So not only is this another boardgame adaptation, but it’s a card game to boot. As much as I love card games, I’m getting sick of them myself so this will probably be the last one for a while. The good news is that I got a ton of expansions in one package when I got this, which would have been ruinously expensive to buy in physical form. The bad news is that this game was clearly inspired by Dominion but I think I still like the older game more.

Like Dominion, this is a deckbuilding game in which each player starts with a basic deck and endlessly draws from it as needed to gain resources which are then spent to add more cards to the deck. Unlike Dominion, you don’t buy from a set of cards that are fixed at the beginning of each game. Instead there is a small set of basic cards that are always available in every game plus a row of cards randomly drawn from the central deck and replenished whenever a card leaves the row. Furthermore there are no limitations in terms of actions and buys in Ascension. You can play every card in your hand, and indeed the user interface has a handy play all button just for that purpose, and buy as many cards as you can afford. Finally there are two resources: runes are used to buy cards and power which is used to defeat monsters. Both buyable cards and monsters randomly populate the centre row but monster cards once defeated earn points immediately and perhaps have a special effect once but aren’t added back into your deck.

There are other complications, such as there being cards called Constructs that remain in play but the basic game is fairly easy to figure out. There are four factions in the game and synergies when you play cards of the same faction together but this doesn’t really matter until you add in the expansions. The user interface requires some figuring out, for example when you have the option to draw a card you’re supposed to click and drag from your deck to the playing area but on the whole it does its job. It’s particularly impressive how they manage to cram in all of the added elements from the later expansions. The AI is very, very good. At hard difficulty, I find that whether I win or not is a matter of luck. But when things get complex, the AI can take a long time to figure out what it wants to do. At easy difficulty, you’ll almost certainly win as the AI seems to prefer buying from the default, always available cards but it plays very fast.

The theme is fairly generic dark fantasy with decent art but forgettable flavor text. There’s an addictive quality to trying to build the best deck you possibly can and particularly once you add in the later expansions, there will be great moments when you pull off massive combos and that always feels fantastic. But fundamentally I find it difficult to love this design due to the inherent randomness. Whether the centre row is filled with buyable cards or monsters, cards of one faction or another, cheap ones or expensive ones is completely random. What makes it feel even worse is that you might see the card that is the perfect fit for your deck but the AI snaps it up before it comes to your turn. It’s basically pointless to pay attention to the centre row before it’s your turn because who knows what will happen. Of course you still want to build the best deck possible of what happens to be available during your turn but that decision usually turns out to be not hard at all because the resources as determined by your hand greatly limits your possible choices. That’s why when you do manage to build a deck that sort of works, it feels more like luck than anything else.

By limiting the cards that are buyable to a fixed set, Dominion offers replayability since the value of each card changes depending on what other cards are available and of course how close the game is to ending. Ascension seems to want to offer replayability through randomness and the sheer variety of cards. There truly is a staggering number of cards in the game, so much so that buying this package and slowly working through the various expansions alone provides plenty of solid gameplay as you learn the various card sets. This is especially true as the expansions add more complex mechanics with new resource types, a new mini-deck to buy cards from etc. That’s not even counting the promo cards, some of which do things that would be completely impossible in a physical game, such as randomly drawing cards from any expansion.

While the game allows you to throw every expansion into the mix, that would be a truly insane way to play. I think it makes more sense to add, say, two at a time. Once you understand the card mix of each expansion, that also allows you to tailor card choices accordingly. For example, constructs are only removed from play by monster cards but different expansions have monsters with varying abilities. In expansions where there are rarely monsters with the ability to remove constructs, they stick around a long time, potentially lasting a whole game and that is very powerful. This adds variety and strategy but the whole thing is still terribly random. Plus the beginning of the game is often the same as everyone is too poor to afford anything better than the default Mystics and Heavy Infantry. Some games get rather pathetic when this phase drags on as all of the cards in the centre row are super expensive ones.

Obviously this game is far from terrible but as I said, I just can’t find it in me to really like it. The inherent randomness means that even when I pull off a fantastic combo I know that it’s only a matter of chance. Plus while there is a ridiculous variety of cards, in the end the central mechanic of the game dictate that they mostly interact with one another by modifying each other’s costs or providing resources. In the end this game really is what it seems to be, a weird mash of Euro-game mechanics and American love of randomness and fantasy conflict. I still spent quite a bit of time on it just to see all of the cards and the expansions but in the end I find that I’d rather have been playing either Dominion or Magic: The Gathering, instead of this inelegant mashup of the two.