Cyberpunk adventures

Tamashii: Chronicles of Ascend 🌆 has been waiting for us to try it. It is one of the recent games from Awaken Realms, who are known for their huge sprawling campaign games and mountains of miniatures. Tamashii is actually part of their Lite game line, meaning it’s a more simple and quick-playing game. However unsurprisingly, you do get a bunch of miniatures. 😅 They are simply amazing though.

The theme is a great one. 😁 It’s both cyberpunk (reason for the amazing minis) and post-apocalyptic. An artificial intelligence 🖥️ called “Ascend” had become sentient, which ended badly for humanity (I guess quite similarly to Skynet in Terminator). Now deadly machines are roaming the lands and humans are fighting to survive. Players can hack into bodies and gain control of them and their abilities, and they do not die, instead are simply ejected out and respawn. This special ability is quintessential to stand a chance in this fight for humanity. 💪

At the very center of the game is a creative pattern-matching sliding puzzle mechanic. 🧩 Every turn players randomly draw colored tokens out of their bag and place them on specific spots of their player board grid, then they get a few “programming” movement to push or swap them around. 🧐 Basically somewhat like Candy Crush. If you match specific patterns, you can do those actions, then remove the used tokens from the board. There are some basic patterns that let you increase some stats (like shield or dice rerolls), but other elements of the game will show patterns as well: like bodies you can hack into, enemies you want to defeat or scenario specific things.

💬It works really well. I guess the question is only how it will hold up over the bunch of scenarios there are in the game - and also how different the scenarios themselves are. 🤔 For now we aren’t too deep into the campaign, but I already see that each scenario can bring in unique mechanics to switch things up. 👍 It’s also hard to evaluate the difficulty, and how luck and skill play a role. For now we are interested in exploring the game some more - and probably paint up those beautiful cyberpunk minis. 🤩