by Lowell Kempf
Some months ago, I played the DC Deck Builder for the first time. Both of my initial plays (with four players) were long, sluggish games, one of which lasted around an hour. While I felt that the game had definite promise, the long, lumbering playtime was a serious ding against it. However, many folks who’d played it a lot told me that that play time was a combination of new players and unusual, attack heavy card combinations.After all, I remember my first game of Dominion that had the Witch, Militia, Spy and Bureaucrat. That game took four times as long as I was used to and the winning score was in the single digits. (Mind you, with more experienced players, it wouldn’t have been so long) Bad card combinations can happen.
DC has become popular with many of my friends, who view it as an Ascension killer. I got into another game of it with two folks recently. While I was crushed like a grape beneath a wine maker who is also the Flash, it was a much faster, leaner game than my initial plays. Since my biggest gripe with the game was how long it took to play what felt like a very light game, this was a serious improvement.
And, if I were starting to build my collection right now, I might well take DC over Ascension. I do like how you get your own character with specific powers, how there are attack cards, and the stack of boss cards. It might have only one type of currency but it has effectively seven different types of cards (powers, heroes, villains, super villains, equipment, locations and weaknesses/vulnerabilities) to Ascensions’ three, although it seems like some of the things the cards do are interchangeable in DC, with the card’s type only being important in how it plays off of other cards.
Ahem, that is to say, DC’s apparent simplicity hides the fact that the base game is more complex and possibly deeper than the base game of Ascension. (Sorry, I know I started rambling there)
However, since I already own a couple of boxes of Ascension, I am planning on hanging onto them and I’m not planning on getting my own copy of DC.
Ascension is my go-to game to teach folks about deck building games. From that standpoint, the fact that it is even lighter and more simple than DC is a serious plus. Ascension’s initial appeal was a deck builder that took two minutes to set up and fifteen minutes to play. DC has the same appeal but in the grand scheme of things, the two games are not _that_ different.
In other words, while the two games are distinct and different, from a Jones Theory standpoint, I honestly only need one. And, while DC may be better for my friends who tend to only play with dedicated gamers, the lighter, fluffier and less confrontational nature of Ascension actually makes it better when I am teaching deck building 101.
(Of course, the biggest reason Ascension remains an active part of my gaming life is that it has such a good iOS implementation. However, that really doesn’t come into play with this comparison.)