Ashes & Amber is a 1–4 player card-based civilisation-building game spanning prehistory up to a possible near-term future.
Although the well-written rulebook is short and the individual actions available to players are limited, this game hides a lot of subtlety, which is why this guide is long enough to be split into two parts! I’ve tried to include pointers to many of the things I overlooked in my first few plays or which caught me out.
A quick note before I go any further: if you’ve looked at any of the videos from the Kickstarter campaign or BoardGameGeek, do be aware that there have been some rule changes since the earliest videos were created.
Overview
Your goal is to accumulate Utopia (in the form of cards displaying the Utopia icon), while avoiding Death cards over a sequence of five rounds, termed eras: Prehistory (a gentle introduction to the game), Antiquity, The Middle Ages, The Age of Discovery and The Modern Era, each of which has its own decks of gloriously illustrated cards. You make this journey by drawing and playing various cards in order to build cities taking the form of stacks of cards.
You can activate your cities—specifically the top card in each city—for bonuses, so having more cities lead to more point-scoring options; the first city in the picture above, a Middle Ages civilisation, has been activated (and in fact, was used to create one of the other cities). However, catastrophes at the end of the first 4 eras will lead to the destruction of weak cities, meaning that fewer, stronger (i.e., containing more cards) ones can be better, leading to a tension between ‘building wide’ vs ‘building high.’
Tip: Having more cities also means more cards in your hand, up to a limit—see the description of the Income Phase for details.
Opening the Box
If you’ve only just unwrapped the game, the first thing you’ll be doing is assembling a gazillion little boxes for the cards—not too difficult, and there’s a video showing you how to do it conveniently linked from the game’s web page, followed by sorting all the cards into the right boxes (era-specific cards all have the era name and number on the back). This is a job worth doing, as it makes setup quick and easy, since you just have to grab the appropriately labelled boxes for each era.
After that, you’ll want to print out a copy from the same web page. This includes a handful of corrections to the rulebook and updates several cards; you can cut the sheet up and stick bits on the relevant page and cards. Warning: physical copies of errata sheets were available at Spiel Essen, but there have been updates since then, so if you happen to have one of those, do check the website copy first.
There is possibly one more first-time task… You’ll find 3 of every Amber and Wonder Card in the box. There was meant to be one gold-foiled (the result of reaching one of the Kickstarter campaign’s stretch goal milestones) of each and one not; however, a small fumble during production has resulted in two copies of the normal cards. While my preference is to play with a single set, it probably doesn’t matter a huge amount if there are a couple of each card in the deck, though 3 might be pushing it a bit. Weed out the duplicates as you see fit; the cards all have serial numbers at the end of the flavour text, in continuous blocks for each deck, so it’s pretty easy to check if you’ve got complete sets without copies. (Make a nice collage from the leftovers—the artwork is certainly striking—and hang it on your wall, or just keep them in the box as spares.)
Setup
In the basic game, each era is pretty much independent of the others, so you can consider them on their own—if you have the table space (and you’ll need a lot of it!), you can lay out all 5 eras’ cards side-by-side and navigate across all of time.
Actually, it’s not totally true that eras are independent. There are some cards which refer to previous eras, but more significantly, there are abilities within Tribes modules (see later) which can look at Wonder and Resilience cards of future eras, so there are occasions when you need to select those cards ahead of playing their eras.
For an era, set out its large Timeline card, which serves as a reminder of turn phases. Below that for eras 1–4, place an associated randomly selected Catastrophe card face down—this indicates what disasters will occur at the end of the era, so that players can plan for them—and randomly choose as many era-specific Resilience cards as the number of players, placing them in a face down deck; likewise for Wonder cards, but one fewer than the number of players this time (unless playing solo, in which case select one).
Note that one of the fourth era catastrophes, The Fall of Tenochtitlán, relies on The Long Reach being in play, so if you’re not using that module, choose a different card for this era.
If you’re playing each era separately, you might as well place the Catastrophe, Wonder and Resilience cards face up now, since revealing them will be the first action in the round anyway. It’s only worth placing them face down if you’re laying out all eras up front.
Tip: If you look closely at the Timeline cards, you’ll notice that the sizes of the resource icons are different on different cards, representing the relative number of cards featuring those resources in the era’s Chronicle deck. You can use this to estimate the likelihood of drawing resources you might need, e.g., for the era’s catastrophe or to complete your projects, as well as the risk of giving up any such resources you already have. Because of this, even when I don’t have enough room to lay everything out, I do like to have at least this bit of upcoming Timeline cards available to help with my guesswork.
