Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer
While the great deckbuilding game hasn’t been created yet (sorry Dominion fans), Ascension:Chronicle of the Godslayer is a good step in the right direction. It plays quite quickly (if a bit slower than Dominion) and it trades off some luck in exchange for fun, meaningful decisions throughout the game and a purpose beyond fiddling with cards (namely, defeating monsters).
The result is a fun, yet flawed game that I’ve played more than a dozen times face-to-face plus any number of games via the iOS app. It’s starting to wear a bit thin now (I haven’t gotten to check out the expansion yet), but I’m happy with it.
It avoids the two largest traps Dominion fell into: frontloading all of the interesting decisions and making the game about nothing more than fiddling with the cards. The former it cures with the randomly drawn tableau, and it comes at the price of a healthy dose of luck – if the right card is drawn right before your turn you can be off to the races and having a hand tilted toward runes when it’s all monsters available (or vice versa) is a bummer. Also, there is a mild-to-moderate rich-get-richer problem since lucky breaks make it easier to take advantage of subsequent lucky breaks. It’s not so bad with more players, since there is a higher chance that another player has the luck and tools to keep up, but being left behind is no fun.
Since it’s hard to win the game without defeating some significant monsters along the way, your focus is not just on acquiring card which help you acquire more cards. This secondary note gives the game more variability than Dominion and is welcome. While Ascension still suffers from long turns caused by deck-churning combos, they do not seem to reach the epic proportions of Dominion’s worst excesses.
I think Ascension would have been better with separate monster and “runes” decks and tableaus, so both paths are always viable. Also, the economies of scale for paying higher prices are a little out of whack, since the designers and developers did not seem to take into account the value of getting an effect using a single card in hand versus relying on multiple cards in hand. Nevertheless, there are enough viable strategies, and the factions have enough distinct flavour, to keep the game worth exploring for many plays.
