Ascendia: Seasons of Thargos
- Board's Eye View
- 5 hours ago
- 3 min read
We've grown familar with Thargos over the years. It's been the fantasy setting for SBG Editions' series of battle card games, including Heroes of Thargos and Battle Mages. We make a return visit to Thargos in Ascendia but this time in an adventure-style game with a strong push-your-luck element.
Designed by Philipp Kehl, the premise of Ascendia is that the 2-4 players (tho' there's a solitaire mode too) are competing to be selected for the Lordship of the valley. To successfully apply to be selected as Lord and win the game, a player merely needs to have their standee in the central village hex and meet the threshold (10 in the basic game). When you make a bid for the Lordship you roll two six-sided dice but only your lower roll counts; whenever you roll a 5 in this game (the maximum on the custom d6) it's treated as an exploding die (ie: you get to roll another die and add it to the total). Prior to making your bid tho' you'll have collected Renown tokens by adventuring and these also count towards your total; so go to the village with nine Renown tokens and you only need to roll a 1 to win the game. Except... whenever you roll a Guardian symbol in this game, it's an automatic fail. If you make a bid for the Lordship that fails, you lose all the Renown you hazarded in your attempt. It's wise therefore to also come equipped with at least a couple of active 'storypoint' tokens that can be used any time in the game to buy re-rolls.
The route then to making your end-game dash for glory is to explore the modular board of 18 hexes. You'll be trying to collect raw materials, used to fashion items that upgrade your character's ability to fight, charm or forage, and to appease the Guardians that appear whenever a player rolls that symbol. If the Guardian standees are all out on the board when another Guardian is rolled, then it's game over for everyone. Ascendia is subtitled Seasons of Thargos and each round a card reveals which hex has to be flipped to its winter side. Tiles on the winter side don't ordinarily allow for foraging or exploration, so you can expect the board to get ever tighter over the course of the game. And the tile-flipping also serves as a game timer: the game ends if all the tiles are on their winter side, and, again, everyone loses.
Tho' this may sound unforgiving, Ascendia is in reality a light family-friendly adventure game with appealing art from James Churchill, Martin Paz Romero and Ryan Verhagen. Success or failure of everything you do is determined by dice rolls, so there's inevitably a high luck factor, but you can hope to mitigate against unlucky rolls by equipping your character with items that upgrade their abilities (give them extra dice or an addition to their roll) and by acquiring and spending the storypoint tokens that let you re-roll.
We've found in our plays at Board's Eye View that each play of Ascendia has a distinct arc. Some players initially focus on collecting resources and upgrading, others go all in early on in seeking 'encounters' that mainly involve fighting bandits or poisoning rat swarms. Success in such encounters is rewarded with two Renown. When you encounter animals, you can fight them for their hide (a raw material essential for several of the crafted items) or you can tame an animal as a companion to add its passive ability. Some animal companions allow you to flip a die to its opposite side, meaning you can turn a Guardian roll (automatic fail) into an exploding 5! Tho' it's a competitive game, there'll be times in Ascendia when players will find themselves working together. You may need to do that to avoid the Guardians game-losing trigger but the game anyway incentivises semi-cooperative play because in a joint enterprise it rewards everyone who contributes.
Ultimately tho', the game ends in a dash for glory - making a bid for Lordship before winter has entirely engulfed the land. Go too early and ill-equipped and you'll very likely be unsuccessful, losing you all your Renown and effectively taking you completely out of the running... Timing is all!
We've been playing a preview version of Ascendia ahead of the game's crowdfunding launch, so it's likely there will be tweaks and rule changes in the final version. Ascendia: Seasons of Thargos is due to launch on Gamefound on 15 May. Click here for more details of the campaign.
