Sam Brown

With “Return of the Fallen” it’s now possible to make an infinite turn loop in Ascension. As long as you have a way to get at least one point a turn (e.g. two standing power from artifacts and killing a cultist each turn) you can turn this into infinite victory points.

You won’t get the chance often, but these are the cards you need to grab:

Tablet of Time’s Dawn
Hedron Link Device
Reclamax

See the combo? The tablet gives you another turn. The Hedron Link Device lets you treat it as a mechanica construct. And now that it’s a mechanica construct, you can fish it out of the void with the reclamax each turn.

You also need a guaranteed source of 5 runes(money) per turn, to buy back the tablet. If you have a snapdragon, the serpent staff, and a couple wolf shaman in the deck, that works. Also, playing the wolf shaman with the snapdragon can be your point source, killing two birds with one stone.

On top of that, you’ll need to lean your deck down enough to be able to draw every card every turn. This is necessary so you get your reclamax back into play each turn. So you’ll want to purge your deck of almost all cards that don’t cause you to redraw more cards. Having a Rocket Courier X-99 is good insurance, since it lets you reclamax the Tablet directly into play. This might save you if your deck isn’t perfectly leaned and you get a bad luck turn where all your cards that don’t give extra draws come up in the opening hand. Having the second reclamax is also good insurance. Once you get the combo going decently well, you’ll get the chance to lean your deck down to where drawing it each turn is a mathematical certainty.

If you play enough games versus the iPhone AI opponent, you will eventually get the chance to use this combo. I’ve played hundreds of games and just got it now for the first time.

Playing out of the base set of Ascension, a pure-pacifist strategy (one with little or no monster killing) very rarely wins. But several cards in RotF signal that a pacifist approach could be the winning one in a game where a handful of them pop up early.

Keep an eye out especially for the following cards:
Askara of Fate (Draw cards and banish one.)
Eternal Askara (Banishes a card and gives you points if it was a monster)
Dandelion Witch
Lunar Stag
…and green in general.

If you’re playing mixed with the base set, there are many cards there that are still key to a pacifist strategy. They didn’t have enough support before to make it without some monster-killing blended in, but in combination with RotF, they now shine like never before in a pacifist deck:
Flytrap Witch
Lifebound Initiate
Snapdragon
Seer of the Forked Path

Overall, almost any card from RotF strengthens a pacifist deck to some degree: Only the void cards are anti-pacifist, and even they are useful for their deck trimming.* Because the cards that pick up points without killing monsters in RotF are higher cost & power cards in general, it’s a strong strategy to build into once this set is added. Also, there are more pacifist combos, like the Stone Circle and Great Omen Raven, allowing you to get points for drawing a card you just bought.

As always, one key to winning with a pacifist deck is denying your militant opponent the monsters they need to get ahead of you. That’s what cards like Askara of Fate excel at. Meanwhile, you need to drain the victory point pool so the game ends while you have the lead. Lunar Stag is a bread-and-butter card for this, building your deck up in the early game, then snagging points in the late game. Eternal Askara is the best card of all for the strategy, since it does a bit of both.

Draining the victory point pool while you have an early advantage isn’t the only way. If your economic engine is rolling while your opponent is choked, you can still build up to buying up all the best cards and then outpacing your opponent on all fronts. Once you’re dominating, paying deliberate attention to draining the VP pool while you’re ahead isn’t needed.

Overall, pure pacifist is still only rarely the winning choice: But with RotF, the number of games where it’s the right choice jumps from “almost never” to “unusual”. Keep an eye out for it.

Footnote:
* Even now, a pacifist deck depends on Void cards to clear out the militias and apprentices that would otherwise dilute your green and blue. Arbiter of Fate and Arbiter of the Precipice are the best trimming cards for a pure pacifist deck. Void initiate and Black Hole are solid. Shade of the Black Watch and Black Watch Elite are still strong, but without other power sources, they won’t hit the threshold needed to slay the better monsters.

