How to play Ascendancy

Happy birthday! Open your present: i got you that kingdom you always wanted. Hi! It’s Ryan from Nights Around a Table. Here’s how to play Ascendancy.

You and your friends play heirs to the thrones of your respective royal houses. You’ll travel a fantasy map, extending your kingdom into new regions and controlling them by placing workers, establishing settlements, increasing your skills, discovering and identifying loot, completing quests, constructing buildings, and advancing along a tech tree, all while fending off bad guys invading from your borders, and interacting with non-player Nemesis characters that waste resources, take up the spots you want, wreck your stuff, and pick superpowered boss fights with you.

Ascendancy is half worker placement game: you have a handful of workers of various strengths, and you can place them on spots in four different stations around the board. Those stations let you summon enemies to fight, collect resources, power up your workers or empire, and travel around the board discovering new lands and building out your kingdom. This 4x area control dealie is the other half of the game.

The game has a base set of rules and mechanics that you play by, and a scenario booklet with unique rules and exceptions for different modes of play. Some scenarios have you competing with one another, some have you cooperating, some have you splitting off into teams, sometimes with hidden roles. Certain scenarios introduce powerful new boss characters to square off against. Some Scenarios have you going through a sort of Choose Your Own Adventure story-based mode, like The Lost Jewels of Nabooti. Ooh – remember that one?

Usually, this is where I say “whichever player has the most Nabootis by the end of the game wins,” but Ascendancy’s not like that. It depends on the scenario you’re playing: sometimes you win by getting the biggest score, sometimes you have to team up to defeat the big bad together, and other times… well, who knows what the victory conditions might be?

i’m not going to reveal the details of the actual stories and scenarios in the game, because discovering them is a major part of the joy of playing Ascendancy! This isn’t the type of game where you have to sit down and watch a whole Nights Around a Table video before you play, necessarily. There’s a very good tutorial walkthrough in the Scenario Book that you can open up with your friends at the table and just run through completely cold, without reading a single rule. The tutorial walks you through every phase of the game and gives you a taste of the major mechanics, once you have all the pieces set up. i highly recommend doing that instead of watching me blah blah blah for however long this video is. 40 minutes?? Holy… crap. i hope you’re watching this thing at double speed.

Once you go through that tutorial, THEN you’re tasked with reading through the rest of the rulebook so you can play future games, so maybe that’s when you want to watch this video, because as you know, reading is for nerds. Or maybe you don’t even own the game, and you’re watching this video to figure out whether you might enjoy it? If that’s you, i’ve got you covered.

Now, i said the tutorial goes smoothly once you have the game set up. But the rulebook itself admits that the very first time you open the box and set this game up, it‘ll probably take you over an hour! That’s even longer than this video! If you’re watching because you’re planning to play Ascendancy for the first time TONIGHT, i highly recommend following the setup section before your friends arrive. THEN play the tutorial with them, THEN when they leave, watch the rest of this video, as long as you haven’t run out of snacks. If you’re watching this video with all of your friends around the table and you JUST cracked the shrink on your copy of Ascendancy and you’re hoping to play right now, then i’m sorry, but you’ll need to put your friends to work helping you set everything up. Hiyaa! Get cracking, friends!

The Lay of the Land

You get to play one of four royal houses. There’s a sort of Viking/barbarian/Mongol house, a piratey house, a dark-magicky kind of wizardy house, and one filled with… like… sexy hippies. Depending on which version of the game you own, you get a mini or a standee representing where you are on the cardboard or neoprene map. I’ll be teaching the game with all the souped up components because i’m… fancy.

Lots of things in Ascendancy have a level, or Tier – and that includes your little workers. Among your commoner workers are a tier I outcast, a tier II labourer, and a tier III loyalist. Your nobles include your tier IV Lord /Lady, and your superawesome Tier V royal advisor. And finally, you’ve got a mount that doesn’t count as a normal worker, because it’s a horse, and it can be tier I, II or III depending on what’s going on in the game. You can gain more workers as the game goes on, to a maximum of two of each type. The Tiers affect which District tray you’re allowed to worker-place them in, and whether or not they can muscle out other lower-Tier pieces.

The tracker board has a game clock over here, measured in decades, and ending at the pink tracker. Each decade is a single round of play. Different scenarios can last different numbers of decades, and in certain cases, the number is adjustable so you can play a longer or shorter game.

The Loyalty track measures how much your people respect, admire, and fear you. In scenarios where you win by getting the most Nabootis, these Loyalty points are the Nabootis.

Upkeep represents how costly your kingdom is getting. Different things you build and decisions you make ratchet this cost up, and it grinds down your kingdom’s income. Ascendancy uses these stackable markers on the Tracker, so there can never be ties: if your marker moves into the same space as another player, yours goes on top. The player whose marker is topmost and highest up any given track is leading that track.

Down here is the skill wheel that measures your might, which looks like a fist, intellect, which looks like a brain, and cunning, which looks like a… you know what? i don’t even know what that’s supposed to be. Some kind of… sassy eyeball? It looks like Manitoba just got a new hockey team. But hey: YOU try drawing an icon for the word “cunning” and let’s see what YOU come up with!

At different moments in the game, you’ll need to make checks against those three skills to complete Quests and go on adventures and accomplish other tasks, or roll off against other players to see who gets the highest number that you add to a particular skill value. At the end of each decade, you get rewarded with different prizes depending on where your skill levels are.

You generally start out with a settlement on your starting tile on the map, which is called your Capitol. Tier I looks like this, and you can upgrade it to add a wall to make it tier II, and a tower for tier III. You can also spread out across the map, building settlements on other tiles, up to 6 settlements total. If your Capitol settlement ever gets wrecked, you’re out of the game, so try to avoid that. Depending on the version of the game you have, you might own these big fancy settlements that you can use as your Capitol. But you still have a cap of 6 settlements – if one of those gets pilfered by another player in a SIEGE, you can’t fish the extra one out of the box. 6 settlements is your max.

The game has six resources: food, ore, skill, and knowledge. There’s also a special resource called Manastones – you can gain up to three of them, and the first one you gain costs you 1 upkeep. Manastones let you unleash your fighting champions’ powerful superabilities. You don’t lose your manastones when you spend them – you exhaust them, and they get refreshed later. The purple stuff is influence, which you can spend along with wisdom and food cubes to upgrade different things on these tech trees you uncover at the bottom of your board. The game also has loot that you can pick up from the map or as a reward for doing other things, but that loot generally has to remain secret and unidentified until you take a certain action to reveal it. There are also these renown tokens which you get for doing awesome things – killing monsters, completing quests. Renown is extremely important, since it’s the prerequisite for leveling up your empire and unlocking extra settlement pieces and powerful area of effect tech cards.

