For my money, it’s the best-designed game in the world. I’ve played a ton of Magic: The Gathering. I am a sucker for 1-versus-1 dueling games. Each Phoenixborn can play cards to their spell board and units to the battlefield. This continues until a phoenixborn has taken damage equal to its health. Players then draw back up to five cards and reroll their dice and prepare for the next round. Players continue taking main and side actions until both players pass consecutively for their main action. There are a few units with a special unit guard ability that allows them to jump in front of this type of attack. If you attack a unit directly, in most cases that damage will just happen to the unit. Any unblocked units damage the phoenixborn and any defended units do damage to the blocker. If you are attacking a phoenixborn, the defending player can have any of their units block any of your units. When you attack you can either choose one unit to attack another unit directly or any number of units to attack your opponent’s phoenixborn. Attacking is always your main action for the turn though. There are special icons on each card to designate whether playing/activating it is a main or side action. On your turn, you can take one main action and one side action.
A common magic symbol is found on three sides of every die. You get to pick any five different cards from your deck to be your starting hand.Įach round you’ll start by rolling your pool of dice.
You play with a deck of 30 cards and you have 10 dice that are your resources throughout the game. The core set comes with six different Phoenixborn with preconstructed decks you can play with. In the most meaningful ways, Ashes: Reborn plays exactly like Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn. Plaid Hat has extricated itself from Asmodee and Ashes was re-released with some rules changes and balance adjustments and is alive again as Ashes: Reborn. The game died and its beautiful art was relegated to the dark corners of the gaming world where people play dead card games.īut, apropos considering the phoenix in the name, Ashes has risen again. After being acquired by Asmodee, Ashes expansions and organized play ceased to exist. After buying the core box, a few expansions, and a sweet insert… Asmodee buys up Plaid Hat.Īnd there lies the end of the Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn’s story. The new buzz is going on about a beautiful living card game from Plaid Hat Games, fresh off their massive success with Dead of Winter.