Ashes And Amber - Board Game Review - Why Do We Fall?
Transcript
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Hi everyone on the broken mele. Win or lose, I'm going to be honest with you. And we got a slightly different one here. This is Ashes and Amber. This is an indie game effectively. So, this is the same guy who does his own design, his own publishing and everything. And, you know, I've been sent a copy, so very much thank you for that. And this one had me intrigued because of its concept, a civilization-based card game. Okay, that already gets me interested. I like games like Fruity Ages and the like that do this kind of thing. But this one isn't so much about building up a civilization in terms of right here's my Aztecs and I now have all the corn and I'm I'm a reign of farmers or whatever and I make lots of food but I suck at military you know and that kind of thing. It doesn't go down that route.
This one talks more about the rise and fall of civilizations where essentially you are building up cities for your civilization. I mean call them what they will. They don't really have well until you use some of the asymmetric stuff they don't really have a name. It's more that your civilization creates cities by way of cards. And these cards will, you know, give you resources that can be used to, you know, acquire other cards or the cards themselves might be just currency. But these cities, these stacks will come and go as the game goes on. You know, what you build in round one won't be there in round five because at the end of every round, something bad happens and basically kills off a bunch of your cards. Your job is to essentially, you know, kind of pick your battles to decide which stuff is worth protecting, which stuff isn't, and for the stuff that does get burned, you know, burnt to ash effectively, what will you do to move forward with that?
It's a a concept I have not seen in another Civilization card game. So, that alone just thought, you know what, this is something different. And even if the game doesn't fully work, I got to give props to anybody who tries something a little bit different, whether it's in mechanics or theme. So, they sent me it. I went in pretty much completely blind cuz I don't watch Kickstarter preview videos. So, you know, I had no idea what the mechanics and that were going to be like. Just saw an interesting looking cover, saw an interesting concept, and figured
what the hell.
Ashes and Amber is played through five eras effectively. You've got prehistory and then you go through the different eras. These are basically timeline cards that showcase what you do in each era because there are subtle differences in terms of the round structure. There is also an ambition at the end which is chosen at random when the game starts which will have some interesting little effects that you got to contend with in the last era. But for the most part each era revolves around card play. So you have various cards. You have chronicle cards which represent the cards from each particular age. Most of them will consist of resource cards, which basically means an icon in the bottom to say it's engineering or food for the like. And some of them will have special effects. Move a card, create a city, you know, draw one, discard one, you know, the classic card play effects that you would expect. And in every single era, you will have at random from a fairly largest stack a calamity that's going to happen or a catastrophe, I think the actual name is called. So this is one here from the Middle Ages, for example.
And this one will have negative effects that will take place that everybody around the table will have to contend with, which mostly revolve around two concepts. One, taking death cards. Death cards basically are dead cards. They're not much use, and the only way to get rid of them is with specific effects. But what they do is that they slowly kill off other cards as you go along. But then you also have the calamities specifically target cards in your cities, which if you don't protect them, will turn to ash. Ash is essentially a temporary currency for the next round. So even if something burns, there's still a use you'll get out of it, but it's basically just a generic card that is used for currency. And if you don't use it quick enough, well then it goes away. What you're also able to do is claim wonders in the particular age. So the antiquity age here, we've got, let's see, we've got the Tower of Babel, Colossus of Rose, Great Pyramids of Giza, you know, and a few others. And in the other section, we've also got resilience cards, which are essentially bought that either have temporary protection effects for some of your cards, or they could have one really good effect that can protect an entire city, but it goes away and burns to ash afterwards. What you essentially do in each round is that you collect cards by way of an income phase. How many cards you draw is dictated by how many cities you have, whether you're still holding on to your starting amber card, and how many city and how many cards are in your respective cities. you would essentially draw X amount of cards and then you'll get to draw a bunch of cards and pick one depending on how many cities you have and how tall they are. So it varies
for each player. These cards are then used to acquire other cards and the city stacks are essentially built in such a way that you have cards on top and cards on bottom. So the card on the top you can trigger its effect. Cards anywhere else can be spent for various types of currency but you need it to be on the top to have its effect. And typically something like a deaf card you'll stick on the bottom because you want it somewhere like out of the way. This is an example of one city that I've got here. I've got an amber card. I've got an engineering a food card. One ashes card and a deaf card. You know, that could be an example of a slightly deteriorating city that I have. And you might have multiple of these. The what is essentially happening is that your actions are spent to buy cards which most of the time have a discard cost of cards from your city. So you're act you're actively having to spend stuff from your cities in order to get these better cards, but then also trying to mitigate the damage that is impending.
