Tamashii: Chronicle of Ascend is a high concept board game. It’s a cooperative cyberpunk adventure game bathed in neon. You awake from a coma finding your consciousness inhabiting a foreign body. Your memory is clouded and nothing is familiar. The nearby city is in shambles. Machines and faceless agents begin to stalk you. A chance meeting with an underground faction opens an entirely new world. Towering above it all is a tyrannical AI known as Ascend.
It’s exceedingly cool. The large box is swollen with content. There are hundreds of cards that make up enemies, scenarios, and abilities. Large vibrant player boards host tokens and chits of various colors. Dozens of tiles are randomized to construct the post-apocalyptic city. Large standees - or lovely miniatures if you spring for the add-on - depict various bodies the protagonists pilot. It’s a very attractive product that works an extra shift to sell its mysterious setting.
Its style is not simply veneer, either. Vibrating beneath the surface of this handsome exterior are two prominent systems that work together to deliver an electric experience. The first governs the city itself. Each scenario contains a map of the environment, a collection of district tiles that are often semi-randomized. They are arranged in an overall shape to form an interconnected board. Players will traverse the map by flipping over unexplored areas and interacting with various location abilities.
This portion of the game walks between the extremes of a fully detailed environment and a thin abstract space devoid of personality. It broadly mimics the style of adventure board games such as Arkham Horror and Return to Dark Tower, with characters navigating a zoomed out macro-level map. It doesn’t quite manage a rich portrayal of the city itself, instead leaning into a more distant and lean depiction that provides context for the second half of the game.
The bulk of play is contained on each player’s personal board. This mat resembles a HUD of sorts, and it contains several systems that interlock to form the digital arena. The focus here is on the launcher, a large central area of the player board that hosts colorful data tokens of various types. Each turn, players draw these tokens from a bag and repopulate their launcher. They spend actions to move these tokens around, shifting them into new slots in an attempt to form various patterns. When you complete a pattern, the tokens are spent and a benefit is triggered, such as hacking an enemy drone that is pursuing you, establishing a data uplink to fulfill a scenario objective, or gaining new intel and assets to prop up your character.
This is ostensibly a puzzle, similar to Bejeweled and Candy Crush. It’s a system I’ve never seen imitated on the tabletop, and it’s surprising how effective it is as an engaging mini-game that is core to the Tamashii experience. It might not feel like computer programming or hacking, exactly, but it can be surprisingly tense.
Everything else is handled through modular extensions of the various components. Enemies are represented solely by cards. They attach to your player board and follow your character around, harassing them in the conflict phase where blows are traded. Experience is gained through defeating enemies and triggering certain patterns on the launcher. These are spent to upgrade certain attributes and acquire new permanent ability cards. Bodies for your character to inhabit are locked into the top of the player board, offering new combat options and traits.
Everything is tied wonderfully together through the scenario architecture. Scenarios consist of small booklets with an accompanying deck of mission cards. You are given narrative background, initial setup conditions including unique rules, and a first stage objective. Often, this requires you head to specific points on the map. Sometimes you must perform special actions or complete patterns on your launcher to progress the story. Often you are required to make a decision which leads down a branching narrative path. This may be choosing one of two factions to aid, or deciding between rescuing civilians and selfishly preserving your own life. These decisions are meaningful and shape subsequent stages of the scenario, altering your goals and leading to a unique climax.
The scenario variety is fortunately strong. Each is rated for length and difficulty, which lets you know what you're in for before starting. This isn’t a perfect approach, however, as the overall challenge presented is somewhat shallow. In fact, I’d prefer the difficulty to be ratcheted up across the board, as far too often the game simply doesn’t throw up enough obstacles to inhibit progress. It also occasionally stretches on too long. The longer scenarios can cross the three hour mark, dragging during the mid-game, and not picking up again until the final act is triggered. Thankfully, this is uncommon and the length depicted on the title page of the scenario will at least clue you in on this possibility.
Surprisingly bucking the recent trend of campaign board games, Tamashii does not feature linked scenario play. Each session is an isolated story and can be played with a rotating cast of players. However, the game introduces a unique roguelike-inspired system of unlocking content. Depending on the particular ending you trigger in a scenario, new content is added to the game for future plays. This may mean new body or enemy cards, or even new location tiles, are added to the mix. The box offers a functional, although unfortunately messy, organization system to segregate locked content from the rest of the components.
This content unlocking is a really fantastic feature. I was always eager to get back to the table to try these new options. It feels modern, touching on some of the benefits of the campaign format found in narrative board games, but without the long term commitment of a dedicated group.
While the writing in the scenarios isn't always superb, it works when woven into the fabric of the branching decision structure. This story layer sits atop the rest of the game forming the fibers that connect the various components to create an interactive and engrossing experience. Tamashii: Chronicle of Ascend is a juggernaut of powerful and flexible machinery that delivers captivating drama.
