I’m keen on the idea of games based on human civilization, but am not actually a fan of many of them. 7 Wonders is a nice game, but is over and done a bit too quickly for my tastes; at the other extreme, Civilization is a great game, but one that needs a great deal of stamina with a gameplay time of 5+ hours. (Don’t get me started on Mega Civilization and its estimated time of 6–12 hours and 2×1metre board, though it does support up to 18 players).
My eyes lit up when Ashes & Amber popped up on Kickstarter a couple of days ago. This is a 1–4 player game (I do appreciate a good solo mode) lasting an estimated 40 minutes per player—much more acceptable than the previous pair—following civilization from prehistory to a bit beyond now. It’s designed and published by David Falla de Acebo.
The blurb at the head of the campaign page reads: ‘The inevitable will come. Cities will fall. Yet from their ashes, you may rise again. Guided by a single great moment of humanity, visible from the dawn of time to its distant future, every choice you make echoes through history. Plan carefully. Endure wisely. Preserve what truly matters. Will your civilization be remembered as the one that left its mark?’
The amber in the game’s title is one of the things worth preserving: it represents your civilization’s resilience. In more concrete terms, besides scoring points at the end, it gives you extra cards to play each round, without which you’ll struggle. But nothing persists: ashes are what becomes of portions of your civilization at the end of each era, which despite being an accurate representation of what happens at the end of a real-life mighty civilization, does sound somewhat depressing. However, if you’ve done a decent job on the preservation front, you should have enough to rebuild from in the next era.
Gameplay Overview
Amber & Ashes is played over 5 rounds, referred to as eras: prehistory, antiquity, middle ages, age of discovery and modern era, each of which has their own decks of lovingly illustrated cards: the catastrophe deck, from which one card is randomly selected to dictate what happens at the end of that era; wonder and resilience cards, providing scoring opportunities and protection against disaster, respectively; and chronicle decks. The final era substitutes an achievement card for the catastrophe one and scoring cards for wonders and resilience, since there won’t be an era following this one.
A civilization is represented by a number of cities, which are stacks of cards. Somewhat reminiscent of Reforest: Old Growth, cards can be played from your hand only to the top or bottom of these stacks, and the topmost card is the only one whose abilities can be activated. Some cards affect adjacent ones (e.g., some provide protection against burning for themselves and the card below).
Cards are labelled as resources (food, people, engineering, culture, science, or combinations—used to gain wonder and resilience cards), accomplishments (worth scoring points), ash (will be discarded at the end of the era, so should be at the top of the candidate list for resources to discard before reaching that point) or death (worth negative points).
At the start of each era, players reset their exhausted cards (see later) and draw a number of chronicle cards depending on the number and size of their cities (they begin the game with one city, composed of two cards: fire and amber). Then players take turns to draw and play cards, at some point deciding to pass, after which they no longer participate until the next era—similar to how Terraforming Mars generations work. (Interestingly, David lists Terraforming Mars as one of his inspirations for this Ashes & Amber.)
The initial part of each turn is to optionally draw a wonder or resilience card, for which players need to pay the indicated resources in the form of matching cards from their cities. The first person to take a card gets the first player indicator for the next era (unless they already were first player this round). After this, they perform two actions from the following set:
· play a card from their hand into a city, either on top or bottom;
· activate the top card in a city, performing the action indicated on the card, and turning the card sideways to show that it’s exhausted;
· discard two cards from cities to create a new city with a third;
· discard one card from a city in order to move another between cities—the card can be placed anywhere within the city, not just top and bottom; and
· pass, and if the first player indicator has not been claimed already, the player takes it.
Card actions include, for example, grabbing accomplishment cards as well as the opportunity to discard death cards.
At the end of the era, i.e., when everyone has passed, players discard all their ash cards and take a death card, adding it to a city without one if possible, otherwise any city. Next, cards targeted by the catastrophe selected for that era will be ‘burned’ (this might include all cards adjacent to a death card or a specified number from the player’s largest city, unless they’re immediately below a card which provides protection) and replaced with ash cards, ripe for destruction at the end of the next era. (Death cards don’t turn to ashes, alas, and persist across rounds.)
At the end of the game, death cards result in the removal of accomplishment cards as far as possible, and players’ final scores are totted up from remaining accomplishments and death cards, as well as foresight cards (objective cards randomly selected at the start of the game). Highest score wins.
Solo play is essentially you vs the game, or rather, the game’s catastrophes and setbacks—‘just’ get to the end having overcome everything thrown at you, and you win.
There does seem to be a good amount of replayability in this game, with about 400 chronicle, resilience and wonder cards spread across the 5 eras, and 30-odd different catastrophe cards—a total of more than 600, when you take into account the timeline, catastrophe and achievement cards, etc. (The Kickstarter version includes additional cards, taking that total to over 750, though close to 60 of them are foiled versions of the base wonder and amber cards.)
Tribes
An extension to the basic play introduces tribes, asymmetric civilizations (8 in the base game, a further 4 for Kickstarter backers, with potentially more to be unlocked) represented by decks of 5 double-sided cards which can be played into cities instead of catastrophe cards to provide tribe-specific benefits. As a neat touch, the tribe decks are all uniquely and thematically illustrated to distinguish them from each other.
Campaign Notes
Ashes & Amber is David’s first game, and first crowdfunding campaign. The Kickstarter page is long and packed with images from the game as well as several aesthetic ones; however, there’s less detail about the game itself than I would like to see. There are two overviews of gameplay, one in the form of an overly brief image and the other having more text and short videos demonstrating how you perform actions; however, these are not sufficiently descriptive by themselves to understand the game. Fortunately, a draft rulebook is available (though that could do with further expansion) and there are links to a few informative videos.
The game will reach retail, but the Kickstarter extras won’t be available beyond the campaign. It’s difficult to tell from the page as it stands currently exactly what those extras are: there are the 4 extra tribes and some shiny ‘holographic’ foil cards, as well as an expansion, The Long Reach. Unfortunately, nothing is said about this expansion other than it’s a Kickstarter exclusive and it contains ‘land cards,’ whatever they are. (‘Land cards are created instantly as cities, and never burn’—so, lower cost ways to establish cities, perhaps.)
An interesting note about two thirds down the page is that future expansions are already being worked on: a sixth era, set in the near future; and one bringing historical figures into the game (Ada Lovelace and Martin Luther King are mentioned).
Wrap Up
Overall, this is a great looking game, and easy to pick up (though there are a lot of icons, they’re explained in detail in the rulebook) with plenty of strategic thinking required.
As I’ve said elsewhere, I tend not to back first time crowdfunding projects like this unless they’re both good and cheap. Ashes & Amber certainly looks pretty good, though the campaign is lacking some details, hopefully to be be filled in before it ends; however, it’s not cheap (don’t forget shipping and VAT)!
The campaign reached its funding goal within a couple of hours (though the target did look rather low), so the project will be going ahead, and the low-risk option is to wait for the retail version to land. I can live without holographic cards, and there’s currently insufficient information about the Kickstarter exclusives for me to determine if they’re worthwhile. (Having said that, the ‘We Become the Code’ achievement card sounds intriguing—‘Will you let the machines control humanity? Or will you truly manage to pair Population and Culture?’)
Ashes & Amber is something to keep an eye on, and I hope some friendly retailers will snag a copy or ten.
About the author
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