Turn Order

Here’s what the game loop looks like:

There are four different trays called Districts that you tackle one by one in order: phase 1 The Frontier, phase 2 The Supply, phase 3 The Academy, and phase 4 The Empire. Tray by tray, everybody places their workers on different spots, and after everyone has placed, you resolve the actions where the workers are standing. Repeat that for all four Districts, and then the decade is over. You perform a few final steps to hand out prizes and refresh some card stacks and markers around the game.

So let’s zoom in on the first tray for phase 1, The Frontier. These are all the places where you can potentially place one of your worker dudes. The spots are all exclusive, so only one player at a time can have a dude there. But some actions have two slots… when play comes back around to you, if you want to, you’re allowed to place another one of your guys in the other slot, if it’s available. The TYPE of action isn’t exclusive, but the individual spots are.

Everyone takes turns in reverse loyalty order, and you figure that out by looking at the loyalty track: so here, green and yellow are at the top of the track, but we know green is in first place because the green stacker is on top. Then it’s red, and then blue. But your turns go in REVERSE loyalty order, so: blue gets to place first, then red, yellow, and green. That means blue gets a chance to place a guy in the Frontier first, then red, then yellow, then green. Then you loop back around to blue, who gets a chance to place another guy. Then red, then yellow, then green. I say “gets a chance,” because on your turn, you can either place a dude, or pass.

Once everyone has passed because nobody wants to place any more guys, you resolve all of the actions. This is a bit of a free-for-all: everyone can resolve their actions simultaneously to speed the game up, but if there are timing conflicts or combos or whatever, you can slow it down and resolve the actions from top to bottom, left to right as they appear on the tray.

Once you resolve all of the actions in District 1, you leave all your guys on that tray and repeat the process on District 2, then 3, and so on until you’ve gone through all four districts.

The game uses this crowned bust to refer to a human player, and this bust with gears-for-brains to refer to a non-player Nemesis. You can play against a Nemesis on standard or hard mode. Round order gets a bit more complicated with a Nemesis in the mix. Watch:

A standard mode nemesis always places their workers before any humans do. Start by grabbing these workers for the Nemesis, plus their mount. Before any of the human players get a turn, for all four District trays, you roll for the Nemesis, and place the worker on the matching spot as you work through the Districts: Tier 1 Outcast in District 1, Tier 2 Labourer on District II, and so on. Once all of those Nemesis workers are in place, THEN you start with the lowest human player on the Loyalty track, and start placing dudes on the Phase 1 Frontier tray as usual.!

It’s only a titch more squirrelly if you have MORE than one Nemesis character in the game set to standard difficulty.

Let’s say that in this game, the yellow and green players are non-player Nemesis characters, while blue and red are humans. The yellow Nemesis character rolls the die a bunch of times and places their guys on all the District trays first. Ordinarily, the next person in reverse loyalty order would be the red player, but we’re not finished dealing with the robots yet. Green is the next ROBOT in reverse loyalty order, so we roll the die and place all of that robot player’s guys next. THEN we move on to the two human players: red gets to go next, being the lowest of the human players, so red gets a chance to place a guy in District 1 first. Then blue gets a turn to place a guy in District 1. And you keep looping between the two human players until they’ve both passed. After you resolve all the actions on that board, including the actions that the Nemesis characters rolled, that ends phase 1, and you pick up again with the lowest Loyalty human player, who gets the first shot at placing a worker in District 2. And so on and so forth.

If the Nemesis is on HARD mode, you don’t get the luxury of seeing where the non-player characters will place their dudes ahead of time!

You grab the Nemesis character’s workers, but they all get bumped up 1 Tier.

Then, you go through the phases of the game in reverse Loyalty order as if everyone was human. So here, the yellow player is a non-player Nemesis. The green human player gets a turn to place in District 1, red player gets a turn, then the yellow Nemesis rolls a die and places their Laborer in the corresponding spot in District 1, and then the blue human player goes. It loops back around to green, then red, then you skip the yellow Nemesis player because they only place one dude per District, and you move on to blue, and then keep looping until all the humans pass. Then repeat that process for the rest of the phases in the other Districts.

Given the chance, a Nemesis character will always choose the leftmost slot because it’s usually more valuable and has a bonus attached.

When you move from one District to another, it’s possible that the Loyalty standings will have changed, which will affect turn order. Evaluate the reverse Loyalty order at the beginning of each new Phase, and stick with that order until each phase is complete.

Worker Tiers and Ousting

We’ve seen that each of your different workers has a Tier.

You can only place a worker in a district if that District’s phase number is less than or equal to the worker’s Tier.

So District 1 is the Frontier. You can place any of your workers there.

But in District 2, you can’t place your Tier 1 Outcast. In fact, the District 1 board is the ONLY District where you can place your Tier 1 Outcast!

If someone has a worker in a spot you want, you can rock up with a higher Tier worker and bump that guy out, returning it to its controlling player.

So this level 1 red Outcast gets the boot when blue plays a level 3 Loyalist. This frees up that Outcast for red to maybe play it to another action space somewhere else on their turn, if there are still any spots remaining!

You can also be a total jerk about this. If there’s a spot with two actions and only one of them is occupied, you don’t have to take the empty one. You can boot this guy out with your higher-Tier worker just for funsies, and grab the perk that usually comes with the better spot.

If you have a riderless mount, and your mount is a higher Tier than a mount that has a Lord/Lady astride it, you can boot that mount AND its rider… the mounted Lord/Lady doesn’t beef up the mount’s tier or anything – you just look at the… horsepower.

Royal Advisors are the most powerful workers in the game, and can never be booted. They also let you resolve an action twice!

If you boot a Nemesis player’s worker, that worker is gone for this decade – the Nemesis doesn’t get to put it back on the District later, not even on Hard mode. But if you boot a Nemesis player’s MOUNT, it stays on the tray. It just gets bumped down to the next highest MOVE slot.

Decade End

After you’ve gone through all four Phases and resolved the actions on the fourth and final District board, you do a little cleanup.

In turn order,everyone gets to do four things in any order they like: collect income, gain skill perks, trigger area effects, and perform Instant Actions.

To collect income, look at the coins you’re due based on where you are on the loyalty track, and subtract the coins you owe from the Upkeep track. Collect your money from the bank. You only ever GET money in this step – you never LOSE it. So if the difference here is less than zero, you don’t have to pay.

To resolve your skill perks, look at where your markers are on the skill track. If you see any prizes with an hourglass icon on them sitting next to your marker, claim that perk. The perks sitting in between two skills require you to have reached that level or better on both adjacent tracks to claim them. So if you have at least 4 cunning and at least 4 intellect, you can claim elitism, where all of your workers can act as Lords/Ladies for the rest of the game. And since these perks are cumulative, you could claim all of these ones too.

