Post by Gilvan Blight on Jul 2, 2017 9:48:02 GMT -5
I think it's time to resurrect my old review format since this board has come back from the dead.
Quickly: I dig it and want to play again. Embrace of Darkness dug it and wants to play again. Pandora through it was meh but would give it another try. It's longer than expected but quite simple once you get going. So far recommended.
Summary:
Star Trek Ascendancy is a Star Trek based 4x games for Three Players only. Not 2, not 4, but three. Each of the players takes control of one of the classic Star Trek Factions: The Federations, The Klingons or the Romulans. The goal of the game is to become the most Ascendant Empire. Your ascendancy is tracked with ascendancy tokens and every player starts with 1. When one player gets to 5 the game ends. The player with the most then wins with a tiebreaker being whoever owns the most systems.
At the start of the game, all players start with: a home planet. An outpost and three resources generating nodes, one of each type. Three ships in orbit of their homeworld. Three of each resource (Production, Research and Culture) and a starting advancement. This is an asymmetric game and in addition to a starting advancement, each race has two special rules printed on their player boards. Example Romulans are suspicious so don't get resources the first turn a trade agreement is formed, but they get bonus culture for developing certain technologies. The Romulan Starter advancement is their famous Cloaking Technology which lets them attack first in combat that they initiate.
From these humble beginnings, players will build their empire and spread out exploring the galaxy. Eventually, empires will hook up and then trade agreements can be formed. Along the way, players will discover hazards, alien races, stellar phenomenon and more. It's all very Star Trek Like.
Turn order is random until players empires hook up. Then initiative is bid for using any resources the players have. Each turn a player will do a build phase followed by a command phase. The build phase has players paying those resources they owned to improves their systems. Players build outposts, add resource nodes to outposts, build more ships and allocate research points. Once the building phase is done the player moves to their command phase. This is the meat of the game. During the command phase, players move ships, initiate space combats, invade systems, build starbases, attempt diplomatic takeovers, develop advancements and probably do something else I'm forgetting right now.
Movement is unique and easier to describe in play. There are two types of movement: Impulse and Warp. During impulse movement, you move two sections at a time. Through warp movement, you can move from system to system. Warp speeds improve as your civilization adds advancements. When moving off a system you have to follow space lanes or forge new ones. This is done with a die roll to see how long the lane is, then you either attach it to an existing system (if it can reach) or place a new on. When a new system is placed it's drawn from a pile, you move your ship onto it and then interact with it. Some systems are safe, some are hazardous and some are a phenomenon sectors which are also hazardous. On hazardous spots, a die roll is made to see if your ships survive and only if at least 1 ship lives do you get to interact with the sector. For non-phenomenon, this means drawing a card to see what's there. On the cards, you get all the Star Trek fluff. You can find dangers, established colonies, new races, all kinds of stuff. The exploration deck used for this is a significant size and you won't see all the cards after only one or two plays. Phenomenon sectors are different, if you survive the initial roll and get to interact with them you get a free research token which can be spent for free right away on advancements.
All forms of combat in the game are very simple. For every ship involved you roll a D6. Each player board has a weapons rating that tells you your target number. It starts at 5+ and you can improve it with research. To that target number, you add the targets shields. Shields are also on player boards, start at 0 and can be improved with tech. Alien Warp Capable Civilizations also have weapon and shield ratings which are used when you try to invade them. Each hit destroys one thing of opposing miniature. Combat is simultaneous unless some rule breaks that (Like the Romulan cloaking device). After each round of combat, both involved parties get a chance to retreat, and if there are still forces left on both sides after that another round of combat happens. There are some special rules for invasions that determines how much of the nodes are on the planet when you win a combat.
Instead of invading a colony you also have the option to convert it to your side through Hegemony. This is a bit more complicated than combat but still very simple. The player attempting to convert the colony spends a culture and rolls a D6. They add their ascendency. If their total is higher than the number of nodes on the planet plus the level of civilization there (for alien warp-capable systems) or plus the ascendency of the target (for other players), the sector converts if the 'attacker' can pay one more culture.
All types of conflict: invading, space battle and Hegemony are heavily modified by the advances players can develop. The advances come from a deck that is unique to each civilization. For a command point, a player draws two cards from the deck and can turn them into projects. Players must have a research node they control on the board for each active project. During the build phase players can assign research to projects and when they hit a target number of research tokens they are completed. Competed advances modify the game going forward. In addition to modifying some rule, many also increase the warp capability of the civilization while others will give more command points.
Command points are basically the number of actions you can take in a turn. All players start with 5 and can earn more through advancements and buy building or capturing Starbases. All actions take one command point and you track these with command tokens which you flip as you use them. So put a ship into warp: flip a token. Come out of warp: flip a token. Attack with that ship that just came out of warp: flip a token. Research a new advancement: flip a token. Etc.
When players make contact, by sectors adjacent they control ended up connected and occupied the players can agree to set up trade agreements. These represent those civilizations being a peace and generate resources every turn for both players. There are various levels of trade agreement and the players decide what level of agreement to have with each other player. You can only have on agreement per player.
At the end of each turn, you check to see if someone won either by having 5 ascendency tokens or by owning all three homeworlds (I can't see this ever happening). If not then you go through a maintenance phase. All exhausted (flipped over) cards and tokens flip back, including command tokens. All ships at warp get another warp token. All phenomenon with a research token get one (they can be investigated every round and resources are generated. A player gets 1 of each resource for each node of that type they control. So production nodes produce production tokens, culture nodes produce culture tokens, etc. Once everyone has their resources you move on to the next phase.