You know, for example, you're going to take a death card, it's going to kill something that's next to it, and your tallest city is about to get half of its like cards nuked if you're not careful. So what you're deciding to do is decide, well, what would I target? What stuff am I willing to let go of? And if you want to buy some of these resilience cards in order to protect bits of your city, well, now's the time to buy them. And they will have different requirements. They like specific resource cards, like a food card or an engineering, or they could just be discard generic cards like ashes, for example, in order to acquire them. Each round plays out in essentially that way. But in later rounds, you also have to deal with decisive moment cards, which basically revolve around, you know, one means of getting rid of death and some certain types of cards. But you manage you can get more victory points if you fulfill these. And at the end of the game, you've also got projects, which are basically little personal objectives and the main ambition at the end, which is another effect that you have to contend with in round five. The victory points of the game are called utopia points, and this is a very lowscoring game.
essentially like you'll be lucky if you score anywhere like 10 to 15 points in this game. It really is low scoring. Utopia cards as you collect them are worth one point each, but they're eroded away by any death cards that you happen to acquire. Hence, they're double-sided in that regard.
You could kill all the girls who are prettier than me.
Well, that would just leave England.
So, that's kind of a brief summary of like how things go. And certainly, if you're talking like if you want a box full of cards, you're going to get them here. I mean, there's a lot. You can't see them all on this table, but I mean, you know, let me put it this way. You know, this is a deck of cards for one of the eras, right? This is just the chronicle cards from one era. That's it. There is a ton of cards here. I mean, that is just era five. Okay. There's the chronicle cards for era 4. There's the chronicle cards for era 3. There's the chronicle cards for era 2. I mean, that's just the chronicle cards. I haven't even got into the wonders or the resilience cards yet. And then you've got the death ones. You've got the ashes ones, amber, and that. There's a lot. There's a lot of cards. The game boasts about having a lot of unique cards, although that might be slightly misleading because yes, there are a lot of unique art cards, but there's a lot of rinse repeat with the abilities. You know, there'll be plenty enough in this deck for example, that you know, the vast majority of them, I mean, just like taking this particular deck here, all of these cards in the deck are simply just resource cards. Yes, they're different.
One of them is spilled wine. The other one is rotten rice. The other one is spoiled wheat. The other one's a windmill. The other one's a millstone. Whatever. It all does the same thing. It's basically a card with a symbol on it. And then you've only got this many cards with actual abilities. But then I'm already looking through like the first five here. You know, I basically put this deck back how it was when I first unpacked it. And the first six of them do the exact same thing. And then the next six of those do the exact same thing. And then the final six again do the exact same thing. So this deck only has really four types of cards in it. A resource card and three different abilities. So the term unique is really only down to the artwork. And you know otherwise there's only so much like variety with these cards. Now one thing that I do have to stress with the artwork, the artwork I do think looks fantastic. It is beautiful. I love this kind of, you know, almost like a sort of black and white style with color imposed on it. It gives me that sort of this war of mind feeling, but I do have to stress this part out. I there is a thread on BG that explains, you know, what the designer has done in terms of the art and there has been suspicions that it is AI generated. From what the designer has said, the artwork isn't AI generated, but software tools are used for him to basically muck around with the artwork and create unique stuff. Some of which do use AI as part of the tool. So, it's kind of a gray area as to what you would
consider that to be in the terms of AI. I mean, I think the artwork on these cards looks fantastic, but there's only so much cop I can give them when AI is part of the equation. I would much rather they were handdrawn by somebody, you know, a human being with no AI interference. But there is a Fred on Boge Geek with this discussion. I'll even put it in the description so you can have a read of it yourself. You can even chat to the guy. He's very vocal on BG and you know, you can kind of draw your own conclusions by that. But uh yeah, suffice to say, I will warn you that some AI tools have been used with this art. It's not 100% AI generated from what I can see, but yeah, there is some AI with the tools. I'm going to leave you to draw your conclusions on that and focus more on the game play.
