

Dixit is a card-based party game that revolves around the idea of creatively describing images. (Do not confuse it with the 1983 crossword-building game of the same name, as the two are very different!) The aim of the game is to score points — this can be achieved by, depending on what your role is that turn, describing cards in just enough detail that one or two people around the table successfully guess what you were describing, by successfully identifying what that turn’s “storyteller” was describing, or by convincing other people that the card you played was the one the storyteller was describing.

It’s a quick, easy to learn game that’s high on communication and creativity, making it ideal for social gatherings. There are numerous expansions available too, as well as standalone variants that bump up the maximum player count to 8 rather than the original’s 6.

How it Plays

The role of “storyteller” is passed around the table one player at a time. On your turn as the storyteller, you must select one of the cards from your hand and play it face-down onto the table, then describe it in any way you please — a word, a phrase, a little song and dance routine.

Once this is done, all of the other players select a card from their hand that they believe would also fit the storyteller’s description and play them face-down. The storyteller then shuffles the played cards and reveals them to the table.

At this point, players secretly vote which one they think was the storyteller’s card using cardboard chips with numbers on them. The storyteller does not vote. All votes are revealed simultaneously, and the storyteller then reveals which card was theirs.

If all players correctly voted for the storyteller’s card or if no-one correctly identified it, all players except the storyteller receive two points. In all other cases, the storyteller and any players who successfully identified their card receive three points. Bonus points are awarded for each vote a player received for the card they played when they were not the storyteller. In other words, it’s in the storyteller’s interest to be slightly obtuse about their clues, but not so obtuse no-one will recognise what they’re talking about. Savvy storytellers will make use of references and descriptions they know only certain players around the table will catch.

Players then draw up to a hand of 6 cards, and the role of storyteller passes around the table. Play continues until the deck of cards is exhausted, and the player with the most points at the end is the winner.

Bits and Pieces

The highlight of Dixit is its 84 oversized cards, each of which depicts a different image. The images — the work of one Marie Cardouat — are all somewhat surreal in nature and deliberately difficult to describe in simple terms, but they have a consistent art style that is pleasingly distinctive and instantly recognisable.

Scoring is tracked using wooden rabbit markers that proceed around a track printed on the box insert which may be removed if desired. The markers are well-made but their shape makes them somewhat prone to falling over or being knocked around if the table or box is bumped inadvertently, and with the close positioning of the numbers on the board, this can sometimes lead to inaccurately tracked scores. The score tracker also only goes up to 30, and it’s possible for games — particularly those with fewer players — to exceed this total, necessitating further “laps” around the board.

Voting is accomplished through coloured cardboard tokens with numbers on one side and the Dixit logo on the back. They’re functional but in keeping with the game’s playful art style, and the bright, vibrant colours make each player’s tokens immediately distinguishable from one another.

Is it Fun?

Dixit’s a game you need to play with the right people, and it’s also a game that changes over time the more times you play it with the same people. Ideally, you want to play with a group of people who all know each other well so that psychological tricks such as obscure references and in-jokes can come into play. Those who are not very creative or imaginative — or those who find it difficult to grasp more abstract games — probably won’t have as good a time playing Dixit.

The more times you play, the more you’ll come to recognise various cards as they come up, and how people generally tend to describe them. This forces you to either come up with more creative ways of describing the images — or, of course, to invest in one of the various expansion decks available.

The game makes for some memorable occasions, however, particularly if someone comes up with a particularly creative (or offensive!) description for one of the cards. It’s fun trying to read the other players around the table, and determining how best to bluff your way to victory. It may initially seem like a simple, straightforward party game and indeed there’s nothing stopping you treating it as such. But it’s also possible to turn the game into a gruelling battle of wits against your rivals as you attempt to take advantage of what you know about all of them.

So yes, it’s very much a fun game — and a pleasantly short, light affair that’s good for either opening or capping off an evening’s gaming. If you have a group of players who would respond well to its creative challenges, it’s well worth your time.

1445: From the Game Shelf: Dungeonquest

[As promised, here is the first instalment in a series of posts exploring my collection of board games. I’m not making any promises as to how regular these will be since they’re a fair amount of work to put together, but ideally I’d like to cover everything on my shelf and hopefully provide a few of you with some ideas as to what games you might want to try with your friends sometime. Here we go with the game that happened to be in the top-left corner of the shelf, Dungeonquest.]

