Increasingly, the newest deckbuilding games use deckbuilding as a single mechanic in a more complex gaming system that  draws from our categories of gaming. Thus, Martin Wallace’s A Few Acres of Snow was a wargame deckbuilder and Friedemann Friese’s Copycat was a worker-placement deckbuilder. Asgard’s Chosen by Morgan Dontanville follows that trend.

The Game

Asgard’s Chosen is — like A Few Acres of Snow (2011) — a deckbuilding wargame. However, where A Few Acres felt like it was a pretty serious wargame that happened to use deckbuilding as a resource mechanic, Asgard’s Chosen feels like a serious deckbuilding game that happens to also incorporate wargaming.

Which is to say the emphasis is different.

Asgard’s Chosen focuses on two of its gameplay phases: the Campaign Phase and the Muster Phase.

• The Campaign Phase is the wargaming portion of the game: heroes move around the map and probably land in enemy territories where a battle is  fought through the play of cards.
• The Muster Phase is the deckbuilding portion of the game: players buy new cards (using the cards they didn’t spend on battling).

The goal of the game is to appease the God cards that form your initial hand, which  means meeting specific victory conditions for the various cards; those conditions depend on either the cards in your hand or your position on the game board.

The Good

A Very Unique Starting Hand. At the start of the game, each player gets 10 god cards to form their initial hands. As already noted, these cards have the victory conditions that you have to meet to win the game. They also feature pretty strong powers, which is pretty unusual for a deckbuilding game; that’s offset by the fact that you’re only allowed to play one of those cards per turn (in the “God Phase”).

I generally enjoy the fact that Asgard’s Chosen has figured out how to start the players with higher power while still giving room for growth (through the purchase of cards that can be played in other phases). It’s a great balance. I also like how expending your initial cards (by meeting victory conditions) can be a deficit, which is a big change from the typical deckbuilding game where everyone’s first priority is to dump all of their initial cards out of their hands.

Very Unique Victory Conditions. The victory conditions on the god cards are also quite unique. You can’t win this deckbuilding game just by powering up your deck. Instead you have to take certain types of territories (like cities or spaces with certain icons on them) or you have to purchase certain cards (like items or monsters) and have them in your hand. These requirements drive the game play, as you actively try to meet the conditions of cards as you draw; it also sets Asgard’s Chosen well apart from the rest of the deckbuilding genre.

The Wargame Controls Deckbuilding. One of the most interesting aspects of Asgard’s Chosen is that you can only buy cards when you control territory of the type matching the card. This can be a pretty severe restriction and something that drives your tactics during the Campaign Phase of the game. Since most deckbuilding games limit their purchases largely by limiting purchasing power, it’s nice to see something different — though Fantastiqa (2012) sounds like it has some of the same ideas and A Few Acres of Snow more directly ties specific locations to specific cards.

The Deckbuilding Controls Warfare. On the flipside, the cards in your deck are entirely crucial to winning attacks, because they’re what you play in order to win territories! Again, this is a nice variation from the more-common trope of cards-as-money.

Together these two systems create a wonderful synergistic loop that makes it clear that both the deckbuilding and the warfare are part of a single coherent game — just as deckbuilding and worker placement meld together almost effortlessly in Copycat (2012).

Nice Suits. A few deckbuilding games make strong use of suits. Most obviously, Ascension (2010) ensures that its different suits of cards have different powers, which takes a page out of the book of Magic: The Gathering (1993). Arctic Scavengers (2009, 2013) approaches suits in a different way: there are a few different decks of cards, each of which has different things in it.

Asgard’s Chosen takes a more abstract approach: each suit of cards works particularly well with its own suit (it fights better in that terrain or it buys that suit better) and particularly bad against its opposite suit (it can’t fight in the opposite terrain or it can’t buy cards of the opposite suit).This also shows yet another link between the deckbuilding suits and the warfare terrain.

I think that every deck building game that’s suited its cards thus far has benefited from it, so I’m happy to see Asgard’s Chosen offer up another model for doing so.

The Bad

Buying is Fairly Simplistic. The choice of whether to buy cards in Asgard’s Chosen often seems a little one-dimensional. Too often you just buy whatever you can. That’s in large part because it’s not just easy to get rid of cards … it’s actually desirable, as doing so can appease certain gods. Because of those gods, it’s a lot harder to clog your hand with bad purchases, and as a result there’s a lot less concern about buying them. I think that the purchase limitations also build into this issue, at least for inexperienced players: because your territory can severely limit what you can buy, you just buy the one or two cards that are available to you.

Underdeveloped Systems. Overall, Asgard’s Chosen felt like it had less development than it should have, resulting in sharp edges that made gameplay awkward. A lot of this actually centered on the wargaming play, which was the more complex and longer part of the gameplay. In particular, people were confused by differences between the battleground (where a conflict is fought) and the terrain that is being attacked from, because they work the same in some situations, but not in others. None of this was game breaking, but it was the sort of thing that can stop a good game from being great.

Long Play Time. Your mileage may vary, and to be honest my group often seems to have  deck builder games run long on first play, but this one was long — to the tune of 45-60 minutes per player for a first-time play. We were pretty happy to only have three players! Even with continued plays, I have concerns that this is going to be a long ‘un.

Didn’t Take Off. The best deck builders have an arc, where you start off weak and then can build a considerably stronger deck. In the worst, you can buy everything at the start of the game, which was one of my several problems with Quarriors (2011). Asgard’s Chosen fell somewhere in between. As I said above, there’s some room for growth, but it’s ultimately limited. This had something to do with the fact that the cards in your deck at the start are pretty good; something to do with the fact that your deck can get worse as you fulfill victory conditions; and something to do with the fact that you can buy pretty good cards at start on a lucky draw. With that said, some of the improvement was more subtle, such as focusing a deck on one color.

Conclusion

The pure deck builder is dead! Long live games that use deck building as one component among many!

Asgard’s Chosen does a great job of showing how a wargame can focus heavily on deckbuilding … but still have lots of warfare too. The interactions between warfare and deckbuilding are really what make the game — but I like some of the deckbuilding innovations too, such as the heavily suited cards and the relations between board position and card purchasing. Overall, Asgard’s Chosen is an interesting design that’s well worth playing.

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