Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn

GAMES NEWS! 10/08/20

Ava: Expelled? From board game school? But I played by all the rules! And you’re not even the head of board game school, you’re just a janitor! Surely you can’t have expulsion privileges?!

Tom: Ava, everyone has expulsion privileges at board game school. It’s a loophole in the rules – the only way to get back in is to write a compelling 2,000 word essay on this week’s hot games news. Either that, or eat a whole copy of Roads and Boats.

Ava: Hmm, I had Bus for breakfast. I guess it’ll have to be the news.

Ava: Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn took quite a few by storm back in 2015, and wrapped up with a big finale after a successful run of expansions. Now it’s all happening again, like a groundhog-flavoured phoenix.

Ava: After a week playing the fun game ‘moving all the objects I own from one building to another and then slowly finding new places for them to sit’, I’m mostly on my own for this week’s Games News. I’m cosily nested in an incredibly tall house on a slightly different hill in my gorgeous little valley. The sky is blue, the trees are green, the garden is gravelly and the game table is flat.

What a perfect time to roast up some news.

Kickstarting its way into orbit this week is Space Race, a follow up to a card game of the same name that looks to take up a little more of your table. The art direction is the star here, all blueprints and sharply inked illustrations. Players will build rival agencies sending astronauts into the void with a some literal and metaphorical engine building and what looks like a bit of orbital area control.

Paul: Do you like games? And do you like news? If so, you’re in EXACTLY the right place. Even as I type these words, news about games is forming out of the very air itself. It speckles and shines like morning dew, so here we are collecting only the freshest of drops-

Quinns: paul there has been another SCANDAL

After acquiring the license for the Alien franchise, publisher Wonderdice announced the forthcoming USCSS Nostromo, a co-operative survival horror game about trying to escape from the film’s famous shiny space monster. So far, so promising. However, soon after the announcement, French designer François Bachelart stepped forward to say that the game was a copy of a design he’d already pitched to Wonderdice, four years back.

Quinns: Hello everybody! So glad you could meet me here, at the Games News pub. It’s my round! Who’s for a pint of news? [points at you] News and soda, was it?

It’s happy hour, so we’re going to start out with a double news on the rocks. The nonsense-mongers at Hasbro have just unveiled two new games. Speak Out: Kids vs Parents is a familial evolution of their game Speak Out, both of which feature your team trying to work out what the hell you’re saying while you wear a dentist’s cheek retractor.

Doesn’t that sound like a game we’d make up as part of a skit? I can only approve that Hasbro has made it a reality.

The press image for it (above) is freaking me out, though. The combination of Habro’s clean-cut toy photography (which has always looked a little “uncanny valley” to me) with rictus grins is absolutely terrifying. Imagine coming downstairs and finding them in your living room. “WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY A GAME,” bleats the mother, spraying spit across the room.

Paul: Welcome! Welcome to a very particular corner of my home. While apartment life in Vancouver doesn’t afford me the sort of cavernous attic that we peeped into when Quinns talked about his game collection, I do have a very particular place where I keep mine, all safe and warm and pristine. Welcome to my Games Closet. Welcome to the home of my fun. Please, take my hand as I invite you into a midnight tour of a very snug, very intimate space in my life. Don’t worry! You’re quite safe. Now, walk this way with me. Walk this way. Just around here. Toward the light…

Quinns: It’s the week of Spiel, Germany’s largest board game convention! Break out the bratwurst.

Paul: Keep calm and curryworst… on?

Quinns: I wonder which games will have stollen our hearts by the end.

Paul: Let’s talk card games over kartoffelpuffer. Print runs and fischbrötchen!

Quinns: Are you just looking at the Wikipedia page on German food?

Paul: Yes.

Quinns: Well nevermind that! I want to tell the people about my most-anticipated Spiel releases!

This week, Paul takes a trip to the clinic, as a result of looking at another new title from Plaid Hat Games. To everyone’s surprise, he finds himself deckbuilding with Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn. Deckbuilding! Whatever will happen next?

Seriously, what will happen next? Paul’s been unable to get hold of Quinns since setting up the North American office and now he’s acting a little out of character.

In Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn, an expandable card game, players take on the roles of Phoenixborns, demi-gods and protectors of this world. These characters are the great saviors of their civilizations. Before they came into existence, the humans were plagued by monsters like chimeras that took away their lands and forced them to live in walled-off cities. When the Phoenixborns came, they fought off the chimeras and freed the lands for humans to take over once again.

But the time of peace was short-lived. A prophecy arose that if one Phoenixborn was able to absorb enough Ashes of others, they would ascend into full gods and take mastery over this world. This, as well as humans’ greed for land, fueled the War of Ashes. The great cities now fight among each other, each one of them with a Phoenixborn at its helm, and you will decide who will rise and who will fall to ashes.

Quinns: Hello and welcome, I hope you’re all ready for another piping hot serving of Games News. Today, we have a double news, in which I’m joined by Paul and we’ll be firing off the news together, manning the News Cannons. Rotating the News Turrets.

Paul: I had to get up very early for this.

Quinns: So shall we dive right in?

Paul: Because of the time difference, it’s 4am in Shut Up & Sit Down’s North American Office and also 1986…

Quinns: Let’s go!

Paul: …I’m using a dial-up modem.

Quinns: First up!

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