malvasia bianca

It took me a little while to warm up to Ascension: Immortal Heroes, but I eventually ended up liking it quite a bit, about as much as the second expansion. It first seemed like the new mechanic, randomly acquiring a card from the original game that was valid for one turn only, added a bit too much randomness, but as I played more that turned into one more thing to take into account into my calculations.

More importantly, the more I played, the more I liked the balance between the factions: Mechana constructs didn’t seem to dominate, Lifebound heroes did if you could chain them together right but judging the chances of that happening took some doing, and events gave enough of a boost to the other two factions to make them interesting. The original game was in large part all about banishing; that was much much less important in this iteration, but it was still present (and still occasionally a dominating strategy if the cards fell correctly), with timing the switch from banishing to profit becoming rather more important.

So: well done, I look forward to the next expansion.