So, other components wise, not a huge amount because it is pretty much just cards. I mean, you get an insert to hold the cards themselves and what you essentially get is a bunch of boxes. You have to spend ages assembling these, you know, not not massively sturdy, but reasonably good um, you know, cardboard boxes, each one for a specific [snorts] decks. And these are quite useful because I mean, I have got decks of cards littered all over this table. And if I had to pack them away in the box without these things, it'd be an absolute pain. But it is cool to have these. You know, they basically open up and you can put the deck in one side and you basically discard the cards on the other. So you don't actually have to take the cards out of these boxes. I've done so just, you know, for playing this game a bunch of times. But you could happily just have these decks, take them out when you need them, open it up, have a discard pile, an actual pile, and then when you're done with that particular era, you just simply close the box up, which does sometimes require a little bit of a careful with the flapping, but there you go. There's the box, and you can just stick it back in. So, you're kind of on you're packing it away as you're playing it, which is nice. Nice.
I mean, I'm glad that these are in the game and they weren't just left as a, you know, you didn't just get a divider and you had to basically, you know, fifth around fifth around, you know, sift around through a box to get them. So, these are a nice touch. But other than that, there isn't really any components to speak of. It is basically just cards and a bunch of little wallets like this. We'll get on to those a little bit later. Uh, you have got some player aids. The game has quite a lot of iconography, it must be said. I mean, this entire back of the sheet is lots of unique icons, but a lot of them are just variations of each other. And the player aid is more than enough to get you going. And the other side revolves around like, you know, the the phases for particular rounds. Again, it's great that they're in here. You know, there's one for each player. So, again, good. I like it when player raids are in a game, but it shouldn't take you too long to get used to the iconography. But, yeah, there is quite a lot of it. And there's no, you know, I mean, the the text does explain what a lot of them does. It's a bit like Terraforming Mars and the like where and Ark Nova where, you know, the text explains what the symbology does.
So, it shouldn't take you too long. And one kudos for the game is that the game is not particularly difficult to learn. It's a little bit weird at first because the tutorial they've got on their YouTube channel is a bit hit and miss, but the rule book is written reasonably well. There's a good amount of FAQ at the back. There's some round examples and you know, pictorial representation as well. Um, but it's not a particularly complex game. You know, the game quotes it can be learned in about 15 minutes. Maybe that's a little bit optimistic, but you know, we're not talking that long to learn a game yourself because each of the eras kind of plays out the same with just some subtle tweaks. And the gameplay loop is not that complex. I mean, you basically get in a multiplayer game, you get a couple of actions or you can claim a card, keep going until someone until everyone's passed. clean, you know, do the catastrophe next round, get your incoming cards, and then rinse, repeat in a similar fashion. If you're playing solo, you don't even do any of that. I mean, the solo mode is literally just basically do what you like. You know, optimize it as much as you can and try to reach a point threshold at the end as well as make sure you do those decisive moment cards. Otherwise, that's an auto fail. So, there's no bot per se, but you can happily play this solo or you can play this with up to four players. Not that I think you should.
This definitely for me felt like a solo game only.
That's putting it mildly 007.
