It’s not a lot compared to the chance to crush ones enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women that most of my favourite games offer me, but it’s enough to make the game not-awful. In Dominion you can force your opponents to discard down with Militia, or use a Thief to steal their best treasure cards or, best of all, fill their deck with crap via the magic of the Witch. The latter has basically none, other than trying to steal or banish cards that you think your opponent might want to collect. But I can’t apply that here because Dominion quite clearly and demonstrably has more player interaction than Ascension. For the most part I can disregard weak theme, dull mechanics and low production values so long as it allow me to stick it direct to another human being in a meaningful way. I’ve often mused in the past that usually, the utmost single defining characteristic of whether I’ll like a game or not is whether it has much interaction. And that of course begs the rather more interesting question of why? Clearly I like Ascension better than I like Dominion. Androminion also puts some of the myriad variants and expansions for the game, none of which I’ve played, at your fingertips and yet I wasn’t inspired to try them out. Before playing Androminion I hadn’t played a game of Dominionin over two years and I’d actually forgotten some of the extremely simple rules. So I got to grips with it and played a few games of the basic setup just to remind myself of how to play, and then a few more games against the more interesting “interactive” setups to see how that shook out.Īnd by that point, I was bored sick of it. But it’s by no means difficult to get to grips with, especially if you’ve got prior experience with the card game. Now, it’s not entirely fair to compare them: Ascension is played on the big-screen iPad and has a professionally designed and developed interface, while Androminion is played on my small-screen phone and has a bare-bones approach to presentation. On my Android phone I had a copy of the free Dominion clone Androminion. But then I remembered something interesting. So, I figured that given the curve of my feelings about Dominionlargely mirrored those about Ascension it would be fair of me to say that I didn’t really like one all that much more than the other. It’s as good a demonstration as any of the dangers of trying to assess the quality of a game on the strength of online play alone. So while I generated fairly intense initial enthusiasm for the app, I can’t see that translating into a purchase of the card game. I suspect Ascension would have a similar problem. It’s not actually slow, but with all the shuffling and without all the interaction, it damn well seemed it. I was initially really excited by Dominionbut initial enthusiasm after playing it on BSW cooled after ten games or so and my opinion of it actually went down after playing it face to face. The slick nature of the app, and the ease of playing quick games against the AI and of finding human opponents has a way of obscuring judgement on what the game would be like in real life. The future would seem to be using the mechanic in tandem with something else, much like Mage Knight and A Few Acres of Snow.Īssessing what I really thought about Ascensionas an actual game rather than as a computer implementation has been difficult. Must try Nightfall some day, just to be sure, but for the time being I think my flirtation with the concept is done. I guess deckbuilders aren’t really my thing: there’s not been one pure deck building game I’ve really enjoyed. I’ve played the game and lot and enjoyed it, got my money’s worth, but frankly I’m starting to get a little bored of it, even with the added pleasure of losing repeatedly to you lot. So, as the Ascension players amongst you will already know, I have the app on my iPad.
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