The 6 cards in the row are all superior, rune for rune, or power for power, to the Mystic, Heavy Infantry, or Cultist. So when you get the chance, deny your opponents cards from the row.

This strategy works best in a one-vs-one game. With more players, you’re likely to confront different strategies at the same time, making it impossible to deny all opponents the row cards. Your goal is to leave nothing on the row that your opponent can buy or kill that will help them build momentum in the early game, or grab meaningful points in the late game. If your opponent is playing a power-heavy deck, leave only expensive purchasable cards on the row. If they’re playing a purchase-heavy deck, get rid of all the cards worth buying and let the row fill with monsters.

There are two ways of denying row cards to your opponents: Buying/killing them or banishing them. To pull this strategy off well, you’ll be doing some of both.

The most common way to lock the row is to be playing a rune-heavy (buying) deck yourself, while your opponent plays a combat-heavy deck or tries to balance the two. It’s harder to pull off a monster-heavy lock, because you’re less likely to redraw a new monster when you take cards off the row. Also, the cheaper price of combat cards makes it easier to pivot into a combat strategy from an economic one if your opponent figures out what you’re doing in time.

Some golden opportunities to keep an eye out for for are the Avatar of the Forked Path and the Mephit. The Forked Path is the most pure card for pursuing this strategy, especially when taken in combination with a thinned out deck that will redraw it often. And the Mephit (or Mistake of Creation) is a one-shot row-control opportunity that your opponent will soon turn against you if you don’t grab it first.

Like all strategies in Ascension, the luck of the draw is a factor, and you have to know when to make a play for this one and when to save your efforts for other strategies. If there’s too many cards on the row that are tasty for your opponent’s deck strategy, locking the row is a distraction. It’ll help you to get rid of the ones s/he wants most, but your efforts are better spent building your own deck than trying to block their every play when the draws aren’t playing along.

It’s also worth knowing which cards you can safely leave for your opponent. Cards like the Mechanica Initiate or Void Adept combo poorly with many decks, actually making them less tuned. It’s often safe to leave these on the row, letting your opponent pollute his deck with cards that work contrary to his strategy. The Thorn Witch, so powerful in a thinned-out redraw-heavy deck, is a waste of runes as a late game buy for a bulked-out deck in the late game. In the last third of the game, the time to buy most (non-mechanica) Constructs is past. Knowing the cards you can safely leave for your opponent to buy is another key to this strategy. Just knowing your opponent’s playstyle preferences may often give you the chance to leave a card on the row that you know they will refuse.

It’s rare that you get the chance to make a major play of this strategy – more often it’s a minor compliment to the core strategies of building a tight deck and grabbing the best opportunities. But when the draws give you the chance to pull it off at the same time, it’s a key factor in the most runaway victories you’ll ever see.

Short version:
This is a rare strategy that gives you the chance to walk away with HUGE victories when it goes big. In a 2-player game, watch for your opponent to blunder into a combat heavy or balanced strategy in a game where you’ve chosen economic (rune) power and the deck has played along with you. Use selective buying, killing and banishing to deny your opponent the cards that would compliment their deck’s strategy.

As the one monument that also gives you a tech-up like bonus, the Great Wall is the clear choice for which monument to build first. Even if another player has a head start on you building it, it may still be worth it even at second-player credit.

Depopulating the human fleet with the -3 risk early jump often isn’t nearly as good a coup for the cylon as it appears to be. The population dial has to already be low for this to help you. Otherwise you’re just helping the humans trade a resource they have to spare for a jump, which is what makes them win the game.

If you really want to hurt the humans with an early jump, be sure that you or an allied cylon is currently the Admiral, so you choose a low-distance jump. In a best-case scenario, use scouting actions on the destination deck in previous turns to guarantee you have a 1 distance jump to choose.

Remember that your best way to get the human’s population down is through raider attacks on their civilian ships. You can set these up with scouting missions, Boomer or Roslin’s powers, or by having a revealed allied cylon working the crisis deck or cylon fleet locations. The -3 risk jump might be the decisive extra that pushes them over the edge, but most population damage will come from killing their civilian ships.

