Tamashii: Chronicle of Ascend BGG ↗

Tamashii: Chronicle of Ascend · English edition · (2023)

Your rating: 7.0

My BGG Comment

We‘ve played the 2nd chapter of the Tamashii Chronicles of Ascend campaign. We won barely… while also making a few stupid mistakes. The scenario difficulty increases over time. While players gain quite some improvements. And it was not all that difficult—at least not with 2 players. With a single character could have got far more tricky. The game is played in rounds which have phases some of which are played in parallel and some in turns by player. In theory this should speed up everything but despite pretty good rules retention the first phase just takes a little long. This is „planning“ during which you refill your board from your bag and then „program“ some patterns to do stuff in later phases. Programming means moving pieces or switching adjacent ones. With just 4 moves (on average) you can‘t do a lot. Basic Patterns can give you resources or XP to spend on upgrades. Other patterns can claim a new body or maybe hack one of Ascend‘s evil bots that is after you. Once you have planned your turn, everyone gets to move to a new district, gain some more „noise“ (which attracts the enemies), do the district action and launch some patterns you programmed. After that is the combat phase which is played in turns again but can easily be played in parallel. Combat is a bit tricky initially and in this scenario we had a total of 3 resets (when a body loses all of its integrity aka HP you reset which may include losing the body). Resets also give you „duds“ to include in your bag—while you can easily get rid of the corrupted data tokens you gain this way (or by running away from enemies), each scenario is also on a fixed pool of these tokens and if that is empty you lose. Overall I like the gameplay but the scenarios today was too long. And the complexity of the actual game with the programming is just so that I doubt I would want to 2-hand the game but it is so far not engaging enough to make me want to play this as a game beyond trying to discover the story. The decisions which patterns you want to make are always straightforward, the question is can you get to the patterns you need? Setup and tear down are pretty long and a bit on the fiddly side. Now that I have the game, I will hopefully play a few times and maybe even finish the campaign—it is not overly long, I think 12 scenarios in the base game and another handfull in the expansion. I doubt I will use the scenario generator. I do hope that I might discover some more depth in the next games… and I really hope it works solo. If I had played this at SPIEL or a convention it would not have made my buy-list. But I adore the cyberpunk setting and looks and so I was helpless against a crowdfunding campaign. 7/10