Ascension: A deck building game on my iPhone

Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer is both an actual deck-building card game, and an iOS game.  I recently bought the iOS version to play on my iPhone, and I want to tell you about it.  This is a great port of a good deck-building game.



I had never played the board game, but that was not a problem because the iPhone version includes a useful tutorial, and written rules.  All players (2-4 are supported) start with the same deck initially, then use their runes to get new cards, and their power to defeat monsters to score victory point.  In the top left of the game board there are two cards always available to buy with runes, and one monster always available to attack.  In the middle there are 6 other cards available, and each time one of this cards is acquired or defeated, a random new card takes its place.  You drag cards to the discard (red box in the lower right) to acquire them, and drag them to the void (purple box top right) to defeat or banish them.

I am in the middle of a turn, I have 21 victory points, my opponent has 23, and there are 16 left before the game ends.

Each turn you start with 5 cards, and play them by dragging them into the gray bar.  You can play them in any order, and when the card has special effect the game either handles them automatically (like draw more) or gives you a choice.  There are many cards that let you "banish a card from the center your and/or your discard," which is something that could have been done poorly in an iPhone game.  Well don't worry about that, the folks at Incinerator Studios that built the iPhone game did an amazing job.  Given that they were building an iPhone port of an existing game, I don't think it would be possible to do a better job than they did.  Everything works well, and everything makes sense.  It even supports online multiplayer and local pass-and-play multiplayer with a mix of AI and human players.  The $5 game supports both iPhone and iPad, and while the iPhone game is good, I think it would be even better on iPad.

I have a few gripes about the card game itself, but overall it is pretty fun.  There are a lot of different cards, and there seem to be more than just one successful strategy.  You start with 8 cards that give a rune point, and 2 cards that give a power point.  So your first two hands can either be: 5 runes followed by 3 runes, 2 power, or 4 rune, 1 power twice.  Since 1 power is totally useless, it seem objectively better in almost every case to get the first set of hands.  That seems like a poor system to me.  It is also possible for the center row of cards to have either no monsters, or all monsters.  And they can all be too expensive for either player at the start of the game.  These situations resolve themselves because you can always use the top 3 cards.  But they just aren't fun, and it seems like there should be some mechanism to prevent them.

I have had fun playing against the AI, and I still suck enough that I regularly lose to the medium AI.  I can't seem to figure out how to turn the AI to hard, is this a bug?  Online play is fun, and works pretty well with random people. Because it supports both live multiplayer, and asynchronous turn based multiplayer, you will sometimes join games with random people who don't respond.  Once you get a live game going, it works great and is a lot of fun.  

Leave some comments on how I can stop sucking at this game, I should at least be able to beat the AI.

Overall it is a great port of a good deck-building game, and you should check it out.  

Score 8/10

More screen shots:

Watching my online opponent take his first turn.

The multiplayer menu.

Uggh there are only monsters in the center, and it is early in the game. Luckily I have 5 power so I can actually beat one of them.

This shows up between turns in local pass-and-play multiplayer

Creating a 3 human, 1 medium AI local multiplayer game.