Tranquility: The Ascent - First Play!

5th March 2023

It's a Sunday and we're logged into Board Game Arena for another evening of gaming goodness.

​Tranquility: The Ascent is the follow up to the rather good Tranquility and employs similar mechanics, only instead of crossing an ocean, in Tranquility: The Ascent, players are cooperatively climbing a mountain.

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Caveat: We've only ever played Tranquility: The Ascent digitally.

What's in a game?

• Panorama cards: These triangular cards are used to form the base of the mountain and thus the base of the playing area.

There are 10 panorama cards.

• Cards: As with its predecessor, Tranquility: The Ascent makes use of square shaped cards, except here game they are rotated '45 and used in a diamond shape.
  There are several types.
  • Ascent cards: These cards come in 3 colours, green, red & blue. There are cards numbered 1-12 twice in each colour, thus 72 cards total.
    Ascent cards depict various types of environment or landscape that might be encountered when climbing a mountain.
  • Bridge cards: These depict a rather precarious looking rope bridge spanning 2 cliffs!
  • Campfire cards: These show a little plateau in the wilderness along with a small campsite. Like ascent cards, campfire cards come in green, red & blue.
  • ​Summit cards: Much like the name suggests, these cards display the mountain peak and are functionally ​similar to the finish cards from the original Tranquility.

3 ascent cards, a campfire card and a bridge card.

Tranquility: The Ascent features the same pleasant, colourful and slightly stylised artwork found in its predecessor.
This time however, obviously depicting a variety of harsh hilly and mountainous terrain, up to and including a cold, inhospitable looking snowy peak.
In the digital version unfortunately, much of the art is obscured by large numbers, which is a shame as I quite liked it.

The game uses colours and numbers and other than the illustrations for campfire cards and the like has no iconography. Players should have no trouble at all comprehending Tranquility: The Ascent.

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How's it play?
Setup

• Panorama cards: Set out the panorama cards in a row. This row represents the lowest level of the playing area.
• Bridge cards: First, a starting player must be determined.
  ​Then as per the player count, give bridge cards to the relevant players. These cards should be kept separate from other cards for the time being.
• Shuffle cards: Next, add the remaining bridge cards to all the other cards and shuffle them into a face-down deck.
• Deal cards: All cards should dealt out to face-down all players as equally as possible so that each player has their own personal deck.
• Draw hand: If player has a bridge card, then they should draw 4 cards from their personal deck into their hand and then add their bridge to their hand for a total hand of 5 cards.
  Players starting without a bridge card should simply draw a hand of 5 cards.

On to play
In Tranquility: The Ascent, players are attempting to collectively create a pyramid of cards. This is done by playing a row of cards and then playing further rows above and so forth. In total, during a successfully completed game, there will be 9 rows of 44 cards.
The game uses a traditional turn structure with the active player acting before play progresses to the player on their left.
During their turn, the active player has a choice of 2 actions.

• Play card: The active player may play an ascent card from their hand into the central playing area with the following provisos and restrictions
  • First card: When the first card on a row (Including the bottom row.) is played, it must be on the furthest left on that row.
  • Adjacent: After the first card has been played in a row, all further cards must be played adjacent to cards on that row with the following restrictions.
    • Different colour: 2 adjacent cards cannot have the same colour, they must be different. This also applies to campfire cards
    • Matching or higher number: When playing an ascent card, it's number must be equal to or higher than the row it is played into.
      I.e., a 1 value card can only ever be played in the bottom row. While only cards with a value of 8+ can be played in to the 8th row. It is OK to place cards with higher numbers into lower rows. E.g., a 6 can be placed on to the 2nd row.
    • Above: A card can be played on a higher row provided there are at least 2 cards directly beneath it.
    • Cost: Once an ascent card is placed, the active player must potentially pay a cost which involves discarding cards equal to the difference between the card they played and the card they played it next to.
      ​If the 2 cards have identical numbers, then the cost is 0.
  • Special cards: The rules for playing special cards a little different.
    • Bridge card: These cards can be used to leave gaps between adjacent cards. However, bridge cards must be covered by ascent cards in order to win the game. Furthermore: when a ascent cards does cover a bridge, they may be a cost for doing so.
    • Campfire: A campfire card can be used to swap for a already placed ascent card, thus allowing the ascent card to be used again. The campfire card's colour must match the card being swapped for.
    • Summit card: The last card played in order to win must be a summit card at the peak.
• Skip turn: The active player may skip their turn by discarding 2 cards of their choice.
• Replenish hand: Regardless of what action the active player took, they must replenish their hand back up to 5 (If possible.).
• Next player: Play now progresses to the player on the left of the current player.

Endgame
If during any player's turn they cannot play a card for any reason and do not have 2 cards to discard, then the players collectively lose.

If a summit card is played and no uncovered bridge cards remain in the central playing area, then the players have reached the mountain's summit and collectively win!

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Overall
Tranquility The Ascent is a sibling to the original Tranquility and as such, they utilise the same name, I'm not sure that there's much 'tranquility' in Tranquility: The Ascent though!

Gone is the lonely sense serenity and titular tranquility one might imagine the crossing of smooth mirror-like waters of an ocean would invoke. In its place are the rigours and obstacles of mountain climbing.
A better name would've been Stress: The Ascent or Acrophobia: The Ascent!

Joking aside, Thematically and visually, Tranquility: The Ascent actually works quite well, building upwards gives a nice sense of progress and I'm sure with the physical copy, a completed pyramid would look quite impressive.

Mechanically, Tranquility: The Ascent clearly shares some DNA with its predecessor.
Broadly speaking, both are about playing numbered tiles next to one another and discarding cards according the difference in numbers.
Tranquility: The Ascent changes this up somewhat, adding colour and placement rules to wisely differentiate it from Tranquility and notably, also increase the difficulty a little: The original Tranquility was fairly 'solvable' once the mathematics involved were understood. This doesn't seem the case with the follow up.
Tranquility: The Ascent also does away with that pesky 'start' card from the original!

All of this means the challenges in Tranquility: The Ascent are slightly different.
When playing cards, colours will now need to be taken into consideration as well as numbers and numbers now also have 2 parts to play, both when placing cards and the height of placing them. E.g., using a '5' on the 1st level can be wasteful since it could potentially be also employed on higher levels. However, the addition of campfire and cards adds some flexibility in this regard as do the bridge cards.

While I feel this requires players planning ahead a little more, players must also recognise when to change their tactics as new cards (For better or worse.) appear in their hand. As already stated I feel the changes add to the difficulty a little. This may be to your liking or not.

For me, I prefer the elegance of the original Tranquility and would choose that iteration over this one. I also have a preference for the sea faring theme.

YMMV of course, Tranquility: The Ascent is a smart little game which presents some interesting problems to overcome and if the mountain climbing theme appeals and you're looking for a cooperative game, Tranquility: The Ascent is worth checking out.