All of this sounds like a lot and at first, it seems like it is, but once you get playing it's really not complicated at all. Every civilization gets a reference card with two sides, one for the build phase and one for the command phase and it spells out pretty clearly what you can do each turn.
The Good:
I had a lot of fun playing through our first run of Star Trek Ascendency. It's a very solid 4x game that seems a lot less busy and complicated than other popular 4x games like Twilight Imperium or Eclipse. Added to that is the Star Trek theme which I really enjoy. The asymmetric player powers which only grow to become more asymmetric as the game goes on and players start developing advances really make this game. The differences mean that each player is trying to do things differently and has different goals. It's also this asymmetry that most ads to the theme of the game. The Federation player can't initiative an invasion. Heck, the invasion action isn't even listed on their reference card. They can't interfere with pre-warp civilizations either. To make up for this, they get culture whenever they find a new phenomenon or when they discover a warp-capable civilization. Yep, that sounds like the Federation I know.
The components in this game are actually good. Do I sound surprised? Well, I am. Gale Force 9 puts out this game and they are well known for having very mixed component quality. They are known for very thing cards, and board elements made out of cardstock that should be made out of cardboard. While the encounter cards are a bit thin, overall I have no complaints about the physical components. Added to that the tokens are really nice and clear, the colours are all very easy to distinguish and everything is easy to see from across the board.
I also really liked the way you build your own unique space map each game. The rules and system for playing new system seem a bit odd at first. There are some wonky rules for floating and fixed systems, but once you figure them out they all seem to work well. Placement of systems became a big strategic element in our game and I expect that to continue in future plays. By the time the game is done you have a rather cool looking map that looks like it would be good for an RPG.
The Bad:
The biggest issue we had with our game last night was the length. I know it's a learning game, but even then this game was long. We played for 4 hours and we didn't even play out the last turn of the game. This leads to potential problem number two, I worry the game may just have a runaway leader problem. I was playing the Federation and got to a point where I was generating 7 culture a turn. Ascendency tokens are bought with 5 culture. Which meant that every round I could buy one and you only need 5 to win and start with 1. Now that we've seen this happen, I'm not sure if it's going to be a problem again. Now the other players know that this can happen and could take actions early enough to stop it. If that's the case then perhaps it's not a problem at all but rather a brilliant way to force players to make alliances to take down a leader. I really won't know without more plays.
The game is a bit of a bear to teach. Each individual thing you do isn't complicated, but there are a lot of things to cover. It's also hard due to so many parts of the game relying on so many other parts. So when explaining the build phase and how you build nodes, do you then want to explain what the nodes do? If you do that do you then want to explain what those resources they generate are for? If you do that do you then want to explain where you can and can't build... etc. It reminded me of teaching Terra Mystica which also has pretty simple actions players can take but so many of them available that it's overwhelming.
The Ugly:
As is typical of GF9 I wish they used better cardstock. I will admit that this game has better components than many GFP games (I'm looking at you Star Trek: Fleet Captains), but the cards really could use to be better quality.
The one thing that none of us liked in this game was the very start, the initial set up. You have to somehow to mark out a playing area, then you have to make sure you put your starting planets in the right spots in that playing area. They should be 5" from the edge but also equidistant from each other. This meant finding a measuring tape. I haven't used a measuring tape in a game since Shadowrun Duels (that cool game with the huge action figured sized miniatures). Of course, GF9 is ready to help you out here by providing a player mat that has marked out starting spots but it costs $40USD (best Canadian price I can find is $99). That's more than half as much as the game itself costs! Thankfully I have play mats for playing X-Wing on so at least we had a way to mark out our play area.
The absolute worse thing about Star Trek Ascendency is the player count. You must play with three players. Not four, not two, not five but Three. This is hard for our group. Either it's just my wife and I or it's 5 or more of us often split into two groups of 4 or more. I do a lot of my gaming at public events and finding this exact player count has been really hard. I've had Ascendency since 2016 and only just got it to the table now because of this. Now supposedly there are expansions coming that will allow you to play with more players. There's something going on with those though and despite them announced to come out in 2016 they still aren't here. This has created a lot of bad blood with fans.
Overall:
I rather liked Star Trek Ascendency. I was playing the Federation and won handily. So much so that we didn't even bother to play out the last round of the game. My friend EoD played the Romulans and is well known for not liking a game that he gets beat handily in. He still liked Ascendency and wants to play again. My wife was kind of meh on the whole thing. She played Klingons and made a few bad decisions earlier in the game and kind of felt she wasn't in the race. She is willing to try again though so that's a good sign. After the game all three of us spent far too long based on how late it was, talking about how we would play differently next time, and that's a great sign.
Speaking of how long the game was: it was long. We played for a bit over four hours and we didn't play out the last round of the game. Now it was a learning game so I expect it would be quicker with experienced players, but I don't think all that much quicker. It's not like we had a lot of AP and the teaching part didn't take too long despite it not being the easiest game to teach.
At this point, I recommend checking out Star Trek Ascendency. Just realize that you need exactly three players and make sure you set aside a significant chunk of your game night, if not all of it, to fit a full game in.