Set the shuffled deck of the era’s Chronicle cards alongside that, face down. Cards marked with a ‘crack’ symbol (though it looks more like a lightning bolt to me) are considered advanced, and should be avoided for your first few games.
At the start of the game, select a random Achievement card, which defines a final goal for the end of the fifth era, along with its associated Ambition and Civilization cards—take one for each player, face up and stack them as pairs. These are visible from the get-go, so that you have plenty of time to plan ahead before you reach the final era.
Choose three Decisive Moment cards, which act as further random end of era objectives and rewards, coming into play at the ends of the second, third and fourth eras—these are also face up from the start, so players can see what to aim for. If you’ve laid out all the eras, you can position these alongside the appropriate eras’ Timeline cards, otherwise just place them where they’re visible to all players. Note that as with The Fall of Tenochtitlán above, one of the Decisive Moments cards, titled Lands, is specific to The Long Reach, so if you’re not using that module, choose another.
Place the Ash and Death/Utopia card decks within reach of all players.
There may be additional cards to lay out, depending on which additional modules are in play.
Players get a Fire card and an Amber card, which form their first city (Fire stacked on top of Amber, ensuring the lower card’s row of icons is visible), as well as a pair of Project cards (personal objectives, essentially), from which they choose one, keeping it hidden from the other players. The unused Project cards are shuffled and placed face down. One player takes the First Player card, and you’re ready to play. The picture above shows the setup for a 2-player game. (Project cards, the ones in landscape orientation beside the player’s initial cities, are normally kept hidden, but I’ve revealed them here, to show what they offer.)
Cards, So Many Cards!
Cities can comprise Chronicle cards, Utopia/Death cards, Ambition cards, Civilization cards, Wonder cards, Resilience cards, Ash cards, and the starting Amber and Fire cards (the first pair in the picture above), as well as Tribe cards and others, depending on your choice of modules; some of these you get to choose, and some are imposed on you. The sheer number of cards in the game can seem daunting, and while these cards come from different places and have different properties, all share the same general layout, so you only need to recognise the cards’ iconography rather than treat each type of card differently (mostly).
Icons at the bottom right indicate what the card can be used for, such as: Utopia (first on the second row above, contributing to scoring), Death (second in that row, negative scoring and other bad things), Ash (third, will disappear at the end of the era, so use ’em or lose ’em), and Food/Population/Engineering/Culture/Science (resource types, used to pay for cards). I’ll mention that, aside from the artwork, a goodly number of the cards do exactly the same thing (e.g., all the Death cards are the same, all those that grant a specific resource are the same, etc.), while a smaller fraction are unique in their powers and abilities—this is deliberate, as you’ll be dealing with a fair amount of Death and resources in the game, but it’s how you choose to use the cards that gives the game its depth.
The card’s cost appears top left, indicating the number of cards of particular types you have to have or discard from your cities—in Ashes & Amber, discards always come from your city, never your hand. As an aside, do take care to distinguish between icons with slashes across them in this area and ones without: the former indicates a discard, while the latter merely means the relevant cards must be present in your civilisation. Additional icons can appear in that area, indicating, e.g., that the card must be played as soon as it’s acquired rather that go into your hand. The rulebook lists most of the card icons on pages 14 and 15, and some appear on the player aids. The game contains other iconography, and although text on the cards summarises their meaning, you’ll likely be flicking through the rulebook during your first games until you become familiar with the icons and text. Admittedly, this shouldn’t take too long, as the icons and terminology are logical and consistent.
Abilities or effects appear at the bottom left on some cards: e.g., shields on Resilience cards, indicating they protect the card immediately below from destruction (i.e., being converted to ash), or that this is an action card, which can be ‘exhausted’ (the term used in the rule book for activating a card, which I will mainly use from here on)—the costs and effects of activation appear in the middle of the card. A further note about Resilience cards: they don’t have the symbol for an action card, but they can be activated to provide a stronger protection power (e.g., covering an entire city rather than just a single card), but unlike action cards, once activated in this way, they’re immediately converted to ash.
The centre of an action card contains details of what happens when its exhausted, in both graphical and text formats. The groups of icons split by thin lines and colons can look confusing (unlike many games, the lines don’t mean either-or, but batch the operations into steps or conditions to be processed as a unit), but remember that the text below them describes what you need to do and what conditions apply before you can do it. For me, some of the icons best serve as reminders of, e.g., resource types to match on other cards.
