Tranquility: The Descent

We featured the original Tranquility (Board Game Hub) on Board's Eye View back in 2019. Last year, designer James Emmerson and artist Tristam Rossin revisited their cooperative game with Tranquility: The Ascent (Lucky Duck), which was a standalone game with its own particular pyramid-shaped challenges. Tranquility: The Descent then is the third game in the series but it's entirely standalone and you don't need to own or have played either of the other Tranquility games to play this one.

Like its predecessors, Tranquility: The Descent can be played solitaire but it's primarily a 2-5 player cooperative card game predicated on limited communication between the players. Your aim is to lay out cards in rows of eight in ascending numerical order but you can only lay a card after you've first laid a card face down as the base or 'element' for a subsequently played card of the same colour (ie: the cards that have to be in ascending numerical order). Players don't know what cards the other players hold, and you mustn't tell them, but players can all see from the backs of other players' cards what colours they hold. Players' hands should be arranged in numerical order so, from their relative positions in a player's hand and that player's previous card plays, you may be able to make inferences and deductions about whether a card of a particular colour is high or low.

On your turn you must play a card and draw a card. Players win by collectively completing five eight-card rows, and the deck doubles as a timer because you collectively lose if, having run down the draw deck, any player runs out of cards. You can't progress to start a new row till the row above is completed, so there will be occasions when all a player can do is play a card on its element side on top of another element card. At best this simply burns through the deck but it can mean you are forced to play a card that you know is likely to screw up the next player's intended play.

Players have a limited number of single-use 'canary' tokens that are primarily used to peek at a card in another player's hand and there are cards that let you move a card to a position in another row. A player can use their turn to buy and place a 'wild statue' card which can take the place of any number, so can fill an awkward gap in a row. Wild statue cards don't come for free, however: if a player takes one, the players must between them discard (face down) three cards of matching colour...

Tranquility: The Descent makes for a cooperative puzzler that seems deceptively easy at the start but it gets increasingly challenging as each row nears completion. Often it's the timing of when to make the card sacrifice to fill a row with a wild statue card that makes the difference between winning and losing. And if and when you find you're beating the game too readily, the publishers Wayfarer have you covered because they've incorporated mini expansions and tweaks that allow players to further step up the difficulty level; for example by using one or more cards that set an additional condition that has to be met; such as having a row with no cards of value 1, 2, 20 or 21.

Wayfarer Games are bringing Tranquility: The Descent to Kickstarter. Click here to find out more.

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