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Overview

Well, Cooperative Ashes is now officially unlocked, that includes solo play! For this review, we’re going to simplify this entire box into “Coop Ashes” and “Ashes Red Rains”.

This box comes with cards to make 4 decks, but you’re allowed to use any deck to play against it. We played through the campaign with preconstructed Noah, with some slight deckbuilding tweaks according to this box’s rules.

Then the rest of the time, we played one shots using solely preconstructed decks: the box’s included Jesse Nani and Brennen, then we went to the core set for Coal, Monei Viper, and Jesse Nani. Then we played the expansion deck Namine Hymntide.

These are not every deck in Ashes: Reborn obviously, but we do have some ideas on how all decks fare against the chimera’s mechanisms, and even how deckbuilding could work.

Also if you don’t know anything about Ashes: Reborn… what are you doing here! Go check out our review over here!

How to Play

Goal is to kill the Chimera, using pretty much the original Ashes rules with some slight tweaks. To do bring that HP to 0, you either attack the Chimera directly, and/or attack its parts called Aspect units which it spawns on the board. When you kill an aspect like how you would normally kill a unit, you deal the ‘blood’ damage to the Chimera who is treated like a phoenixborn for all intents and purposes.

The Chimera starts with a bunch of these facedown aspects, and then on each of its turns, has a CHANCE to flip over new ones, or attack with current ones. But at the same time, you also roll a new die called a Rage Die, so let’s get into that.

If these ever get the red rains power symbol, the die is now ‘locked’ in to a slot and doesn’t get rolled again. When these 5 slots are filled up, then it gives a Red Rains token which is real scary, then the Rage all reverts back to basic. When the Chimera gets 3 red rains tokens, it triggers its Ultimate, doing strong stuff, then upgrading to escalate its behavior. Then discard those Red Rain tokens.

You and the chimera both pass turns of you doing your normal main and side action, and the chimera rolling its D12 and its rage die. When there’s no more facedown aspects, the Chimera turns become one aspect attacking, done from left to right. When they can’t do that, they’re forced to pass and don’t do anything. You as the human player just pass normally, probably when you run out of mana to use. When both you and robot are passed, you refresh everything as usual, pass the first player token, and the Chimera restocks its aspects up to its current maximum. Also you re-roll your mana dice, the chimera doesn’t.

Those are the bare basics, you lose by normally dying in Ashes. Much more soon regarding the new positioning, intricacies of passing, and the even how the Chimera defends itself!

Pros

First for components, dice and art meet the same Ashes standard! There’s Chimera aspects all doing something gritty, and the new player cards keep up the same style of Ashes: Reborn art.

Then its cool how they give 2 rulebooks, one for those entirely new to Ashes, and then another for those experienced players. The setup is really easy to follow in each, and there’s an updated glossary with different color font for the new terms which is awesome! There’s even a new round summary on the back of one! We’ll get back to the rulebooks a bit in the cons though.

As for gameplay, let’s start with praising how the Chimera works, the heart and soul of this expansion. For a robot, it generally is pretty cool to play around.

Of course, we have to start on the rage dice, because the way they handled Ashes dice for a coop is pretty neat. Essentially, it requires really little bookkeeping while still feeling a bit like Ashes. All it does is slowly ramp up the power symbols, then resets, meaning you don’t really have to fiddle with manipulating complicated dice mechanics or faces when its not your turn. Plus, since the dice still have a power side, there’s room for all of your abilities where you get to manipulate your opponent’s dice.

Speaking of dice, the other D12 system is good to give some degree of uncertainty that kind of replaces the tension of playing against a human. There’s often tension in not being sure if something will do an early attack, but most likely new aspects flip over for new board states- now you can’t play certain cards with this glare! Or maybe the bad guy will ramp faster through certain results.

Actually the Chimera can get a D12 result to downgrade YOUR dice too, just like in normal Ashes, so you can’t always just keep stalling with your own dice and have a guaranteed late round play.

The Chimera even uses the D12 to defend! If you’re gonna attack one of its aspects, there’s a slight chance it blocks for it, if you roll a 9+, JUST like what a normal Phoenixborn can do!

What’s more, is that the Chimera somewhat gets you the feeling of manipulating your mana around your opponent. See, if you ever pass while there’s a facedown aspect on the board, one of their dice gets advanced… yeah you never want to be in the “no more possible main actions” situation, sound familiar to normal Ashes?

It’s a neat exercise here because the Chimera always starts each round with a full board, and its up to you to time how to spend mana to deal with all of its threats, keeping track of everything that either hasn’t been flipped faceup, or how much of a threat they’ll be if they attack. It’s like having a full board at the start of each round is the AI equivalent of having 10 mana to spend in the original game. Manage your mana vs. Chimera board well, and it’ll be the Chimera who will be tapped out of options while you get back to back turns over them!

You also have to play around how the Chimera progresses! It gets a red rains token for each face up aspect still alive come end round, so you’re often debating between actually killing aspects to do a little bit of damage, or doing direct attacks for the most damage, but letting the Chimera ramp up with those surviving aspects.