Read the text carefully and don’t fall into the trap of making incorrect assumptions: e.g., if told to target 2 cards in border cities (the actual wording on the Border Cities Decisive Moment card is: ‘discard 1, remove death, both from border cities’), the two cards need not be in the same city, and nor does it mean to remove a pair from each border city. As another example, The Emerald Cityscape project talks about having engineering and food resources in your tallest cities—that doesn’t mean that all your tallest cities have to contain both, but that the resources appear an any of your city stacks that tie for height. Also, when told to target multiple cards, it really means targeting multiple card locations—i.e., if you target a card, converting it into ash, that Ash card does not count as a different card you can then target in the same action.
Taking the We Are in Harmony Ambition card shown bottom right in the picture above, the first block is an initial condition for activation, which is 2 Death cards touching your Amber (i.e., one directly above and one below); if you don’t have this configuration of cards in your civilisation, you can’t activate the card. The block below that indicates that when you exhaust the card, you discard all (the infinity symbol) Death cards in your civilisation, then take 2 Utopia cards, adding them to your city stacks; and finally, on the right, discard your Amber. (All Ambition and Civilization cards, such as the one next to the card describes above, will require you to discard your Amber, so you’ll be able to activate at most one of them, and just once.)
Colons indicate conditions applied during card selection; for example, in the Missoula Floods Catastrophe card shown at the head of the Setup section, the icon to the left of the colon says to burn cards, and the graphic to the right, indicates which, namely those appearing in the bottom two slots of city stacks.
Finally, cards have a trait label below the flavour text, for use with the some of the Tribe modules (see later).
Round and Turn Structure
Each era consists of three phases: income, action and catastrophe. (Actually, the fifth era substitutes achievements for catastrophes; there’s little benefit to be had in destroying civilisations right before the end.)
will describe gameplay in detail, but in summary:
• the Income Phase is when you add Chronicle cards to your hand based on the number and size of cities in your civilisation;
• during the Action Phase, you take turns to play cards from your hand into your civilisation and perform operations using played cards to, e.g., claim Utopia or create new cities, among other operations; and
• catastrophes are when your civilisation suffers some sort of calamity, with cards being destroyed (as determined by the era’s Catastrophe card).
Solo and Family Variants
Before ending this part of the article, I’ll mention a couple of variants which you can keep in mind as you read about how to play.
Solo play is essentially you vs the game, or rather, you vs the game’s catastrophes and setbacks—if you can ‘just’ get to the end having overcome everything thrown at you and manage to accumulate a lot of Utopia along the way, you win.
Do be aware that some Project cards are labelled as 2-player or more, so won’t be available for solo games. Some Tribes and Land cards also require multiple players, so likewise avoid them here.
You play as normal, except that you ignore the right side of Decisive Moment cards; if you can’t perform the actions on their left, you lose. Winning conditions are: the fifth era’s Ambition card has been claimed, you’ve completed all the Decisive Moment cards, and you have at least 15 Utopia symbols. It is pretty tough to earn so much Utopia, so playing solo does mean taking risks and keeping your fingers crossed!
The rulebook also includes suggestions for a simplified ‘family’ variant. Remove the Decisive Moment and Ambition cards; treat Resilience cards as simple shields, and skip the Middle Ages.
Income Phase
At the start of each era, the Catastrophe, Wonder and Resilience cards are revealed. Players reset their exhausted action cards (see later), and starting with the person having the First Player card, draw a number of Chronicle cards into their hands, depending on the number and size of their cities:
• If you still have your Amber card, draw 2;
• If you have only a single city, draw 1;
• For each city, starting from the smallest and up to a maximum of 4, select as many Chronicle cards as there are cards in the city, again to a maximum of 4, and keep just one—you do this in order from smallest city to largest, and make your selection from the drawn cards before you move to the next city.
For example, at the start of the game, you will have just a single city, composed of your Amber and Fire cards; this means you end up with 4 cards at the end of this phase: 2 from Amber, 1 for a single city, and 1 selected from a pair for the cards in that city. If you had 5 cities, with card counts 2–6, that final step would lead to 4 cards from the cities: 1 selected from 2 (for the smallest city), 1 chosen from 3 (for the next), 1 from 4 (for the third, of size 4), and 1 from 4 (for the 5-card city), and the largest city is ignored; you would also get an additional pair if you still have your Amber—letting your Amber card burn (see later) is a bad idea!
Do remember you can look at the cards you drew before you get to the cities step, to help you make your choice among the city card options.