Dungeonquest (’80s Version)

Publisher: Games Workshop
Designer: Dan Glimne and Jakob Bonds
Released: 1987
Players: 1-4
Recommended ages: 12+
Play Time: 1 hour

Theme: Fantasy
Mechanics: Tile-laying, exploration, press-your-luck, player elimination
Co-Op or Competitive: Competitive, asymmetrical player abilities
Randomness: Very high
Luck factor: Very high
Strategy: Minimal
Interaction: Moderate

Dungeonquest is a simplistic dungeon crawler originally from Games Workshop back when they still made board games. It is a dungeon crawler in the purest sense of the word, though it bears little relation to Games Workshop’s other well-known dungeon-centric games such as Hero Quest, its Advanced counterpart and the later Warhammer Quest aside from a heavy focus on random generation and a necessary reliance on luck. The version I’m exploring here is from the late ’80s; Fantasy Flight Games have since revamped the game to a considerable degree and set it in their “Terrinoth” campaign setting along with tweaking, improving and outright changing a number of the mechanics described here.

In Dungeonquest, you take on the role of one of four different heroes who are attempting to raid the ruins of Dragonfire Castle. As you might expect, Dragonfire Castle plays host to a dragon — and as every good adventurer knows, where there’s a dragon, there’s treasure. As such, your aim is to get in to Dragonfire Castle, pinch as much loot from the dragon as you can and get out again without getting horribly killed by something or other.

It is, of course, not that simple, and more often than not you will find yourself getting horribly killed by something or other.

How it Plays

The basic mechanics of Dungeonquest involve drawing a face-down tile and placing it off one of the entrances to the room you’re in, then moving into it. According to the type of room drawn, various things might happen. Normal rooms have nothing special about them, but may be searched. They also force you to draw a Room card, which may force you into combat against a monster. Certain Room cards allow you to draw other cards relating to looting corpses or crypts for treasure — but there’s no guarantee you’ll find anything, and there’s a chance you’ll end up hurting yourself in the process.

Combat is resolved through a rock-paper-scissors contest against another player — you and your opponent each have a choice of three moves, and the combination of your two respective choices will determine who gets hit and how much damage they take according to a chart on the board. Depending on the group you play with, this will either end up being completely random or a brain-frying battle of wits.

Special rooms vary from a bottomless pit — which you must pass an Agility test using the dice to survive, else forfeit the game — to rotating rooms that immediately spin through 180 degrees once you enter, potentially trapping you in a dead end.

The aim of the game is to make your way to the dragon’s lair at the centre of the board — not necessarily as easy as it looks, depending on the room tiles you draw and the merry path they lead you — and steal its treasure. Acquiring treasure is a press-your-luck challenge in which you take treasure tokens and then draw dragon cards, hoping that the one you draw doesn’t depict the dragon awakening. The longer you stay gathering loot, the fewer cards there are to draw and consequently the greater chance you’ll be roasted alive.

Once you’ve stolen the treasure, in order to be credited for it and potentially win, you have to get back out of the dungeon before the turn timer expires. This makes for a minimal amount of strategy — in other words, determining how many turns’ grace period you have before you need to start heading homewards. Alternatively, you can risk trying to escape via an alternative route. Both options usually end in failure.

The winner of the game is whoever is not dead when all players have either escaped or died, and who has most treasure out of the survivors. Since it’s rare for anyone to survive, you may wish to implement a house rule determining who the winner is in case of everyone being dead.

Bits and Pieces

As you might expect from a Games Workshop game, Dungeonquest features some high-quality miniatures to depict the heroes, but these are by far the best quality components in the game.

The board itself is made up of six interlocking pieces, and its rather thin nature makes it somewhat prone to warping. This is a bit of a problem considering the number of things you need to lay on top of it over the course of a typical game.

The cards, which sport some gloriously ’80s fantasy artwork, are made of thin, flimsy cardboard and are all a little too small to be comfortable. Each deck is its own distinctive shape, too, and while it is thematically rather fun to draw “crypt” cards from a coffin-shaped deck, this makes storage of the cards a little awkward, particularly given the lack of an insert in the box. This is a game in which all its components absolutely need to be bagged and stored separately from one another if you don’t want to spend longer setting up than playing.

Is it Fun?

Dungeonquest is not a game to be taken seriously. There’s no persistent progression of characters — they don’t survive long enough for that — and there’s nothing to do with the treasure save winning the game. Its highly luck-based nature makes it impossible to devise strategies for, so it’s more a game for groups that don’t mind a high amount of randomness — and groups that don’t mind losing.

It’s also not very well balanced. Certain characters have a significantly higher chance of survival than others — there’s one for whom a bottomless pit tile is almost-guaranteed unavoidable death, for example, and others who have a tough job surviving the amount of damage the average player takes on a run into the castle.

The game makes for good stories when everything goes wrong if nothing else, and it’s undoubtedly fun from a “one disaster after another” perspective, but for those players who want to get their teeth into something a little meatier or more strategic, it’s probably one to pass by.

So yes, it is fun; it’s just not something you’ll probably want to play week after week. It’s an enjoyable game for a drunken beer-and-pretzels sort of evening; just be sure to have something with a bit more depth up your sleeve to play afterwards. Or perhaps before!