Next, you can trigger any area effects on any tech cards that you’ve unlocked from your tech tree. You also have to resolve any area effects that are in play from Nemesis characters that impact YOU. We’ll look at this in more detail later.

There are also certain Instant Actions you can perform at the end of a decade, but i’ll cover those in their own section.

Once all players have finished these end-of-decade things, you hold a coronation ceremony. The player with the highest Loyalty gets the crown token. If your version of the game came with a paper crown, the crowned player has to put it on. Now, does the crowned player ACTUALLY have to wear the paper crown? Like, is that a rule? … Yes.

That crowned player gets to pick any or all card stacks in the game and refresh them by sending the top card to the bottom of the stack. If a non-player Nemesis gets crowned, none of the card stacks get refreshed.

Then, the crowned player draws a new Event card, reads it to the table, and places it in the Empire tray. Event cards come in different varieties: some favour the crowned player for the next decade, and some favour everyone else. The ones marked Dissent give 1 or 2 loyalty points to Nemesis characters depending on their difficulty. Some events require players to pass a skill check, sometimes in a roll-off against a Nemesis. Some even force all players to discard a worker.

After the crowned player deals with the Event card, you retrieve all of your workers from the four Districts, refresh your exhausted cards, recharge your manastones, and bump the brown decade marker up a tick. Well done: that’s ten years on the books, Your Highnesses!

The crowned player remains crowned for the entire next decade and gets final say on any rules disputes, no matter what happens to their Loyalty score during that time.

If this was the final decade of the Scenario, no one gets crowned, there’s no new Event, your workers stay in their Districts, and your manastones stay exhausted. But everyone still gets to run their income/skill perks/and area effects, perform instant actions, and refresh their exhausted cards.

At the end of the game, figure out who won and lost according to the Scenario you were playing. Any and all winning players get to grab a Legacy Reward card and add it to their tableau to use in their next game of Ascendancy.

With that all sorted, let’s dive even deeper and see what all of the action spaces on the district boards do for you!

Phase 1 – The Frontier

All the stuff on this board represents what’s going on on the outskirts of your kingdom’s borders.

You’ll generally be placing your Tier 1 Outcast workers here, but if you place a Tier 2 worker or above on a spot that lets you draw a card, you get to draw 1 extra card, pick the one you want, and sink the other to the bottom of the deck. And remember that if you place your Royal Advisor, you also get to perform an action twice.

If you resolve this action, you get to grab the topmost item or battle item from one of these stacks and add it to your tableau. This here is called an Instant Action – we’ll worry about those in their own section.

The Scout action lets you first grab a piece of loot sitting on a tile up to one range away from your avatar. Mountains affect range, so even though this tile looks like it’s within 1 range from your avatar, it’s not, because the mountains mean these two tiles are not connected. If you snag any loot, remember not to flip it over – it’s still unidentified, and has to stay that way until you take an action to identify it. Then, you grab the top 2 tiles, from this stack, pick one, and place it on the empty hex. Each hex can only hold 1 tile. Discard the tile you didn’t choose face-down in this stack. Each location tile has modifiers that may give players Loyalty bonuses depending on how those tiles are connected with other tiles of various colours. So if a player built a settlement on this tile, they’d suffer a loyalty penalty from any purple tile sitting next to it, but they’d get a loyalty point boost for every adjacent blue tile. FIX GFX HERE If this was the situation, a player settling this tile wouldn’t lose points from the adjacent purple location, because these tiles aren’t connected, due to the mountain between them. By the way, yellow is wild and means “any colour.”

When you resolve the Scout action, you don’t actually get to move your avatar anywhere – it stays put. Moving is an entirely different action that we’ll see in Phase 4.

These two actions let you Reveal a creature from either the Tier I or Tier II stack. You flip the card from the respective stack, and move that creature to the enemy side of the Encounter Zone on your player board. There’s another action in the final phase that lets you just fight a blindly-drawn Creature card, but resolving this action lets you see what you’re getting into ahead of time. Before or after you resolve this action, you also get to identify any 1 piece of loot you’ve collected by flipping it over and claiming what’s on the back.

Let’s skip this one and talk about the Patron action first. Resolving this space lets you do the thing on this building up here. Each District starts off with a pre-printed level 0 building on it – we’ll find out what the Innkeeper does after we learn about some other game mechanics. Placing here also lets you identify one of your collected bags of loot before or after you resolve this action.

Backing it up, when you resolve the Build action, you get to construct one of the buildings from your player board to the District tray. Since we’re in Phase 1, your only option here is your stack of Cunning buildings – you can only construct your might and intellect buildings to Districts 2 and 3 in later phases.

Your Manitoba Hockey Team stack contains tier 0, tier I, II, and III buildings, but you gotta build tier 0 first – you can’t just skip ahead and build Tier III, even if you can afford it.

To afford it, you have to meet a certain skill prerequisite: this one means you have to have at least two Manitoba Hockey Team points on the Tracker. You also have to pay 2 ore, but the BUILD space here gets you a 1-ore discount. Then, you gain this many Loyalty points and this much Upkeep. Flip the card face-up into the building spot on the District tray – you can either splay it so that you can see what all the buildings do, or place it next to the tray if you find that sloppy and you’ve got the table space to spread out. Any of the buildings up here are available to players to patronize when anyone resolves the PATRON action.

Finally, you take that entire stack of cards and slide it up to reveal the next single row of the Tech Tree below it. That thing looks crazy cool, so obviously we’re gonna go over it later.

Now for the rest of the game, anyone who takes the Patron action can choose to do the thing on YOUR building, and if you’re playing a competitive version of the game, you’re entitled to charge other players 1 money if they patronize your building. In a cooperative game, you might not want to do that. But it’s up to you.

Later in the game, if you manage to build the next Tier building for this Phase, you slam it on top of the previous Tier version, overwriting it. So that’s when going from Tier 0 to Tier I to Tier II to Tier III.

If you resolve the BUILD action and you can’t afford or don’t want to build anything, you can forfeit your action. The game even lets you displace your worker and stick it on an empty space on the current District board and resolve that action instead, if any spaces are still open.

Phase 2 – The Supply

The Supply is where you get to ransack your kingdom’s farms, mines, and small businesses for the stuff you need to expand your empire and keep your engine running.

You can only place your Tier II labourers or higher here, so if you held on to any Outcasts from Phase 1, they’re not allowed in the Supply. Jus’…gettin’ everything dirty. Gross. Get out of here.

If you use a Tier III Loyalist in this District to get a goodie, you get a 1-buck bonus.

If you place a Lord/Lady, you get a 2-buck bonus.

