Base price: $15.
1 – 4 players.
Play time: 15 – 30 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 48
Full disclosure: A review copy of Tranquility: The Ascent was provided by Lucky Duck Games.
Alright, let’s dig into this one. Quick opener and then straight to it. We’re diving into a second game in the Tranquility series! Tranquility: The Ascent! We’re swapping boats for mountains and making our way up to the top! Work together and play cards to get to the summit!
Contents
Setup
Not a ton, here, which is great! You just shuffle the cards, and then lay out the ten Panorama Cards along the bottom of the play area:
You keep them number-side down for the basic game. You can keep the goats and the Hiker meeple nearby, if you’re using the expansion content.
More on that later. If you’re playing solo, deal yourself six cards; otherwise, deal each player five cards and you’re ready to get started!
Gameplay
This one’s pretty simple! Ascent, like its predecessor, is a cooperative card game all about advancing together. Instead of sailing, however, you’re climbing a mountain! (Why are you climbing a mountain?) Your goal is simple: make the summit! How you do so is a bit up to you.
On your turn, you can either play a card or discard two cards. Up to you! If you play a card, you must place it next to an existing card or on top of the space between two existing cards. If you’re playing next to a card, you have to follow a few rules:
- No adjacent cards can be the same color. Note that this doesn’t apply to Bridges.
- You must discard a number of cards equal to the difference between the two cards. If they’re the same value, that’s 0, so, free play!
- If you place a Bridge, all the Bridges in the Mountain must be covered by other cards before you play the Summit. No visible bridges allowed!
- If you play a Campfire, replace a card on a lower level of the same color with the Campfire, then play the replaced card as normal. For future plays, the Campfire is considered to have the same value as the closest card on its left.
Either way, draw back up to five (six in solo) at the end of your turn. If you are playing solo, you can discard a Grappling Hook to shuffle your hand back into the deck and draw back up to six cards.
That’s kind of the whole thing! If you can make it to the top, you win! If you run out of cards to play and can’t play on your turn, you lose!
For a greater challenge, there are also extra expansions! For one, you can do The Green Path (mandatory in solo mode), where there must be a connected path of green cards going from the bottom to the top, or you can flip the Panorama Cards or add Mountain Goats to make the game even more challenging. Good luck!
Player Count Differences
Pretty few, this time! Everyone is just playing cards from their hands as they go around. There’s a bit of possible tension just because there’s only two cards in each number / color pair, so it’s possible that one player might have all of the cards you need to play in more difficult modes. Beyond that, though, it’s a pretty chill game. You can’t talk about the cards you have or your strategy, so you can just vibe about whatever.
Strategy
- Two of each pair of color and number. That’s critical to remember. If you discard both of a color, it’s not coming back. This can be pretty tricky, since you need certain cards for more difficult levels and you’d like to avoid wasting cards where you can.
- Don’t discard cards willy-nilly! If you run out, you lose, so you don’t really want to be playing a ton of cards that are pretty different values; you’ll be spending cards constantly. It’s not great.
- Keep in mind that you only need one Summit Card. Whether or not anyone kept theirs is something you can’t know. You can safely get rid of Summit Cards if you have more than one; they’re pretty useless otherwise. There’s some risk in getting rid of the last one in your hand. You don’t know how many your co-players have gotten rid of, and if you run out of Summit Cards entirely, you’re definitely screwed.
- There are good cards that can almost always be discarded. Once you’ve gotten through the first couple levels, 1s and 2s aren’t as useful later in the game for anything except discard fodder, since they can’t be placed on higher levels.
- Use Bridges to build out a good foundation. It can be challenging to build up the lower levels if you don’t get the cards you need, but Bridges can be placed to extend your levels so that you can place later. They’re especially helpful when you have two of the same card, so you can essentially use the Bridge to space out the two cards.
- Campfires let you re-use cards to, frequently, great effect. Don’t take them for granted. This is pretty clutch when you need certain values and colors that you’ve already placed.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- A nice, quick, and relaxing game. It’s a pleasant cooperative game, and it doesn’t take a lot of intense thought or discussion to play since you’re just playing tactically when it’s your turn. No-communication games are nice like that, sometimes. The game even encourages you to talk about non-game-related things to keep the focus light and pleasant.
- I actually like this better than the original. Something about the theme and the pyramid really work for me, though I preferred the original’s color scheme and art style. No disrespect to Ascent; I just like the colors.
- The art is very pleasant. The mountains are nice and the cards are fairly different and distinguished, which is nice.
- The challenge is pretty fun, too! Early-on, it’s pretty easy, but if you start adding in the more difficult modes, you can make the game pretty tough! Granted, the tough parts make the game a bit more nondeterministic, but what can you do?
- The extra modes are a fun way to add more difficulty in a way that doesn’t necessarily feel contrived. They’re thematically very nice! The challenge of having forced orderings via the panorama or having to make a path that’s all green cards to the top. Truly, the goats make things the most complicated.
- The arithmetic required for this is pretty simple, so no problems there either. Like I said, it’s mostly just simple subtraction, and you truly shouldn’t play cards that are more than two apart. You can play four apart (five in solo), but you obviously shouldn’t do that. You’re going to spend too many cards.
- Your partner(s) can really mess up your plans; the game is challenging and dynamic. Since you’re not communicating, you aren’t necessarily sure if they’re doing what you think is best or if they’re trying their own strategy. It’s a whole thing, especially in the more challenging modes.
Mehs
- This game is a bit more satisfying on Board Game Arena because it doesn’t have you deal with how finicky placement is; it just works. There are so many cards and they get knocked around pretty constantly unless you have them pretty close together. It’s the same issue with the base game, but it’s occasionally a bit messy.
- The square box continues to not be my favorite. It’s hard to store in a shelf! I had to get a smaller shelf for small-box games, so it might work if I stack both on top of each other?
Cons
- This is another game where random draw luck can really hurt you, like Hanabi. Especially if you’re playing with the Panorama mode, you need certain cards at certain times and they can very easily end up at the bottom of the deck. It’s not necessarily the worst in the standard game, but it can really trip you up otherwise.
Overall: 8 / 10
Overall, I think Tranquility: The Ascent is a great next step in the Tranquility series! Building up a mountain is fun, of course, but it’s got some nice additional modes to flesh out some difficulty for players if you want to spice it up. It loses a bit of the perks of a grid system, since they can kind of all align next to each other. Here, since you’re making a mountain, it can kind of get a bit messy. I particularly don’t love placing the initial panorama cards; who can place ten cards corner to corner perfectly aligned like that? Certainly not me. I’ve been playing a lot of Ascent on Board Game Arena, and it’s worked perfectly, there. Less emphasis on the actual physical challenges of playing the game and more focus on the strategy and implementation, which I like a lot. I tend to discount this a bit since standard Tranquility has similar issues. I had actually been playing it since before it was confirmed that Lucky Duck was bringing it stateside, so, I was glad that they picked it up! It’s a good challenge and the nice art ties it all together. If you are looking for a solid cooperative card game, you enjoy a tactical challenge, or you just want to climb a mountain, I’d definitely recommend Tranquility: The Ascent! It’s been a lot of fun.
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