Incidentally, you will have noticed that of the huge number of cards in the box, each player will use only a few over the course of any given game—e.g., the maximum number of Chronicle cards you can draw in the Income Phase is 18 (2 for Amber, plus 4 for 4 cities), and you’ll keep just 6 of them, as in the preceding example. Other cards may come into play during a turn, but not many more. The benefits of a lot of cards are removing the need to shuffle discards at higher player counts and increasing replayability.
Tip: When choosing which resource-bearing cards to select, keep an eye on the current and later Timeline cards, specifically where they indicate the likelihood of drawing each resource type. Also pay attention to the end of era and end of game cards, to make sure you’re able to build up enough of the resources require to score well.
Action Phase
Next, players take turns to draw and play cards. On each turn, players can either claim a card or take up to 2 actions from: play a card into a city, exhaust a card, create a city, and move a card between cities. Or they can decide to pass, after which they no longer participate until the end of the era.
Tip: Most often, you won’t pass until you’ve played all the cards in your hand into cities, but there may be times where you don’t want to play some cards (e.g., when those cards would either be lost at the end of the era or would cover action cards you want to keep visible), so remember that you can choose to pass with cards in your hand, to play in a later era.
Claiming a card means ‘purchasing’ it by having and discarding cards (from a city, remember, not your hand) matching the icons in the top left of the card in order to grab one of the era’s visible Wonder or Resilience cards, or in the fifth era (which doesn’t have those cards), a pair of matching Ambition and Civilization cards instead, both of which have to be taken together. Any cards with a down arrow symbol on them must be played into a city immediately (described in a moment), otherwise they go into your hand. Note that claiming and playing a card doesn’t give you its immediate benefit, you still have to exhaust it to gain Utopia or protect a city.
If you claimed a card, and the First Player card is available, you take it; if it’s already in your hand when you claim a card, you return it to the table.
The game end is signalled when the final Ambition card has been taken; at this point the Achievement is immediately resolved (similar to how a Catastrophe is dealt with at the end of the round—more details later). The round continues until all players have passed, as with the prior eras, and then the game ends.
Playing a card means placing it from your hand into one of your cities, either top of the stack or bottom. Ensure the bottom of covered cards is visible, showing icons and traits, reminding you of which resources and special cards you have in your cities. Note that you can place cards on top of exhausted ones, giving you the opportunity to activate the same city multiple times. Take care when playing Utopia cards: if you place one such that it touches another, they ‘cancel out’ and you have to discard one—this only occurs when you play the card from your hand, and not when moving one later on or causing a pair to touch by removing cards separating them.
Normally, only the cards on the top of a city’s stack can be exhausted. To do this, pay the required costs by discarding cards and perform the actions indicated in the middle of the card, rotating it 90° to indicate that it’s been activated; you can’t use the action again until the card’s reset at the start of the next era. Note that when the exhausted card itself can be a candidate for discarding in this way; for example, Cueva De Las Manos, fourth in the top row in the picture above, requires a culture card to be discarded, but it provides a culture resource itself, so could be chosen for discard if you so desire.
Tip: Something to remember about your Fire card is that it can be exhausted to add a new Ash card to your civilisation; that can be an essential additional resource given the small number of cards you gain in the Income Phase.
If you want to create a new city, you discard 2 cards from your cities, and use a third one (again, from one of your existing cities) to start a new city stack with that single card. This is a rather costly action, but can be worth it if you have Ash cards waiting to be used and creating a new city could extract a card you could then exhaust for further bonuses.
You can move a card from one city to anywhere in another (i.e., not limited to just top and bottom of the stack) by discarding one other card from any of your cities. This is another mechanism to allow you to get action cards to the top of cities.
Passing means declaring you’re done with this round, and will take no more part in the game until the next round. You discard all Ash cards from your civilisation and take the First Player card if it’s still on the table, then lean back and watch the rest of the players.
Tip: Because you have to discard ash when you pass, those cards are priority candidates for using as payment when activating others, creating cities or moving cards, to avoid wasting them.
Catastrophe Phase and Decisive Moments
For eras 1–4, the action phase is followed by resolving a catastrophe. Catastrophe cards require you to take a Death card; they also indicate which cities and cards within them will be targeted to be burned (i.e., converted to ash), e.g., the first era’s Missoula Floods catastrophe shown in the picture above will cause a pair of your cards to burn, selected from the bottom 2 of any of your cities (they needn’t come from the same city). Catastrophe-related icons, detailing the targeting effects, are listed on page 18 of the rulebook.
