Can Converting a Competitive Game into a Boss Battler Work? Ashes Reborn: Red Rains – The Corpse of Viros (A Review)

In recent times I was sorting through my Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborne collection, a game which I have not had much chance to play in recent times; but I have greatly enjoyed in the past. While looking at it I was struck by the concept of how this game could be adapted into a cooperative boss battling experience in a similar fashion to the old World of Warcraft Card Game gained Raid modes; or in a more modern sense the way that Marvel Champions is fashioned. However, before undertaking such a task; I did my research, contacting the game's designer Isaac Vega via boardgamegeek and he informed me that I was right with my thoughts, but behind Plaid Hat Games who had already designed and were printing an expansion that featured such a mode. The first of these solo/cooperative expansions in what they have titled the the Red Rains series is the Corpse of Viros. Or to give it its full title Ashes Reborn: Red Trains – the Corpse of Viros. I secured a copy from the US and had it shipped over in order to play it and see if this new boss battling expansion was a dish worth eating, or simply a flash in the pan.

Ashes: Reborn

Before we get into the weeds on that one I am going to start with a brief overview of Ashes: Reborn; the rebranded version of Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborne. In this game you take the role of a Phoenixborn; a powerful mage who have a wide and disparate set of abilities, no one Phoenixborne is like the other, both in their magical powers and their appearance. Your Phoenixborne is represented by a card, here are a few of the possiblities.

In addition to having a unique name and appearance; each Phoenixborne has a unique power; a set amount of health and a limit on their battlefield plus spellboard – each of which restricts the respective number of units and ready spells they can have out at one time.

In addition to this card; you will have a deck of thirty cards (there are pre-constructed decks for each Phoenixborn, plus you can customise your deck if you get more into the game's competitive aspects) and ten dice, these dice are typically either completely one colour or split 50/50 between two colours for the pre-constructed decks. Constructed decks can have a lot more colours of dice, sometimes even utilising a single die of one colour. The dice have three sides with the basic symbol that's universal to all dice; then two sides with a symbol unique to their power or flavour and a final side with another unique symbol. Here's a selection of them and the tokens so you can see what the difference between each is.

These symbols are utilised for casting spells, summoning constructs and recruiting allies, with the rarer symbols being required for more powerful cards. In addition, every single dice type has access to a unique power that can be utilised with the rarest/most powerful symbol on the matching die. These effects vary and can add a lot of utility and flavour to your phoenixborne.

This dice system represents the resource generation method for the game and you can think of it as Magic the Gather's mana, Hearthstone's gems or whatever other limited resource from a game you can think of. At the start of the game you'll roll ten dice and use them – making them exhausted; in each future turn you will roll only the exhausted dice and add them to any dice you didn't use in the previous turn (without changing those older rolls). This is a system that encourages you to use as many of your dice as possible each turn and it is a significant improvement over Magic's Land → Mana system.

Another area where the game differentiates itself from other card games is in the starting hand, the usual method starting hands are created are via a shuffle and draw of X cards, sometimes allowing players to discard cards to draw new ones, or generate a new hand in some other fashion if the starting hand is not desirable. Ashes instead offers the 'first five' system, where players will choose their starting hand from cards in their deck, this system allows for specific strategies to deploy early, makes for explosive starts instead of the usual slow ramping up of action that other card games have and it also allows for players to run single copies of certain tech cards (cards included for a specific match up to cover weaknesses or exploit weaknesses of their opponents).

A Conjuration Unit, attack is how much damage it deals, Life is how much damage it can take an Recover is how much Life it recovers at the end of a round. Units deal damage when attacking or attacked as long as they are not exhausted.

The turn structure is yet another part where the game stands out; it employs a round structure broken into I go, then you go, until we both pass turns. So the game is very reactive and responsive, you can immediately enact plans based on what your opponent's last turn was instead of having to watch them do everything for their turn before you get to do the same. It's a dynamic system that rewards both long term strategic planning and moment to moment tactical manoeuvrers. It also performs an excellent job of capping how much a player can do on their round by limiting them to a “Main action” and a “Side action”. Main actions tend to be significant in how they affect the game state and include summoning units (Conjurations or allies) or casting big spells; while side actions involve less powerful spells or even things like discarding cards from your deck/hand to change dice rolls to the side you want (providing excellent mitigation at a cost to smooth over the randomness of the dice).

The game will continue until one Phoenixborne has run out of health; a resource that is stressed not just by direct attacks from opposing units, but also through defending one's own units from attacks or simply not being able to draw cards – an empty deck doesn't cause an automatic loss, instead it inflicts damage to the Phoenixborne. You're out of gas, but you might have enough left in your hand and on the board to get the job dome.