And as usual, placing a Royal Advisor lets you perform an action twice. But no bonus money.

The actions here are pretty straightforward: resolve this one to grab a food cube from the topmost row for free, or here for ore, here for skill, and here for knowledge. Any time stuff gets discarded in the game, it winds up in this trough, including manastones and purple stuff. Sometimes, the game tells you to Restock a resource: in that case you move it from Discard to the top row of its respective shelf, and if that row is full, it goes on the next row up. We’ll figure out what all THIS jazz means when we talk about Instant Actions.

The Build and Patron slots here work the same as they did on the first board, but you’ll be building the thing in your middle Might stack instead. Patronizing the basic level zero Banker building lets you put two bucks next to your worker, and reclaim those coins at the end of the decade with one bonus buck as interest. If you placed here, you get a bonus buck, which you can use to pay your banker investment, or optionally, to pay another player who demands it when you patronize their building. Or, you can just keep that buck for other things, because money.

Phase 3 – The Academy

The Academy houses all the most skilled people in your kingdom, be they scholars or warriors.

You can only place a Tier III loyalist or above in this District – this pretentious little beret will help you identify him.

Resolve the Quest action to draw two cards from the Quest deck, put one in your tableau, and sink the other one to the bottom of the deck.

Resolve the Hireling to grab the top card in either the Mercenary or War Machine stack, check it out, and add it face-down to your tableau. This adds 1 Upkeep to your track. As an Instant Action, you’ll be able to pay to Deploy these cards to your Encounter Row to help you fight battles later on. These bits are Instant Actions that we’ll cover in that section.

Here, you can claim a manastone from this supply and place it on your board. It starts charged. Your first manastone always comes with 1 upkeep, but any additional manastones you gain do not. You’re capped at 3 manastones total. This spot nets you an influence cube.

The BUILD and PATRON actions work the same as they did in the other Districts, but you’re building from the Intellect column on your board.

The level 0 Mystic building lets you clear a bad status effect token from a combat unit you control. We haven’t seen those yet, but they’re bad, and you want to clear them. Then, you can either identify 1 loot, or peek at any face-down card in the game. That could be a Creature card or an upcoming event card, or even – in certain Scenarios – another player’s hidden role card.

Phase 4 – The Empire

The fourth and final District board is where all your 4x map stuff happens – moving, settling, picking fights with player or non-player enemies, and laying siege to other players’ settlements.

This board requires you to place a noble worker – either your Lord/Lady, or your Royal Advisor – and these spaces additionally enable that worker to be mounted.

We’ll skip over this bit until we look at Nemesis characters in more detail.

Resolve this action to spruce up one of your settlements. Add the next piece – either a wall or, if you’ve already got a wall, a tower – and then claim Loyalty points according to what the Location tile grants you for your settlement’s new Tier. These values are discrete, not cumulative.

If you placed a noble here – either a Lord/Lady or a Royal Advisor, you get to have an adventure. If you placed a horsey, you get to MOVE. If you placed both, you get to DO both, and in either order.

If you resolve a MOVE action, you pick a target hex you want to move to, and then you have to feed 1 green food cube to your horsey for every food icon printed on the map between you and your target hex. Move your avatar to the target hex.

MOVEing with a Tier 2 horsey gets you a 1-food discount for the whole trip, and a Tier 3 horsey gets you a 2-food discount.

If your target hex has any Loot on it, claim it face-down. But you don’t get to grab all the Loot you find along the way. You’re not Pac-Man.

If the target hex you’re moving to is empty, draw two location tiles. Place one, discard the other. That new tile may affect Loyalty scores of neighbouring tiles controlled by various players like before.

You’re not allowed to MOVE across mountains. These mountainous borders with little arrows in the middle are mountains that let you move through them in one direction without having to give your horse a food cube.

You can move THROUGH any territory that has someone else’s settlement in it, but you’re not allowed to stop your movement there unless the owner of the settlement gives you permission.

If you have a noble here, mounted or otherwise, you get to go on an ADVENTURE. You pick a target hex (so that’s either the hex your avatar is currently on, or the target hex you’re MOVEing to if you’re also using your mount to move on this turn), and then roll a skill check against that Location tile. So this tile has you rolling your die, and adding its result to your current Manitoba Hockey Team skill. If the total is 5 or greater, you get a free SCOUT action, and if it’s 7 or greater, this ampersand means you also get to grab a blue knowledge cube from District 2. There’s no limit to the number of times you can ADVENTURE on a single Location tile throughout the game. If you resolve the ADVENTURE action again either this decade or later in the game and you want to ADVENTURE on the same Location tile, go for it.

If you want to CONQUER something, you’re talking about picking a fight with the enemies lined up down here in your Encounter Zone. If your zone is empty of enemies when you resolve a conquer action, you have to grab any number of bad guy cards in District 1 from either tier and flip them face-up into your Encounter Zone. Surprise! It’s terrible! i bet you wished you used one of those Reveal actions back in Phase 1 so you’d know what kind of fight you were getting into. It’s probably also a good idea if you’ve unlocked and Deployed at least one Champion or Mercenary to fight for you. Anyway, then you fight all the things. We’ll talk about Battle in its own section. If you nab this slot and you have 3 or more human players in the game, you get 1 renown when you fight, guaranteed, even if you lose the Battle.

If you want to lay SIEGE to another player’s settlement, you need to have one of those War Machines you drew from the Academy board Deployed into your Encounter Zone – and we’ll see how to Deploy cards in a bit.

To lay SIEGE, target a settlement within range 1 of your avatar. Mountains block your range, as usual. If the terrain tile that your targeted settlement is on is empty, just wreck the topmost tier of it and collect it as a trophy. You can’t upgrade your own settlement with that piece later – that trophy is a memento of your SIEGE. Every settlement piece you collect nets you Loyalty points that match its Tier… so if you collect Tier 1, that’s 1 Loyalty point. If you nab a Tier 3 tower piece, that’s 3 Loyalty points.

If somebody’s home when you attack, you start a Battle against that player, and whatever combat units they’ve got lined up on the left side of THEIR Encounter Zone – again, we’ll look at the specifics of battling shortly. If the settlement being attacked is Tier II or III, the human defender is allowed to put a Fortification into play for free to assist in that battle. The Fortification’s super ability lets the defender end the siege. If you’re the defending player and you lose the siege and, therefore, a piece of your settlement, you also lose any loyalty that Tier of your settlement had provided, according to whatever its Location tile says. When the Siege is over, the attacking player removes their War Machine and flips it into their tableau on its undeployed side.

If player-vs-player combat isn’t your bag, don’t worry: in the setup section, i’ll talk about how you can choose to include it in your game or not.

Battle

Enough of this blather: let’s find out how to fight!