Consider jumping at the -3 when a Cylon fleet is about to blow up your civvies anyway, or if you’re in the late game with population to spare. But the real time to jump at -3 is when you’ve got Helo in the FTL Control on his own turn, with a Strategic Planning ready to play.

It has to be Helo’s turn, because his reroll power doesn’t work on other players’ turns – Executive Order doesn’t help here. On the good side, the game errata has clarified that a Strategic Planning played on Helo’s initial role carries over for free to the reroll.

With a 50% chance of getting out scott free and a reroll if he fails, Helo only has a 1 in 4 chance of losing civvies on an early jump when someone pitches in a Strategic Planning, meaning he’s losing 0.75 population per jump this way on average. If you could pull this off for all 5 jumps of the game, you’d cut the number of cards you need to survive to win the game down from 45 to 30. Actually a little more, since you’re waiting to come around to Helo’s turn, which makes the math quirky. And your total population sacrifice is most likely 3 for the entire game. If you’re running low on population (and you probably aren’t, because early jumping has probably kept the cylon fleet from ever touching your civvies) then you can always fall back to the jump on -1 rather than -3 strategy.

P.S. As usual, things are backwards if you’re the cylon, and then you can exploit the -3 risk jump to depopulate the human fleet. But don’t underestimate the savings you’re giving the humans by jumping them two turns early. The population dial has to already be low for this to help you. Otherwise you’re just helping the humans trade a resource they have to spare for a jump, which is what makes them win the game.

As the humans, always jump early. Jump the moment the readiness track hits -1. No excuses.

Why? The whole game for the humans is about advancing the jump track. That’s the win condition. Everything else is a side quest or a distraction. Every time you jump early, you put another jump advancement marker towards winning. The jump marker you save by not auto-jumping will advance your next jump.

Typically it’s going to take 5 jumps to win the game, maybe one more, maybe one less. Jumping at -1 means you only need 5 jump advancement markers per jump, not 6. So it’s only going to take you 25 jump markers instead of 30 to win the game. With 60% of the crisis deck having jump advancement counters on it, that means you have to survive ~37 turns to win, not ~45 as you would with auto jumping. That’s 8 less turns of everything going wrong. Less if you make clever use of scouting missions, and Boomer or Roslin’s powers.

And what do you really risk by jumping at -1? You’ve got a 75% chance of losing 1 population, which is less than you were likely to lose to other crisis while you waited for that last jump advancement to come up. Not even 75%, because someone’s going to be holding back Strategic Planning to play on the jump. Now you’re only losing a single population half the time. On average, that’s 2 or 3 population lost over the course of the entire game, for massive savings elsewhere. And jumping is the best fleet defense, too. Since fleet attacks are the biggest danger to your population dial, you’re protecting it at least as much as you’re putting it at risk.

Always jump one early on the track. Always always always.

When teaching new players Bohnanza, I’ll say this at the end of my quick-let’s-jump-in-explanation:

“There’s one more rule, and even after I tell it to you, someone at this table will forget it and get burnt by it. The rule is: If you’re going to trash one of your fields, you have to trash a field that has more than one bean in it in preference to a field that has only one bean in it.”

I’ll repeat it if someone asks for clarification, but otherwise we dive in and play as soon as possible. The fastest way to learn is to play.

The point of this now-ritual phrase is to set up the expectation that someone WILL get busted by this rule, and it’s ok, and other people at the table will back you up when it happens so it doesn’t degenerate into an argument or sore feelings. It was a newbie error that someone was going to make, now we’ve seen it happen and we understand, and the game keeps moving.

Actions are your primary resource. Don’t squander them returning over ground that you already cleared of disease.

Whenever possible, plot a route of travel that ends at a research base, a city where you can fly away from, or any other hack to avoid walking back over ground you already covered. Hoarding cards is the key to winning by curing diseases, yes. But it’s almost always worth the single card to get to where you can do the most good next, either with a chartered flight or by setting up a research base.