This all combines to make Ashes one of the premium competitive/duelling wizards living card games out there, though the game has not had the reach it deserves. Like Middle Earth: The Wizards and Doomtown it remains a superb but somewhat niche game even though it's mechanically superior to many of the more popular options. For us, the reason that it wasn't played much is because my partner doesn't enjoy head to head games against me; especially card ones, because I'm an ex-semi professional Magic player and also I play board/card games every day – continuously seeking to improve my skills. My partner has a proper job; not just housekeeping and gaming, so they have less time to spend on games and we both honestly prefer cooperative games anyway as it is wonderful to bond together against some soulless set of mechanics rather than against each other.

That's where Red Rains comes in.

Red Rains – The Corpse of Viros

The Red Rains series takes this 1 to 4 player duelling framework by providing a singular foe for all players to fight against instead of each other; it's always a treat when a game manages to mutate itself from being a competitive one to a cooperative one. This very step was one of the things where the Atomic Bonds expansion took the Fallout Board Game from being flawed and mediocre into an excellent experience. While Ashes is not a flawed game; more modes and ways of playing it is just going to increase its potential audience as long as it is done well. However, that's a huge step to take, adding a new system into an existing game framework can go horribly wrong because you are effectively grafting a new set of mechanics onto an already complete framework. As such it risks feeling shoehorned in at best and utterly pointless at worst; this is a situation which KDM's upcoming Gambler's Chest Expansion faces, so examining how adding a new system on here is beneficial to being prepared for properly understanding if the bulk of the Gambler's Chest mechanics were worth the effort. It's hard to do something like this and easy to create a big pile of systems that ultimately the majority of your player base ignores. Such a risk.

This is the spell that summons the Golem from further up, you can see the action and resource costs in the top right corner.

The game comes with a pre-constructed player deck that works for the four different Phoenixborne provided in the box, in fact if you had dice in this box it would be a standalone experience that doesn't need the master set at all – because the game also comes with all the tokens you need, and two rulebooks, one for people who've already played the game and just need the cooperative rules and a full rulebook that includes all the basic rules for all players. I am never a fan of expansions that basically could have been standalone ones; but aren't because key components are missing; this is a very common practice in the Fantasy Flight Living Card Games and while I do understand that publishers want you to buy as much of their product as possible, it does always feel a little disheartening to look at something and think 'if they'd just included X then this wouldn't need the base game for new players'. You can fortunately order dice direct from Plaid Hat Games, but they are not very EU friendly in respect to their shipping, so that's not so much of an option for players outside the US. Womp womp.

The rest of the components are all for the Corpse of Viros itself; there is a dashboard where almost all of the Viros elements are kept; a bunch of cards that represent Viros across two difficulties (standard, heroic); in three levels and two sides for solo and two player coop. I am going to touch back on this player count near the end of this article, so we'll get back to that. Viros's other components are a set of five power dice which have either the basic mana symbol on them, a D12 behaviour die (D12 best dice, accept no substitutes) or the red rains symbol in a 50/50 split (coin toss dice!), three levels of AI behaviour, red rains tokens to track when an ultimate is triggered, three levels of Ultimates and two different aspect decks which can be tackled separately to produce different experiences or mixed together and half of that total can then be faced for an even more unpredictable foe.

Production-wise this is a top tier effort, Ashes always has a real grace and substance to its art, it's a stylish game and this expansion is no exception to that. However, the box it comes in isn't so great; it holds everything when it arrives, but has no room for sleeving; you may end up storing the expansion in the main box (if it's not already full like mine is). I haven't thrown that box out however, I now use it to hold all the game's dice.

The way the structure of the game changes for this cooperative mode is neat and tidy, there are not a huge amount of new rules, for the most part the Chimera boss plays in a simple manner that is easy to operate. The trickiness of the Chimera comes in what its cards do, not how it uses them.

You will set up yourself as per a normal game of Ashes (described briefly above); then you will place the Red Rains board down, choose the difficulty you are playing on, place the matching Chimera on its space, put the power dice in a pool below the five slots they move into when they roll a red rains symbol and then choose what aspect you're facing. In Corpse of Viros the aspects are Fury, which is a straightforward aggressive playstyle that is easy to learn with; and Shadow which is more tricky and aims to make things difficult by disabling your options. You will then look at the Chimera Card (Centre here):

At the bottom of the card you can see a bunch of symbols, these are the cards from the aspect deck which will be dealt face down at the start of the game and then each round (the symbols indicate the types of cards only at the start, the cards have two different backs which allows you to become more familiar with the Chimera's potential actions, information on the backs of cards is such a cool mechanic that boss battlers are using more and more), the greater powerful your foe, the more aspects it is going to have. Mechanically aspects are units in every sense of the word, they can be attacked like a unit, have cards and abilities targeting them and they even have their own life pool. When an aspect is attacked the Chimera may defend it, or other aspects with “Unit Guard” will defend it instead. Once an aspect is slain it is discarded and the Chimera takes a number of wounds equal to the blood printed on the card.

A Fury Aspect Unit.