Apart from Death and Ash cards, you replace all the affected cards with Ash ones, unless they’re protected by a Resilience card directly on top of them, or you activated a Resilience card at the top of a city, protecting many or all of the city’s cards. If activated, the Resilience card burns, but they can also be burned as a result of applying Death cards, so take care not to waste them.
Tip: Because Death and Ash cards can’t burn, when a card gives you free rein to target any card, choosing those is the most sensible option, resulting in no further destruction.
I’d like to emphasise how burning and ash work: when a card is burned, it’s replaced with an Ash card (any Ash card; they all have identical properties), such that your cities are the same size as before. You’ve lost any abilities on the original cards, as well as whatever resources they provided; however, the Ash cards still count when an action requires you to discard cards (either general cards or specifically ash), so they’re not valueless and will persist into the next era. However, you should try to use them during that era, as any still in your civilisation will be discarded at its end.
Death cards are placed in cities without any Death cards for preference, and every card touching a Death card is very likely to become a candidate for burning (unless protected). Sadly, although you can place them where they would become targets for destruction, Death cards themselves will not burn, so you’re stuck with them, unless you exhaust a card with the ability to remove them.
Prehistory is a little different from the other eras in that all the other catastrophes target cards touching Death cards as well as an additional rule, while in Prehistory, you suffer just one calamity, so you should consider steps to minimise damage by seeing what you can do to make both rules attack the same cards. For example, second era catastrophe The Antonine Plague burns cards touching Death cards as well as cards in the bottom pair of city stacks, so if a couple of your Death cards happen at the bottom already, they’ll first convert the cards touching them to ash, and the next step can be directed at those Death cards and the ash above them, neither of which can be damaged further.
Tip: Besides using the move operation mentioned earlier to keep your important cards beyond death’s reach, you can choose to move Death cards into optimal positions, e.g., arrange that several touch others—each will count as a target for one of the others.
Resolving the final Achievement card is similar to dealing with a catastrophe, but can occur in the middle of the round rather than at the end, and players therefore need to pay attention to what others are doing so as not to be caught out by unexpected destruction. As with catastrophes, you can take steps to limit the damage to your civilisation; e.g., We Are in Harmony shown above will zap all Utopia cards in your tallest city (or one of them, if you have several), so it might be a grand idea to make sure that you place your Utopia in shorter stacks.
At the ends of eras 2–4, a Decisive Moment takes place. Players, starting with whoever possessed the First Player card at the start of the era, optionally perform the actions on the left side, e.g., the first card in the row of 3 in the picture above lets you discard a Wonder card to remove 1 or 2 Death cards (possibly a worthwhile sacrifice). Then whoever qualifies performs the action on the right half, e.g., in this same card, whoever has most Wonder cards adds a Project or Utopia card to their civilisation. (In the solo game variant, the left sides are mandatory, and the right ignored.)
A note on being first player: in all but the final era, I’m not sure it makes a huge amount of difference if you’re the first player or not. The rules about taking and returning the card make it seem like there’s some strategy involved in grabbing the card, and by implication, a benefit in having it. However, having the card affects the order of play after the current era ends, and before the Wonder and Resilience cards are revealed—essentially, all that being first player gives you is first dibs on those cards, which you can’t see at the time you take the First Player card. That is, apart from in the final era, where the Ambition cards have been visible since the start of the game… If there’s one of those you really want and you’re confident you’ll have the resources to pay for it at the start of the era, maybe it’s worth the effort of trying to get hold of the First Player card, to remove the chance of someone else claiming it before you do.
If you’ve only got space to lay out one era at a time, you can clear away the current era’s cards now, in preparation for setting up the next, but don’t leave them too far away if you’re playing with a Tribe such as The Elders, which can retrieve cards from previous eras.
Game End
The game ends once everyone has passed in era 5. If all the Ambition cards have been claimed, players reveal their Project cards, and discard those for which the objectives haven’t been completed. If any Ambition cards still remain on the table, everyone discards all their projects, whether the objectives have been met or not.
Players assemble their Project and Utopia cards, discarding one Utopia for each of their remaining Death cards (or as many as they can). Your final score is the number of Utopia symbols left. Ties are broken by the number of Project cards players have, then by whoever has the First Player card. If that doesn’t resolve it, it’s a draw.
Advanced Play
As mentioned earlier, the cards marked with crack symbols are to be avoided until you’re confident about the game. These include Achievement cards We Become the Code, We Didn't Make It, We Return to Fire and We Remember the Giants as well as Tribes The Seers, The Warmongers, The Winterborn, The Reckless Builders and The Necromancers. They’re all just a bit tougher to play than the rest.
