Delirium28: Ascendant

Delirium28: Ascendant is a solo four dimensional 4x campaign game of hallucinatory battlefields. Fight sureeal battles with many interlocking systems forming a bizarre evolving puzzle to explore.

The 4th dimension is represented with blue "outitude" dice, indicating each miniatures 4th dimensional altitude.

Use tarot cards and miniatures to hold the front lines in a mutating 4d landscape with the hopes of mutilating an Enlightened Foe: freaks who are further along the path of ascending to godhood.

Level up your Ascendant hero through battle, unlock new units and technologies, and fight your way up the 10 difficulty levels!

Delirium28: Ascendant comes with 3 enemy factions, Amnesiacs, Architects, and Autophages, each with their own units, abilities, events, and Enlightened Foe.

You might like Delirium28: Ascendant if you enjoy games such as Spirit Island and Mage Knight. This is a high complexity game potentially taking 2-3 hours, though if you know what you’re doing it takes about 90 minutes.

Ascendant has many difficulty levels, and a wide range of upgrades to purchase between games.

The book includes a playthrough at the back so you can see how the game is played.

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More Details

Manage your hand of tarot cards by playing them to pass tests for each action a unit takes.

When you play a card, it goes beneath 1 of the 6 columns of map tiles where it adds to the value of other cards your units in that column play. This rewards you for thinking ahead to play your hand as efficiently as possible.

If played well, these cards can also be returned to the bottom of your deck to activate powerful technologies you unlock between battles.

Once your hand is empty, you'll have to take a redraw action, losing tempo to the enemies and making an enemy event happen a little sooner!

The early game is about timing your movements into unexplored tiles around the cards on top of the enemy's face up deck and discard, since the discard tells you the elevation of the newly explored tile, and the top card of the deck tells you what kind of terrain is there.

As you do this, you're laying out the landscape for the fighting that begins in the midgame, ultimately setting yourself up to quickly take down the Enlightened Foe.

Be careful though, since enemies add "blight" to map tiles they enter. The more blight is on the map, the more actions the enemies get each round. Too much blight and you lose!

The Enlightened Foe shows up after 6 event cards have been discarded, and the game ends after 9 of these events.

If you manage to mutilate the Enlightened Foe, you earn 3 upgrade points and increase the difficulty level of the next match. 

You also have the potential to level up your Ascendant at this stage!

If you didn't mutilate the Enlightened Foe, then you earn 2 upgrade points and may decrease the difficulty level.

Upgrade points are spent to unlock and customize new units and technologies.

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Check out the other D28 games

https://alleywurds.itch.io/delirium28excursions

https://alleywurds.itch.io/delirium28incursions