However, these aspects start off hidden (face down); so initially you have no clear idea what you are going to be facing and all you can do is directly attack the Chimera. That changes during the Chimera's turns (and remember you get to have a turn with a main action + side action, alternating with the Chimera's goes). As during the Chimera's turn you will roll the behaviour dice and check the table to see what happens; this will always reveal the left most face down aspect, but it may also have other effects, such as allowing the aspect to imediately attack, lowering your dice, dealing damage direct to your Phoenixborne or even placing a Red Rains token on the Chimera and hastening the ultimate. The use of the D12 for behaviour is in particular very interesting because it skews the odds in a manner that isn't intuitive for most players. Each side has an 8.33% chance of being rolled and that can be hard to internalise even if you consider it to be approximately 8% per side (as a rough in game calculation). Have I mentioned how much I love D12s when they're used for rolls?

The Chimera will continue to roll behaviours until all of its aspects are face up, and then it will start to attack with any of them that are still alive and haven't attacked already. When a unit is used in Ashes it is exhausted and that is marked with a blue token for easy tracking. So you have time to set up and start carving into the aspects with unit attacks or spells while the Chimera is still revealing; this entire mechanism is fantastic because it nicely matches the flow of the game while also keeping the Chimera feeling different from the players.

A Shadow Aspect Unit, you can see how it messes with your options until defeated.

When you are rolling the behaviour die, you will also be rolling a power die; if you roll a basic symbol it will be going back into the pool, but if you roll a Blood/Rains symbol it will be placed into one of the five slots on the board; five of these and the Chimera gets a Red Rains token; enough of these symbols and the Chimera will ultimate.

Ultimates represent an escalation in the Chimera's powers; it will follow all the text on the Ultimate card; triggering a bunch of varied effects that are helpful for the Chimera and harmful for the players; and then the Ultimate and the Behaviour cards are both discarded, revealing underneath the next Phase (except when you're in Phase 3; those cards represent the peak of the Chimera's behaviour and they're kept in play for the duration of the game). Ultimates are bad, but they can be delayed by exhausting the Ultimate card itself (it counts as a Ready Spell and can be exhausted multiple times, which may stall an ultimate for a round... maybe).

Once the Chimera has performed all its available aspect attacks it will pass for the rest of the round; it gets to do this without any penalty, however if you run out of things to do and start passing then the Chimera will escalate by getting additional Red Rains tokens, in short you need to be good at pacing yourself, especially when facing higher difficulty Chimeras who have more aspects in play at the same time. The lowest version of Viros has just 4 slots per player for aspects, but the highest level has 7; and trust me, this is quite a jump in difficulty!

I will also briefly note that the Chimera also suffers from exhaustion of cards; once it has been through its deck once (twice with two players) then it gets no new aspects and starts to suffer mounting damage the same as a Phoenixborne with an exhausted deck will. You can try and outlast these monsters; but it's not a walk in the park.

There are also a couple of other variations you can play with, one is the 'Call of The Phoenix' variant; where players may have to duel each other with whatever resources they have left after the battle against the boss (not for me, but you might like it). Or alternatively you can play a campaign mode where you start with a pre-constructed deck and get to slowly upgrade it while you face each of the three levels of the Boss. This is especially challenging in Heroic mode because the increased power level of that Chimera pushes it well ahead of many pre-constructed decks and you only get to upgrade a few cards at a time.

In truth, Red Rains has no right to be as good as it is; Ashes is for myself a top five two player head to head duelling game alongside Netrunner, Doomtown, Middle Earth: The Wizards and Magic the Gathering and it could have just stayed there instead of taking a gamble on this boss battling mode. However it has absolutely succeeded with very few issues (the main difficulties are you have to bare in mind that your player cards are designed for other Phoenixborne, so the terminology changes a little and that some cards just don't perform well at all in this mode).

I will criticise the player count though; this is a game which could have easily had a 3 or 4 player mode because the mechanisms scale very cleanly, the second player doubles the chimera's lifepoints and requires double the number of cards (going through the deck twice). So a three player game could run with three times the life and a third time through the deck (or an increase in the decksize by adding 50% extra cards from the unused aspect). This is a scalable system, so I do have to wonder why they didn't open with a player mode that worked with more players; and I do hope they address this in the future. Until then, house rules do work fine, it remains a challenge even at higher player counts than it was designed for.

If you enjoy card based boss battlers like Marvel Champions, Aeon's End or Sentinels of the Multiverse this is a game you should seriously consider investing in; but also if you love boss battling as a genre but want something you can play with your partner or friend inside of an hour and a half (less time when you're experienced with the game's mechanics) I cannot recommend this one enough; I love it, I love Ashes' wide and diverse cast with a Phoenixborne for just about everyone (you'll almost always find someone you resonate with) and I want to see more of this mode; I want to see it get fleshed out with multiple Chimera, expanded to include 3+ players and then followed up with a campaign mode that allows for battling multiple Chimera of escalating difficulties. So please, if you are at all interested, give this one a fair shake – you'll get a sweet duelling card game for 2-4 players as a bonus!

For those of you who are interested and located in the US, here is a link to the pre-order on the main Plaid Hat site.

The next Chimera!