Tribes
The game comes with 19 Tribes, in the form of packs of 5 cards which provide some player assymetry. If you want to use them, at the beginning of the game, each person in reverse player order chooses a Tribe.
Tip: For variety and to speed the process, I suggest laying out a random selection of number of players plus one Tribes packs rather than using all 19 before performing this selection.
One of the Tribe cards replaces your Fire card, and the rest are set in your player area. Any time you take an action to play a card into your cities, you can choose the topmost Tribe card instead of one from your hand, paying its cost as usual; they must be played in numeric order (i.e., Tribe card 1 first, then 2, and so on)—although this looks like using Tribes gives you a higher card count than not using them, the costs of playing the cards are higher, cancelling that out. The cards are double-sided, and you can freely choose which side to use.
The Tribes all have different play styles. The Expansionist Nation (one of the easiest to play) is generous in terms of Utopia generation and city protection and manipulation, which suggests playing the card movement or city creation actions to cause cards with useful actions to appear at the top. On the other hand, The Necromancers (considerably harder to play), makes use of Death in interesting ways, leading you to accept more Death cards than you normally would, placing them carefully and then using the Tribe’s actions to remove them.
Other tribes, such as The Whisperers and The Mercari, increase interaction between players. For example, there are Mercari cards which will let you give resources to another player to gain Utopia either from the bank or from that player. These particular Tribes probably don’t make a lot of sense when playing the solo game!
Additionally, some Tribes make use of the trait labels on cards; The Expansionist Nation has actions tailored for cards with the, surprise, expansionist trait. Oddly, The Necromancers also includes cards which can target expansionists.
One final note about Tribes: a few of the cards have ‘permanent effects’—as long as these cards are exposed (i.e., at the top of a city stack), their effects are in force, affecting other actions you might take. One example is The Chthonians’ London Underground card, which lets you exhaust any action card in any of your cities containing a humanist trait, not just the top card as usual. (There are a few—very few—other cards outside of Tribes offering a permanent effect, too.)
The Long Reach
This module adds 40 Land cards, which unlike most other cards, can’t burn nor can they be discarded, which make them ideal for the bottom of cities, where Death cards are typically added (i.e., during the next catastrophes, when cards touching Death are candidates for destruction, these will be safe).
During game setup, remove any cards that don’t match your player count, order the rest in numeric order, then reveal a row of one more than the player count, so that people can see the resource requirements of the upcoming Land cards.
When you would claim a card, you can instead choose the next available Land card (i.e., they must be picked up in numeric order, which is also the order of increasing requirements for resource icons) as long as you have the required symbols in your cities, and discard one card. Land cards are played immediately, specifically to create a new city.
Remnants
As I noted, your Amber card is quite important—losing it means forgoing a couple of cards during the Income Phase, which is quite significant given how few cards you draw per round. Remnants makes this less of a disaster: if your Amber burns, you can choose one of the 4 Remnant Cards to replace it; this card can be subsequently exhausted to return the Amber card. More precisely, among the different actions for the 4 cards, one will be to return the card to the pool, and regain your Amber card. There will be a delay before you can do all this, as the Remnant card is likely buried within a city, so you have to take extra steps to bring it to the top of the stack, in order to be able to exhaust it.
Wrap Up
The Ashes & Amber rulebook is nicely written and worth close scrutiny, especially the descriptions of example moves and the short strategy guide. This game contains a lot of subtleties (which translates as me failing to spot a number of tricks in my first several games), and the rulebook’s FAQ deserves attention. But if you ever need extra help, the game’s designer, David Falla de Acebo, has produced a Rules Companion web app which can answer questions about the game—quite sophisticated questions, such as ‘What’s a good strategy for ⟨a particular catastrophe card or a specific Tribe⟩?’ or ‘Which tribes work well together for a ⟨n⟩ player game?’ The chatbot does a good job with the more obvious requests for information about cards (identified by name, serial number or by photo), where it explains iconography and actions.
Finally, if you can’t get enough of Ashes & Amber, David’s working on a crowdfunding campaign for a couple of expansions, one of which—Wars—might be especially worth keeping an eye on for increased player interaction. David’s also indicated that this new campaign will also include an upgrade pack for the corrected cards in the base game.
About the author
Current favourite boardgames are Ark Nova and Ashes & Amber, with a side of Terraforming Mars and Dune: Imperium – Uprising. When not playing games or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside over 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). In any time left over after all that, 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.