When you Battle, you’ll either be laying SIEGE to someone’s settlement with their avatar present to defend it, or you’ll be CONQUERring one or more baddies in your Encounter Zone. You can also try to straight-up CONQUER a fellow human player if you’ve both opted in for player-vs-player Combat, and if the avatar there is a Nemesis, you’ll get into a Boss Fight.

There are two different types of combat units in Ascendancy: ones where you roll dice to determine what they do, and ones where you get to spend Stamina points and choose from a menu of options. Champions and Fortifications are Stamina based, where units like Hirelings, Creatures, and Nemesis Bosses are the dice-rolling kind.

The number in the heart is the amount of damage tokens a unit can take before it is defeated. A unit can never have more health than what’s written here.

The little speedy running guy is initiative, a number that decides the order in which the units take turns in a fight. The unit with the highest initiative strikes first. Then the unit with the next highest initiative gets a turn, and so on. If two units are tied for initiative, and they’re on different sides, the tie goes to the Defender. If the tie is on the same side, the controlling player can decide for themselves which unit gets to go next.

Stamina units have this row of numbers, and one of them has a lightning bolt on it. That’s where you place a stamina cube to start the battle and keep track of what that unit can do. This is the menu of things this unit can do during battle, and here’s the stamina cost of each thing.

Here’s an example: the Smuggler is battling the Polar Yeti. They both have the same initiative, so the tie goes to the defender to kick it off. The Yeti rolls an attack die and whiffs it with a 1, which corresponds to this do-nothing Hesitate attack. Now it’s the Smuggler’s turn. He spends 3 stamina points on a Strike action, which deals 1 point of damage to the Yeti. The Yeti gets a chance to respond, so it rolls a defense die. It’s a 3, which means it gets to do – HA-NOTHING! So it does accrue that damage point from the Smuggler’s Strike. Now, it’s still the Smuggler’s turn, and he’s allowed to keep spending stamina to do more things. You can do multiple things on a stamina unit’s card in each Battle round, as long as you can afford the stamina cost, but you can only buy each menu option once for that unit in each Battle round. So the Smuggler couldn’t strike again in this round, even if he had the stamina to do so, which he does not. Eager to keep fighting, he considers blowing another stamina point on Armor Up, which prevents 1 unit of damage this round. But that’s a bad move, because since he’s the last unit to take a turn, the battle round is almost over and Armor Up won’t actually protect him from anything. Whoops. Since he can use Tactics moves outside of his turn, he should probably save that one for when a creature is about to do damage to him – i’ll demonstrate that in a sec. The Smuggler would like to spend 4 more stamina points hitting the Yeti with a harpoon, which would let him target a unit that’s not in the front row, and yank it UP to the front – pretty cool – but there AREN’T any units in any other rows, and the Smuggler doesn’t have enough stamina points to activate that move anyway. So he decides his turn is over. Since all involved units have taken a turn, thus ends the battle round, and the Smuggler will gain this many stamina points before the Yeti takes its first turn of the next battle round.

As your units and the bad guy units accrue damage, you rack it up at the top of the card with damage tokens.

There are a few other icons to be aware of: attack abilities with the crossed swords can only be chosen when this unit takes initiative. Tactics, with the little severed horse head from that scene in the 1972 film The Godfather, can be used any time during battle, even when another unit is attacking while taking initiative. You can even use tactics abilities like Armor Up after the enemy rolls a die to hurt you, but before the damage is applied, so you can see how badly you’re about to be hurt and react appropriately to it. Generally, your unit has to attack whichever beastie is in the front row, but certain moves with this Pinpoint icon on them can target bad guys in other rows, and sometimes multiple units at once.

A battle round ends when each involved unit has taken their Initiative. Then, you restore your unit’s stamina by this much points. So if the unit ends the Battle round at 2 points, and you get 4 stamina per round, you slide the marker up to 6. BUT… Stamina can’t go past a unit’s max, so it caps out here at 5. That max stamina amount is special, because it lets you unleash this unit’s bonkers Ultimate Ability in a future battle round, which’ll usually cost ALL of your stamina, AND you’ll have to exhaust a manastone to do it. But maybe it’s worth it, because it’s bonkers?

Instead of using stamina, the other kind of units in the game roll a die to randomly pick how they attack, and respond to attacks. This is the number of renown you’ll earn for defeating this unit – remember that you use renown points to level up your empire, which we’ll see shortly. When you attack a dice-controlled unit, the unit always responds by rolling a die to determine its resistance response, listed in this section. Whenever possible, let another player roll for your bad guys.

Certain dice units have target abilities too. If there’s ever a situation where there are multiple possibilities for who gets targeted, the defending player picks the target.

There’s a rock/paper/scissors dynamic going on in Battle, and it reuses the might, intellect, and Manitoba Hockey Team iconography from the skill tracker. Intellect is strong against Might, Might is strong against Manitoba, and Manitoba is strong against Intellect. (Yeah – that tracks.)

Different attacks may add status changes to a unit, so units can suffer things like poisoning or being frozen. Some status effects, like Regen, are beneficial. Mercenaries, War Machines, and Creatures can’t gain status effects outside of Battle, but your Champions can. No unit can gain multiple copies of the same status effect…. Except for poison, which has a limit of 3. Certain Nemesis bosses have coloured resistance shields on their cards, which protects them against specific status effects.

When damage equals health, that thing is defeated. Keep the card there – units don’t leave your Encounter Zone until the whole Battle is won or lost. If you defeat the unit in the first row, you treat this as the new first row for targeting purposes.

At the end of each Battle round, stamina-controlled Champions and Fortifications gain their per round stamina. Then you resolve any ongoing status effects – unless one side or the other got totally wiped out, in which case, status effects don’t get a chance to fire off because the battle is over. Good status effects like regen trigger before bad status effects like poison.

If any of your involved Champions soak up max damage, they’re not dead, but they’re also not feeling too good. They can’t fight any more. All defeated units, including Champions, stay in the Encounter Zone until the Battle’s over.

If all of the units on one side or the other soak up max damage, the battle is over, and the side that still has some health remaining is victorious. At the end of the Decade, once all of the various battles going on around the table have been resolved, clear off the damage and status markers from Mercenaries, War Machines, Fortifications, and any Creatures you managed to TAME during the fight. After a SIEGE Battle, Fortification cards get returned to the Empire tray, but hirelings and Tamed creatures go face-down into your Tableau where you can deploy them to your Encounter Zone in a future decade’s Battle. Those tamed creatures can fight on YOUR side next time.

If you DIDN’T defeat a Creature, the damage counters and ongoing status effects stay on that card, and the unit remains in your Encounter Zone, where you’ll have to keep fighting it during your next CONQUER battle.