The interaction in this game is pretty bare bones. You have, you know, basically just a bunch of cards based on the player count that are laid out and then everyone's taking actions with their own cities and the only interaction you really have is the fact that somebody might claim a card before you do. That's it. Everybody gets affected by the catastrophes. Everybody has their own cards they're doing. Everyone is doing their own puzzle. You know, we'll get on to where there's a potential bit of interaction later on. But yeah, this game in its base form plays like a multiplayer solitaire puzzle, which means that the enjoyment I've had from this has come pretty much from a solo play, you know? I mean, not to say that you won't enjoy a multiplayer game, but it says 40 minutes per player on the box. That's a little bit of an exaggeration. I mean, I'm actually kind of pleased that a game actually says more on the timer than it actually takes, cuz most publishers will lie about it and say it takes like 15 minutes to play a 3-hour game.
Wibbly wobbly tiny wimy.
Yeah, 40 minutes per player is probably a little bit too far. You could play a game of this in 45 to 60 minutes by yourself, and you're probably still only looking about two Yeah, two hours tops, I would say, to play a fourplayer game. It doesn't take that long, assuming people are relatively familiar with the iconography and stuff. You know, it didn't take us that long to do it, even with relatively new players. Definitely don't stick this in front of anybody who's brand new to games or a fairly light gamer, cuz I think there's too much you've got to think about before you get onto it.
Dear God, what is it like in your funny little brains? It must be so boring.
So, is the game play fun? Well, yes and no. I mean, there is a decent amount to think about here. It's definitely got some depth because this is not It says it's an epic card game. Not sure I'd use the word epic.
I don't think it means what you think it means.
Not exactly the one I'd use for here, but this card game does have a bit of depth because when you're creating these cities, you really do have to think about not only what cards you're going to use to create these cities, but this is a game of losing cards and gaining cards. You know, it's it's not punishing per se. I mean, it can punish you. It is taking cards away from you, but you know that going in. You know that you're not going to you can't get too attached to these cards. This isn't a civilization game where you start off from the ground, build some farms, build some mice, and watch it grow grow grow like a typical civilization game. Your stuff is basically going to go, "Oh, I've got some stuff. Death. Got some stuff. Death. Got some stuff. Death." And you may grow to some extent. Like you might in a subsequent round be able to do a bit more than you did the previous round, but stuff's going to die. You're not going to finish a round all squeaky clean with nothing getting killed. I mean, maybe in the first round, but you know, in subsequent rounds when you got multiple cities and multiple stuff happening with the catastrophes, yeah, good luck trying to protect every card you have. Stuff's going to die.
I built a second one that sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one that burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp.
The actual gameplay loop itself is a little bit repetitive. You know, you are basically doing the same thing each round. You get a bunch of new cards which as I say the abilities are not particularly varied. I mean they get a little bit more interesting as you go through the game but not crazy extents and again there's just not a lot of variety because a lot of the cards are just resource icon cards and nothing else. You can look at the you can read the flavor text and learn something cool. You can marvel at the artwork depending on what your perspective on that is and you go well that looks like a nice picture. But yeah, the fact that I see one of them is a icon for this and that is an icon for that doesn't really give me much variety. So I find myself playing the same sort of like game each time I play, particularly in its base game form. And so as much as it's an interesting amount of depth, I feel that the gameplay loop just kind of recycles itself a bit too much. You know, when I play it the next time, I'm like, "Right, so this is probably what I'm doing in the first round, and this is probably what I'm doing in the second round as well. Okay, I've drawn a bunch of cards, and three of those are engineering, two of those are food, one of them is a culture, and oh, there's the one carbon ability. Draw one, discard one. Yay." I mean, not they're not interesting enough abilities. This isn't, you know, you don't get really cool effects like I mean, a good example would be probably something like innovation innovation little card game. I mean, you're just playing little abstract cards based on the tech tree, but the abilities and innovation are a bit more crazy, a bit more out there, and that is definitely more of a tactical. I mean, this one's
quite a tactical game as well, but that one definitely has more going on. And this isn't the same as something like an Arc Nova or Terraform Mars or even an Imperium. Someone tried to compare this to, which doesn't really work. Imperium and this are not the same game in any way, shape, or form really. But Imperium has more funky abilities and stuff that you're doing. This one is very basic. It's a lot more simplistic. Um, so you know, when you get to the end, it's interesting to see how well you did. You know, it's basically how well did you fight this losing battle against the ages. It's different, but I don't know. As much as there is a decent amount of variety with these, you know, catastrophe cards and stuff, it's not the greatest amount of variety in terms of the abilities. I mean, you'll you'll gear yourself for whatever they happen to be. It's just the pictures are all unique. And again, the pictures are nice depending on your perspective. Uh, but there is a couple of ways to like make the game a little bit more varied. Uh, the couple little mini expansions which I haven't tried are the remnants and the land cards. Haven't bothered with those yet, but they're just mini expansions.
