Tamashii: Chronicles of Ascend Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Tamashii: Chronicles of Ascend, a cooperative exploration and combat game published by Awaken Realms. If you love the cyberpunk theme, then this one is worth checking out.

If you’ll recall back to my review of the skirmish game Cyberpunk Red: Combat Zone, I lamented on the void of good Cyberpunk board games available for our tabletops. However, recently we’ve seen an uptick in the offerings in this genre, perhaps due to the success of the Cyberpunk 2077 video game. Who can say, but what I do know is that game publisher Awaken Realms has thrown their hat into the ring with their new cyberpunk-themed game, Tamashii: Chronicles of Ascend. It’s a cooperative bag-building and pattern-matching game for 1-4 players that takes about 60-180 minutes to play.

The gameplay in Tamashii is scenario-driven, with each mission being loosely connected to the overall plot. What is the plot? Well, it’s a mix of the themes of The Matrix, Altered Carbon, and The Terminator. Basically, in this post-apocalyptic future, a sentient AI has taken over the world and you are part of a band of resistance fighters who can jump in and out of bodies throughout the net.

Each mission is opened with a small booklet that has the story and setup and then continues through a series of cards with branching paths (something I was a big fan of).

The basic round structure takes place over 4 phases:

First is the Planning phase, where you can upgrade your character, refill your launcher, and program patterns. Your launcher is a grid on your dashboard with a bunch of tokens (in 4 colors). Programming lets you slide/swap them around to try and create patterns (IE: 3 blues in a row, or Red, Yellow, Red).

Once everyone has finished that phase, it’s on to the Move and Trace phase. In this step, you move your character around the city, potentially exploring new districts. Whichever tile you end up on allows you to use its district power. Yet it will also increase your trace track, potentially spawning