Claim the Renown prize on the card if you defeated any baddies – any Creatures you defeated that you didn’t Tame get sunk to the bottom of the District 1 decks.

A defeated Champion keeps its damage tokens, but loses its status effects. If a Champion survives the fight, all the damage and status effects that accrued on a Champion persist past the end of the battle. Just be sure to check the duration on a status effect – the ones that say “next” only trigger once, and then you discard them. The ones that say “battle” only persist during a single battle. It’s the “always” effects that remain on your Champions if they survive the fight.

After battling, if you’ve got wounded Champions, you’ll have to do stuff in order to heal up your crew. If they’re defeated – so COMPLETELY out of health – you won’t be able to use them in another Battle until you heal at least 1 of those damage tokens. So you could patronize the Innkeeper during phase 1 of the next decade, which gets you a 1-food discount when you MOVE your mount, or lets you heal up to 2 damage on all of your Champions. The Mystic on the Academy tray lets you get rid of a status effect on one of your Champions. Some Champions can even shape-shift into Creatures. When they get defeated, follow the game rules to treat them like a Champion, instead of a Creature. “i am not an animal! i am a human being!”

Just before resolving status effects at the end of each Battle round, any human player involved in the fight gets a chance to retreat from battle.

If you got defeated or retreated from a Location tile while someone was laying SIEGE to your settlement, you have to move your avatar to a different tile with one of your settlements on it. That’s one of the reasons you get kicked out of the game if your last settlement falls: there’s nowhere to retreat TO.

Instant Actions

There are a bunch of things you can do called Instant Actions that don’t require you to place a worker anywhere – at any point during your turn, you just do them, as much as you want or can afford to, either before or after placing a worker, resolving an action, or while it’s your turn to clean up at the end of a decade.

Any time you see this little price tag icon, it means you can pay gold to buy the associated thing. You don’t even have to wait until that District is active, so you can buy a Hireling from District 3 while you’re placing a worker in District 1, or buy a good from District 2 during your turn at the end of a decade, or SELL a good in District 2 while you’re resolving your actions in District 4. The sell cost for goods is on the left, and the buy cost is on the right. The costs correspond to these rows…. So the more scarce a good gets, the higher the buy/sell price gets, and then things get less valuable as supply goes up. Whenever you sell something, you put the good in the next available spot in the topmost row, not in the Discard trough.

Another Instant Action is trading. You can trade any of your acquired goodies to any other player as long as they’re within 1 range away from you on the Map, and there are no rules for trading – just both parties have to agree to the trade, whether or not it’s a fair swap. You can’t ever trade with Nemesis characters.

I keep mentioning that these purple renown tokens enable you to ascend your Empire. That’s an Instant Action too. You don’t actually spend your renown tokens – they’re just a threshold that qualifies you to ascend. So this ascension requires you to have 2 renown. If you’ve got it, then as an Instant Action, you can ascend and gain 1 loyalty, 1 upkeep, 1 common undiscovered loot, and unlock a tier I settlement piece from your player box, which you can either place right away wherever your Avatar is, or save until later. Flip the empire tile into your tableau, where it gives you a new permanent ability. Then, slide the whole stack up to reveal the next row of the tech tree underneath. Hang on to your renown – you don’t lose it when you ascend.

Settling is also an Instant Action. Place one of your unlocked Tier 1 settlement pieces wherever your avatar is, and gain the loyalty points written on the tile for Tier 1. You can’t build on a Quest tile, and each terrain tile maxes out at 1 settlement – yours or anyone else’s. You have to have unlocked the settlement piece by upgrading your Empire, – you don’t have immediate access to all the settlement pieces in your player box.

You can spend resource cubes as an Instant Action to gain different bonuses. Discard a green food cube to heal 1 point of damage on each of your Champions. Discard a red skill cube to get a bump on one of the Skill tracks. Discard a purple influence cube to gain a renown.

Tech Tree

As you construct buildings and ascend your empire, you reveal more and more rows of the tech trees beneath them – one row per upgrade. As an Instant Action, you can commit one of your resource cubes to a matching slot to gain prizes. Sometimes, slots have prerequisites: so you can’t put a cube here until you have a cube here, and you can’t put a cube there until you’ve got a cube here.

This blue slot lets you unlock a tech card from your deck, matching the same tier and column as the slot you’re feeding. So placing a blue cube here lets you choose a Tier 1 tech card from your Intellect deck stashed under here. Just like ascended empire tech cards, these cards give you a cool advantage or a special piece of gear. The cards you unlock from your Empire tech tree have area effects that play out based on what’s happening on the map – you get to resolve these area effects at the end of the decade, when you’re gaining skill perks and collecting income.

At the beginning of a standard Scenario, your royal house’s three Champions are locked up in this District 4 holding cell. Feeding a food cube to one of these green slots lets you grab the depicted Champion card from there and add it to your tableau. This costs you 1 upkeep. If this is the first Champion you’ve unlocked, you have to send it directly to your Encounter Zone. If you place here to anoint a FOREIGN champion, you can grab a champion from the deck that lives in a Location tile that your avatar occupies, or that you control by having a settlement there. Attractive singles in your area want to fight! Foreign champions don’t stick you with any extra upkeep – they’re just happy to be here. Each of these foreign champions is unique, and you may be poaching a Foreign Champion from a rival house, so it may be a bit of a race to claim these cards! You can generally only anoint 1 foreign champion per game, so choose wisely.

The Ascend Champion slot does gain you an upkeep, but it lets you flip the associated Champion to its Tier II side. Any damage or status effects that Champion had remain on the card.

Each of your Champions can hold exactly one piece of equipment. As an Instant Action, you can equip an Item to a Champion. Outside of battle, you can even move equipment around between your Champions. Non-champions can’t equip stuff.

Putting a purple cube in a slot like this unlocks the depicted worker, and gains you 1 upkeep. If you ever lose that worker, you’re still stuck with the upkeep, because life isn’t fair. That new worker is ready to place on your turn, as long as it’s at the appropriate Tier for the District you’re dealing with.

THIS purple slot lets you ascend the depicted worker – swap it out for the depicted improved worker. If you upgrade a worker who’s already been placed on a District, you can’t grab that worker back – it has to remain there for the rest of the Decade.

This one increases the number of Champions you can Deploy to your Encounter Zone. You start with a cap of 1. This jacks it to 2.

This nutso spot lets you swap any worker you’ve got for a supergood Royal Advisor.

Finally, some of the tech cards you unlock have the word “Instant” on them. You can trigger those cards’ effects as an Instant Action on your turn.

Quests and Items

Quests, which you can gain by resolving the Quest action at the Academy, pose tricky game challenges and give you renown tokens as a reward. As soon as you fulfill the requirements of a quest card, you can flip it over and claim the renown.