The main thing that you can do, which is in the base game, is utilize these tribes. So, there's quite a lot of these tribes, 19 to be precise. And they come in these little wallets here. And basically, they give you five cards each. One of them is just the fire card, which is your starting card. No big deal. It's pretty much the same as always, maybe with some tweaks. But what else it gives you is essentially four cards that you can buy for yourself. Using each try makes you a little bit more asymmetric with your cities. So, you know, for this one, the elders, I flipped this card. This is my fire. This fire card looks exactly the same as all the other ones. Okay, so that's the starting card. But then in order, you are allowed to buy these cards. One, two, three, four. And they're double-sided. So effectively, you've got eight different like possibilities that you can kind of buy for. And these ones will be geared towards a particular theme. Like one of them may like really like you getting certain icons. One of them may want you to have multiple tiny cities. One may really like you to have the big tall city. So they do gear you in a little respect. And some of them do increase the interaction. There are some that let you like pass cards to other players or, you know, care more about what they're doing in relation to you, but they are very specific tribes. And that's not to say that this game suddenly becomes interactive as a result. You need to use very specific tribes from this slot in order to give this game any kind of interaction. I do like this concept though. I mean, this concept is pretty cool. You know, I wish like, you know, I'd like to see this in some other games because I mean, 19 different versions is pretty sweet to have in your base set. Most places, most
places would give you like four, four to six maybe, and that would be it, but this one gives you 19, which I know it's just four cards with eight sides on it, but it's not bad going. I got to give props for that. So, you know, these I recommend you use in every game. Yes, you might want to learn the game and its mechanics without using them at first, but really this game badly needs these in to give it any kind of asymmetry and to add a little bit to the variety and just make the game play a little bit more interesting. It saddens me to think of you missing out. Overall, Ashes and Amber is it's an an odd one. It the concept is great. I really like this concept with the card game. The idea that you're building a civ and you're watching it rise and fall. you know what theme it's trying to portray is sound. I really like that. It's great that it's got, you know, these cases and a lot of cards, but the cards just simply aren't varied enough. I mean, most of them are just the same thing. Oh, look, you know, in act four, you now get two symbols on a card. Yay. But you still don't have that many abilities across the cards, and they're basically just revamps of each other. I mean, you might get create a city in act two, and in era in era four, you basically get create two cities. I mean, these aren't crazy abilities. There's a lot of variety in terms of number of cards, but what the content is isn't varied enough. Most of that is down to these tribe abilities.
That's kind of where a lot of it will come from. Even the ambition cards for the end of the game, you know, selecting which one of these goes in, whether you go to Mars or make contact or become the code or whatever, it's just basically telling you a different way that things are going to go to pot at the very end. and then you gear yourself up to it as the game goes on. It will change the game play a little bit because you might be more inclined to make tall cities or lower cities, but that only goes so far and that's probably one of the better elements of the variety of this. Certainly, I don't think you're getting it from the cards. You won't be able to buy that many cards anyway, you know, because it's so costly to do anything. And, you know, it's just as even though there's like 600 plus cards in this game, most of it is just unique from an art perspective. So, it's an an interesting game. I don't think it works multiplayer. I think there's not enough interaction in the game to make you want to play it with other players, unless you use very specific tribes, which is not the reason you would get the game.
