Play as necromancers!
In 👑 Crown of Ash you slip into the role of vengeful necromancers 💀 who are raising undead armies to send them into endless bloody clashes and controlling structures to spread their influence over the land, all in an effort to emerge victorious and take the Crown.
It’s a light-weight strategic euro with worker placement and area control played over 4 rounds. Each round you will place 4 of your minions to do your bidding. You can gather resources, build new structures to improve the resources and points they generate, refresh your hand of combat cards or initiate combat. Resources are used to recruit undead soldiers that will march to battles for you.
The main focus of the game is area control. The board is split into 6 areas each with a resource providing structure that you can visit, upgrade or attack, plus there is a middle citadel that is only for generating points. So why are you fighting for control of these locations? At the end of every round they are scored, and controlling them is the primary way to get points. You also get a bonus tax if an enemy minion activates your structure. This means there will be a lot of combat! ⚔️
If you attack someone, you choose up to 2 soldier cards (3 if attacking the citadel) plus you have to secretly play a combat card - the defender just uses the soldiers already on the board and selects a combat card. You then add up the strength values of the cards to determine who is the winner. Bigger value wins, with ties won by the defender. Sets of matching colored soldiers will get a strength bonus. Defeated soldiers are discarded but you get them back every round and you keep recruiting new ones, so your deck of soldiers will grow as you play.
An interesting thing is how the combat cards provide you with a reward depending on whether you won or not - so sometimes defeat can be beneficial!
The art of this game and the production quality is phenomenal for sure, they did a really great job. 🤩The gameplay is accessible, with a fair amount of strategic depth.👍
Crown of Ash is currently on Kickstarter, so you might want to check it out. 😉
A prototype of this game was kindly shared by the publisher for us to try out. Just a heads-up: all the components are prototypes, so things might look or play a bit differently in the final version. For more details, check out our content policy.