You can collect items by resolving the Item action in District 1, or buying an item as an Instant Action. Again, as an Instant Action, you can flip an item over to use its ability, even during Battle. The ones marked “Battle” with the crossed swords on them can be flipped any time, but they’re probably more useful to you during an actual Battle. You can never use a spent Item again, but when it flips, it turns into scrap. Different tech cards and skill perks make use of scrap, and you can save yourself some money by spending scrap to deploy War Machines.

Deployment

If you’re trying to lay SIEGE to sack a settlement, you need to first deploy a War Machine from your tableau to your Encounter Zone as an Instant Action. That’ll cost you a certain type of scrap, or two bucks. War Machines always go in your back row, but they target whatever’s in the defense’s front row. They can never fight alone, they can never take damage, and when they run out of shots, they go back face down into your tableau.

We saw that you have to feed these tech tree slots to unlock your Champions from the deck, and that the first one automatically gets sent to the front lines in your Encounter Zone. You have a total of three Champions you can unlock, plus a foreign champion, but the most Champions you can DEPLOY to your Encounter Zone is 1. That is, unless you feed THIS slot, which lets you put a second Champion into play. Deploying a Champion as an Instant Action is free, and as long as you’re between battles, you can swap out your Champions freely as an Instant Action on your turn. Any damage and status effects your Champions have accrued come with them.

To deploy a non-Champion unit to your Encounter Zone, like a Mercenary or a War Machine, you have to pay the cost on the back of the card, and you’ve got to do that before a battle begins. Once a decade ends, your mercenaries and war machines flip back face down into your tableau, along with any creatures you tamed, so your deployment’s only good for that single decade. You have to pay again to re-deploy them.

Any enemy MIGHT unit with a fist on it automatically takes the front row slot, budging every other unit to the back rows. If you deploy a Fortification unit during a Siege, it has to go in the front row. In all other situations, you get to pick where your deployed unit goes.

Three units per side is the absolute limit. And you can only deploy one of each KIND of unit on a side – so you can’t have two or more Champions, or two or more Mercenaries or War Machines. But you may discover techs or abilities that let you break that rule.

Once a battle begins, your Encounter Row is locked down: you can’t Deploy anything new to either side.

Nemesis Characters

Here are a few more things you need to know about Nemesis characters and how they carry on.

Each Nemesis character’s card tells you where they start with their skills, workers, and mount, on both standard and hard modes. Nemesis characters never accrue Upkeep.

If your Scenario involves Hidden Teams where everyone has a secret role card, the Nemesis remains an enemy to everyone, even if you use an ability to peek at the Nemesis’s role card and you find out they’re actually allied with your team. That means Nemesis characters will still lay siege to your settlements and attack you. The only time a Nemesis will side with your team and consider you allies is if you’re playing that Scenario using the Visible Teams option, which i’ll go over during Setup.

When a Nemesis resolves an action that involves taking a resource or pulling a card, that resource or card just gets discarded, because the Nemesis is a jerk. So if the Nemesis resolves the HIRELING action, they sink the top cards in BOTH hireling decks. Nothing happens when a Nemesis resolves the SCOUT action, or the BUILD or PATRON actions in any District.

If the Nemesis ever has to pay resources to a player, the resources come from their respective resource pools, because Nemesis characters don’t have any of their own stuff to pay out.

The only time a Nemesis will roll a skill check is if it’s against a human player, so it skips location skill checks and skill checks against other non-player Nemesis characters.

In phase 4, when you roll for a Nemesis, their die goes up here. You cross-reference the number on the die with this compass rose on the map. That’s the hex that the Nemesis is targeting this decade. So if the Nemesis rolled a 6, that means south, and so here’s the Nemesis, and he’s got eyes on the area to the south. If the rolled direction goes off the board, you just flip it. So if the target direction is south, but the Nemesis is down here, flip the direction to the north hex. The die doesn’t care about mountains, so if there’s a mountain en route to the target hex, no there isn’t.

The action the Nemesis gets to resolve in District 4 depends on what’s going on on their target hex. If the space is empty, put the Nemesis’s mount and noble on the topmost MOVE slot – the Nemesis intends to move to that tile and drop a settlement. Nemesis players don’t have to unlock settlement pieces like human players do – settlement is automatic. When a Nemesis moves to a new undiscovered hex, they chuck out any loot they find there and draw a tile to fill in the gap. They completely ignore mountains and one-way mountain passes when MOVEing.

If there’s one non-allied human on the target tile, the Nemesis wants to move to that tile and conquer the human. But if the terrain tile has two or more non-allied humans on it, the Nemesis will MOVE to the tile but won’t try to conquer anyone… unless one of the human players ditches by the time the Nemesis resolves their actions, leaving the other player holding the bag. (Hey!)

If the tile has an allied settlement, the Nemesis wants to help upgrade that settlement. The Nemesis will stay on their own tile, and upgrade that settlement from afar.

If the Nemesis targets a tile that’s settled by a NON-allied player, be they human or Nemesis, and whether or not there’s an avatar on that tile, the Nemesis wants to lay SIEGE to that tile. If the place is empty, a standard mode Nemesis automatically trashes the topmost Tier from that settlement, and gains 1, 2, or 3 loyalty points depending on its Tier. A hard mode Nemesis trashes two pieces. And, as we saw before, the owner of the sacked settlement loses some Loyalty points.

If a Nemesis tries to lay siege to a tile with you on it, they initiate a Battle. You might be able to resist if you can get a Fortification into play – this is automatic if your settlement is Tier 2 or better – otherwise, it might be a whoopin’.

A Nemesis will never battle another Nemesis, but the robots WILL lay Siege to each other’s settlements, ignoring any Nemesis avatar on the tile. They never get to deploy a Fortification in their own defense. When you resolve the area effects from a Nemesis at the end of the decade, those effects never impact another Nemesis.

Sometimes, the game state changes by the time you need to resolve a Nemesis character’s actions on District 4, like that example i gave where the Nemesis is trying to attack a player, but the player skedaddles before the Nemesis gets that chance. Or if the Nemesis plans to MOVE into an empty location, but a non-allied player builds a settlement there. Since the location is no longer empty, the Nemesis wants to lay SIEGE instead of MOVEing there. Before the Nemesis resolves their action, double-check this flowchart in the Reference manual to confirm that its action is still valid, and if not, the chart will tell you what it should do instead.

When a fight against a Nemesis inevitably happens, flip the card to its boss battle side. If you’ve got any Creatures in your queue, set them aside for now and slot in the Nemesis card, if you’re the only human player in the fight. Otherwise, keep the card where everyone can see it. For targeting purposes, the Nemesis is considered to be in every participant’s front row. Any number you see with a slash on it is showing you the standard difficulty vs the hard mode Nemesis. On standard mode, in every round a Nemesis rolls two attacks against all human players engaged in the fight, and it’s 3 attacks on hard mode. A Nemesis rolls a separate resist for each incoming attack.