You can't just always use that tribe. And even then, only certain players are going to have that level of interaction in there. It's It feels basically more like this is a solo optimization card game with a cool idea of a theme, you know, put onto it. The artwork, I can't really, you know, give it too many props because there's some elements of AI being used here, but it's not as bad as simply just plugging something into Jack GPT, but, you know, it does look nice on the table. It's got a good table presence. It's a pain having to shift these like, you know, stacks of cities around when you're actually playing the game and trying to, you know, find the right card that you need. That gets a bit annoying, but it's an interesting game. I I I en enjoyed it from a solo perspective and I could almost kind of recommend it from a solo perspective, but overall when I've got to consider that the cards aren't as varied as it would want you to believe and the fact that you know the tribes are kind of like a mandatory thing and the lack of interaction with players, you know, overall I'm giving this one a strong six out of 10. It's an above average card game, which could actually get to seven out of 10, I think. You know, in a recommendation seal, if you play it solo, if you're just planning to play an interesting little quirky card game solo without other players and you just want to enjoy it for that reason, I think you'll get something out of this. It's interesting. As I say, I know I use that word a lot and a lot of people use the word interesting as almost kind of a demeaning uh word when they say, "It's
interesting, I guess." Yes, you know, it's like, no, no, I'm saying that as a good thing here. There's just maybe not enough to keep me captivated from game to game to game because of the cards basically kind of being the same thing. You know, the tribes are cool to experiment with and that's going to give you a decent amount of replay value and the end ambition cards will, you know, tailor your games in some respect. I just wish that maybe there was a bit more uniqueness with the Chronicle cards, which is kind of the meat of the game to have all these cards that you could buy from in each era, and yet most of the time you're just seeing rinse repeats of what you've already seen in all the other eras. It's I don't know. It's a hit and miss, but I'm giving it a 6 out of 10. That's not a bad rating. It's above average. You know, it's it's one that I think you ought to just give it a look. Give it a look at Essen. It's going to be there. It's going to be demoed. Try it. you know, you're probably going to end up trying it with other players, but consider what you would like from it as a solo game, as I think maybe this game should have just been marketed as a solo game, maybe like as a two-player game max. But I think, you know, maybe it should have stuck at one to two. That would have been better.
But, you know, try it. Think of it whether you would like it as a solo game. I don't think I'd recommend it for three and four players all the time, but it's definitely unique. And you know, I got to give credit to anybody who wants to try and make something relatively unique in this day and age cuz a lot of games are just getting released. I mean, there's a bunch of like highly anticipated games at this year's Essen, which to me feel like rehashes of the same thing. Hell, we've got a Kickstarter at the moment that is basically a feast for Odin rehashed, you know. So, there's not a lot of new innovation coming out, and I give props that this one feels a little bit more innovative.
I admire it purity. So that's it for me on this episode of the Broken Me. If you like what you see, then please thumb it up on YouTube and thumb it up on Board Game Geek when it goes live on the page. Check out the rest of my content that I have been doing. Some games that have been released this year at Gen Con and will be appearing at Essen, such as Drillers, for example. I have been reviewing and I hope to get one more video out before Essen, which will be Cascadia Alpine Legs. So, uh, fingers crossed I got time to do that. Of course, this channel is not possible without the assistance of my Patreons because most of my games, I would say good 70 80% of them are not review copies, but thanks for, you know, David Games to lend me this one as a review copy. But most of the time, I got to fork out for them myself. So, the Patreons are what helped to keep this channel going so I can go to the conventions, the trade fairs, you know, get the equipment, pay the subscriptions, and of course, get the games where I can make content that hopefully you're entertained by. So, take care, remember, it's only a game, and I'll see you on the next Broken Mele video. Bye for now and I'll see you at