Its a cool balance of how many red rains you’re willing to give up through letting aspects survive AND playing the entire game generally slower, because playing too slowly means there’s more more rounds before the game ends, meaning the Chimera has more time to ramp up its dice through rolling D12’s. It’s especially important early-mid game to note when the 1st and 2nd ultimate are triggering, because they first do 1 damage to your entire board, then 2 damage to your entire board… so if you don’t play this correctly you could get board wiped hard. And you want to slow down the chimera in general because each behavior card and threat limit gets harsher, and the last ultimate floods you with units.

More new stuff comes in the form of positioning! It’s now a mini-game that requires you to keep track of the columns of everything.

When the monster aspects attack, they’ll either attack your Phoenixborn directly, or your left or rightmost unit. So now whenever you play units, you actually have to worry about placement (you still can only place from left to right though)! You do some board manipulation: like rushing spawns of weak units to act as meat shields, and/or letting you disregard certain aspects if you position correctly.

Pros Con’t

We haven’t even talked about the 2 player mode yet, and it leads to sweet teamwork!

You can always attack the aspects on your teammate’s field, and they can attack your aspects, so its often a lot of discussion about which aspects you’re focusing. Especially good to kill those defender aspects that will block for the chimera when either player attacks directly. 


For every turn, you get to pick whether you or your teammate do your main and side actions which can sometimes spark some conversation. Oh, and also, there’s not really quarterbacking due to how intricate the Ashes system inherently is!

And we have to talk about the new cards: so you get 4 prebuilt Phoenixborn decks that are made from a pool of 39 cards. Basically you pick one of these reprinted Phoenixborn that are exactly the same except for some new flavor text, take 3 of their unique cards, then take all of the rest of the generic cards for a deck.

This means that if you came from just playing the base set, you’re getting a new way to play Jesse Nani, with new ways to spawn blood puppets. Or if you like Coal, his new final stand rewards him for emptying his hand, to do 4 damage!

All 4 of these decks use the black ceremonial die, meaning there’s a huge emphasis on constantly retrieving stuff from the grave, which is a good choice of dice power since it encourages meditating and lets you combo harder. You can combo stuff like letting your allies die because you’re ok with retrieving them later, then spawning this included Bone Raven as a side action. There’s also an emphasis on wound management for your allies, then to do damage to your opponent’s field for each wound you’ve taken (Blood Brawl).

This is all blending into replayability pros, so we have to talk about the included campaign which is the recommended way to play. You play against the Chimera once, if you win, go at it again, but it starts at level 2. If you beat that, you enter the final level… which means it starts at level 3. Doesn’t sound the most flashy, but the Chimera starting at a different level really accelerates difficulty.

Higher levels means more aspects, and stronger behavior- uhhh they can ping your units now for free. This means that the campaign gets more frantic the deeper you get into it, with the last level actually being really freaking hard to beat. It’s pretty cool that you can change up your dice load out in between these levels too. If you’re REALLY all that good, you can up the difficulty again by going for heroic mode.

The final pro is that this runs true to time, at 30 minutes for solo once comfortable. 2 player mode takes about an hour too.

Cons Cont’d

The next con is also not too severe, but it’s an umbrella where the replayability in this set just isn’t as good as it initially seems. Let’s start with deckbuilding. It’s a bit weird. If you deck build specifically to play against the Chimera, like getting big monsters that the Chimera never voluntarily targets because of its positioning attacks, then you’re just gonna find games too easy against it. But then if you deck build normally and then play against the Chimera, you can find a some normal ashes-isms don’t really do anything against the Chimera!

Trying to mostly burn has been off in every attempt, mostly because the Chimera has 30 health instead of about under 20 for a normal Phoenixborn. The Chimera has more HP because its designed to also tank the blood damage from aspects dying. You CAN win through some type of burning, especially with the included Jessa Na-ni Deck, which has ways to supplement burning damage. I would warn against playing the core set of Jessa Na-ni against the Chimera.

Any hard removal that we’ve seen in the base set isn’t that good either, because the Chimera never loads up on certain units, usually area of effect is the best- cheap removal is the best. Negation cards aren’t that good, because you know what the Chimera is typically gonna do from faceup cards, you can’t negate its ultimate, and the Chimera never surprises you from cards dropped from hand.

Look, we haven’t tested how exactly each reaction spell works against the Chimera, or even how successful milling is against an 18 card deck, but fact is, just because of what a robot is there’s gonna be deckbuilding limitations. Again, not a huge deal, and it can get improved with expansions, but a buzzkill if you’re looking to seriously deck build against a robot.

Also, let’s look at the Chimera decks, there’s the Fury and Shadow ones, with 3 copies of each card. And these don’t really play that much differently than one another and definitely don’t follow a cohesive theme. They both have blocking cards, both have status effects to make the Chimera stronger, and then some big attackers. Once you play against one of these decks once, you pretty much know all of the tricks.

This all ends up not being a HARD con because technically you can use any Ashes: Reborn deck against the chimera, with varying matchup success/difficulty. We’re guessing most matchups are gonna be winnable with the right rolls and plays.

All of the 4 included preconstructed decks, which borrow each other’s cards, definitely seem well equipped to deal with the Chimera from the Brennen and Jessa Na-ni runs.

And, there’s a card called Channel Magic to kind of breathe new life into base decks, but again you’re only changing 3 cards out and Channel Magic HAS to be a little more generic in being so splash-able.

The final con has to do with the box. Like, its kind of shoddy, its like one of those old PC games. Couldn’t make this an actual box that opens normally?