For every allied human fighting against the Nemesis, you pile on extra health according to the Nemesis character’s Loyalty score. So a standard mode Nemesis gets 3 health. They’re battling 1 human, so because their Loyalty counter is at 2, you add two to their health. If another human was teaming up with this one, like in a team game, you’d add another 2 hitpoints based on that Loyalty score. And another 2 points if this human was also fighting. But if this game was a free-for-all where all human players were competing with each other, you’d only give the Nemesis that health bonus once, despite there being two or three or four humans in the fight.

If you retreat from a Nemesis, or get your butt kicked, you have to move your Avatar to a friendly settlement of your choice. Sanctuary!

Defeating a Nemesis gets you 5 renown on standard mode and 7 renown on hard, plus a free peek at someone’s hidden role card if applicable. Then, you can choose to either show the Nemesis Mercy, or FINISH HIM. To show mercy, you scoot the Nemesis to any settlement the Nemesis controls. Clear off all status and damage markers, and carry on with the game. You might want to show mercy if you discover that you or your team were secretly allied with the Nemesis, according to the Scenario you’re playing.

If you decide to vanquish the Nemesis once and for all, topple their avatar, and scrub the map of all their settlements. There’s now one less player in the game. If any more Nemesis characters remain, they could still beat you depending on the Scenario, but if you successfully murder ALL of the Nemesis characters, victory is yours!

If your scenario ever ends in a tie somehow, you can shake hands and call it a day and end the game happily. Or, you can end it with SUDDEN DEATH. The Reference Guide covers that rare case in detail.

Setup

To set up the game, pick a Scenario and lay out all the stuff like the book tells you. The base game Scenario is called Loyalty of the People, and there are all kinds of ways you can play it: solo as 1 human vs 2 or 3 Nemesis characters, 4 humans against 1 Nemesis, or any combination in between. As long as you set up for a minimum of three players, be they human or robot, you’re good.

Then, you can choose to play cooperatively or competitively. Beginner players will have an easier time on cooperative mode. You can split the human players up into teams using these role cards – either deal them out randomly, or dole them out face-up and decide who’s on which team – the Allies of Justice or the Consorts of Chaos. Your teams can even be lopsided: you can go 2v2, or 2v1, or everybody vs the robots.

Let everyone at the table individually flag themselves for no Player vs Player fighting, PvpLite, where only the unsupervised settlements are fair game, or hot PvP action, where you agree to allow Conquering among human players. And you can mix and match – so Madeline and Carl might agree that they can attack each other’s unoccupied settlements as PvP-Lite players, while you can flag yourself as a “no PvP” player.

The cool thing about Ascendancy is that after you open your box and put all the cards and bits and things into their containers and cubbies, the game is mostly set up and ready to play for all your future games. Just by watching this video, you probably have a good idea of where everything goes. The Scenario booklet may instruct you to open one or more of these secret Nemesis envelopes, and any other special setup instructions to follow.

Mark the first decade with the brown stacker, and then your chosen Scenario will either tell you to place a pink tracker on a certain final decade so you know when the game will end, or it’ll give you a choice of how many Decades you want to play. To set up the Supply tray, use this chart in your Reference Guide. Look up the number of humans you have in the game, and the number of Decades you’re playing. So if you’re in a 1-person game that lasts 8 decades, put 2 resources in these rows for each resource type. Playing with 3 humans for five decades? Then you need three resources in each of these rows for each resource type. Coins go here.

Follow the chart on the facing page to figure out how many white manastone and purple influence tokens to stock in District 3, using the same procedure.

Grab the stack of event cards your chosen Scenario wants you to use – either the Fully Cooperative, or the Competitive set. Split them into Law, Dissent, and Sacrifice piles. Shuffle a number of each of these together based on this chart (that’ll be stack A), and then shuffle the remaining events into a separate stack (that’ll be stack B). Put stack B in the tray, with stack A on top.

Everyone chooses a house and grabs 1 of each type of worker, except the royal advisor. ADD QUACK Sort your house’s tech cards by type – the Manitoba Hockey Team techs go here, Might here, and Intellect here. There’s 7 of each of these. The 3 area effect tech cards go here.

Then, stack your building piles, again matching the icons, so you’ve got Tier IV empire, Tier III, Tier II, Tier I, and Tier zero on top. Make sure all these stacks fully cover the tech trees at the bottom of each column. Grab this many coins and resources to start – you should take these from the unused piles, not from the Supply board.

Your Scenario will tell you which side of the map to use, and how to set it up. Everyone picks a starting tile, ideally closest to where they’re sitting around the table and places their starting settlement, or fancy settlement, along with their avatar.

Shuffle the 15 location tiles here. The quest tiles, and any leftover embarkment tiles, stay separate.

Starting with the youngest player and working your way up in order to the player who’s statistically most likely to die first, place your stackers on 0 loyalty and 0 upkeep.

Then, in that same order, place your stackers on your starting Might, Intellect, and Manitoba Hockey Team values according to these starting numbers on your house board.

Shuffle the Legacy Reward cards and draw four at random – these will be the prizes you claim if you win the Scenario.

If you’re playing solo, or in a fully cooperative game, you can choose to program your actions ahead of time. Everyone places all their workers in all of the Districts in one shot, and then you chip through each one and resolve all of the actions in order. This may help you better plan your strategy.

If you win your Scenario, everyone gets to draw a Legacy Reward card, usually in Loyalty order. This is a new tech card that you can put into your tableau during your next game, and if you meet its requirements, you can flip it and use its ready side. After that Scenario plays out, you stick the card in its proper stack on your tech tree, where you can unlock it from your Tech Tree using those same rules we’ve already learned in future games. If you didn’t manage to activate it during this game, it’ll go back into your tableau the next time you play. If you had any Nemesis characters set to hard mode, everyone gets two reward cards at the end of the game instead of one.

Occasionally, someone will acquire a rare Legacy Scenario card, which unlocks that Scenario to play later. If you win that Scenario, that’s how the player who drew that card gets to flip it and activate it, and then store it to their player board forevermore.

Of course, you own the game, so you’re free to peek in any envelopes and play any Scenarios in any order you like. But the game has a plan for how it should all unfold, and you can mark your progress on this Ancestral Ledger as you play, which may reveal unexpected secrets and surprises as you go. If you play the Scenarios out of order, you don’t get to mark your progress down on this sheet. But again, it’s your game, so do whatever you want with it.

And now, you’re ready to play Ascendancy!