Day 2 of the #7days7dice over on Instagram and we have Ashes rise of the Phoenixborn by Plaid Hat Games. This is one of the few collectable card games that has really grabbed me. The setting of the game is your standard, magical people must battle it out until only one is left sort of standard fare. Basically, the magical force that gives the phoenixborn the power to wield magic now wants to be united into one person. Kind of like the 2001 Jet Li film The One, except with dragons instead of martial arts.
The game looks beautiful, the bright, colourful artwork really pops off of the cards and is some of the nicest graphical design I’ve seen in a board game. Each player will take the roll of a unique phoenixborn who will have access to some unique cards and powers. To play any cards you need the right magical mana resources. This mana doesn’t come from coloured lands or any other type of card, it comes from dice.
Each player will have a pool of 10 dice that they will roll each turn to determine their mana pool. These dice come in 4 flavours in the base game but more are added in expansions. The dice you roll determine what you can do on your turn, there are ways to mitigate and re-roll your dice but it adds a fresh way to play one of these card battling games.
The game comes with suggested decks and dice selections for each of the 6 phoenixborn in the box, but the game also has a deck building option to it. Or, alternatively you can mix up your dice selection so you are more able to play some of your card types.
The cards broadly speaking come in two types, spells and creatures. Some spells allow you to conjure creatures at a later time and others give you unique abilities to play with. Some of the spells sit out in your play area in your spell board and all of your creatures sit in your battlefield. Each phoenixborn has different limits for the number of cards that can be kept in each of these areas. This gives the different characters a unique feel to them.
It is/was a great game. To expand it you bought fully formed decks for a new phoenixborn. I much prefer this model to the random card packs used by other games. I own nearly everything for this game, everything except for a horribly out of print promo phoenixborn. I don’t get to play it nearly as much as I would like as there just aren’t many players out there. I tend to try and get it in as a follow on game after playing some Star/Hero Realms or Magic. Ashes was a game that never really got the love it deserved.