Credit for this tip goes to Darren Eskandari, who first pointed it in my playgroup.

It’s a simple tip, but it will get you a long way in Bohnanza: Be friendly. If there’s even a single other player at the table who you can trade favors with, you’ll both come out ahead of the people who are playing hyper-competitive and cutthroat.

Blocking other players from the resources they need isn’t as strong of a strategy in Bohnanza as it is in many other games. Rather, keeping your word, offering tempting deals, and going out of your way to help other players who’ll return the favor tends to be rewarded.

This is a simple house rule: All card trades must involve (at least) one of the two cards flipped up at the start of the trade phase.

The main win from this is that it cuts out many trades that would have involved a lot of haggling over what people have in their hand, and keeps the game moving as a result. On the downside, the game already moves well and the rule cuts down your options.

I played with this house rule not knowing it was a house rule my first half dozen times. It plays well. Consider using it if you have a larger group or players who are prone to options paralysis.

A key strategy to Ascension is knowing if you’re going with a fat deck or thin deck strategy.

In an ideal world, you’d love to run a thin deck. Grab purple cards that let you banish the trash from your deck early, such as the Void Adept, Shade of the Black Watch, and Avatar of the Precipice. Build the deck up with cards that make you draw after playing. Blue cards have the purest options for these. (Library Adept combos especially well with the purples named above in the early game.) A thinning deck will often pass up the opportunity to grab Heavy Infantry and any other card that isn’t a construct or have a free redraw, even when it has runes left over at the end of the turn.

Playing vs. iPad AI 1v1, 165 points in a game is my personal record. It was a thin deck that got me there.

But the card row doesn’t always offer you the option to thin, or your opponent snatches up all the good purple thinning cards and leaves none for you. When this happens, it’s time to swing the opposite way and bulk out your deck. Every card you add is worth a point or more. Heavy Infantry? Buying it gets you one point and every time you play it, at worst it’s one point from a defeated Cultist.

If your opponent is thinning, it’s vital that you rush draining the honor pool before his/her deck tuning is complete and s/he steamrolls you. Combat power is the classic way to drain the honor pool and end the game early, but certain Lifebound(green) cards accomplish the same results while keeping your card buying power strong: Lifebound Initiate, Snapdragon, Thorn Witch, and the Yggsdrasil Staff all give you noncombat avenues for speed draining the honor pool and ending the game while you’re still ahead. These are especially handy since buying power will allow you to cycle the cards in the center row to keep a steady stream of monsters available.

Overview: Figure out in the first few turns if you’re running a thin deck or a bulked out deck. Commit to it and push for an early or late game end based on it.

P.S. For the last turn or two, all decks are bulk decks. It should be obvious, but when you don’t have to worry about what trash you’re going to draw next turn, grabbing up the most points the row offers is the way to go.

P.P.S. Thin deck strategies work best with the core game. Once you add the “Return of the Fallen” expansion the ratio of cards in the deck that let you redraw after playing falls, and it’s rare that you get the chance to build the unstoppable play-my-entire-deck-every-turn combos that the core set allows.

This is a well balanced game; there’s no single winning strategy. Every card can be good in the right circumstance, the key is to ****** up the combos that the row offers and adapt as it presents new opportunities.

As a rule of thumb, most colors/factions combo with themselves, so grab multiple cards from the same color and you won’t go far wrong. For example, if there’s a Void Adept (1 cost purple) and a Shade of the Black Watch (3 cost purple) in the row at the start of the game, jump on that. This is a natural combo that will thin the trash out of your deck, leaving you with mean power combos by the last third of the game. If there’s a Snapdragon (5 cost green construct) and anything else green on the row at the start of the game, dive for that. Again, you’ve got a natural combo.

Not all cards that share a color are natural combos. Experience will teach you the many exceptions to this rule. Until you have experience, look for a chance at the opening to specialize in a color or two early on.