A little about me, I'm a HUGE fan of RISING SUN (I also like Blood Rage but I do have my caveats about that game) since it's one of my all time favourite AREA CONTROL games of all time. All my friends love it, I love it and I've always loved most of ERIC LANG's games especially after RISING SUN (MUNCHKING DUNGEON, DEATH MAY DIE etc). So it shouldn't be a surprise that ANKH is probably my all time anticipated HYPED ASS game this year.
With that out of the way, what do I think about this game?
Having played it about 6 times now in all different player counts. Once as a 5P, 1 time as a 3P, 2 times as a 2P and 2 times as a 4P.
Overall...I really like it. I would say it's better than BLOOD RAGE but not better than RISING SUN. However, it has cleaner mechanics than RISING SUN but it's also marinated by some CLUNKY book-keeping which is very unlike <PERSON> as he's typically the master of creating silky smooth gameplay, yet having a great amount of depth and strategy beneath.
First things first how does this compare to RISING SUN? Overall, it is a very different beast, but it does share SIMILARITIES. Unlike RISING SUN where the game is all about setting yourself towards the WAR PHASE (with negotiation being a strong aspect to go along with). ANKH to me feels more like BLOOD RAGE-esque in a sense that BATTLES can be triggered by anyone. But it's kind of like RISING SUN where battles occur via TIMING ie do you trigger battle now (by choosing the action that pushes at the end of the track) or choose other actions to drag it off a little longer so that you can prepare yourself better or do you trigger battle now to deny someone a specific advantage. These choices while simple, feel to me the heart of what BLOOD RAGE and RISING SUN is but in a more streamlined manner.
Battle-wise, I probably would say the game feels more like BLOOD-RAGE(in terms of the crazy card effects and such) but has the forward planning of RISING SUN. You see in this game just like RISING SUN, you're not going to win every battle. In essence, you have to choose which battles you're going to go for whilst having battles where you try to get a little bit out of something. The essence of ANKH is really about trade-offs, IE someone may win the BATTLE but in return you'll get just as much or more. 366
Because you can technically only play 1 card per battle since the card will be unusable on the next battle and face up for everyone to see. These minds games were the heart of RISING SUN (less so in Blood Rage unless you had people who had photographic memory during the drafting phase) and in here whilst in a different form, definitely keeps that in a much more simpler, less-stressful form.
Without trying to make this into an essay why do I not like this game as much as RISING SUN? There a few key reasons:
1. The SCENARIO based setup VS the more organic setup of BLOOD RAGE and RISING SUN makes the game start feeling samey. Having played roughly 4-5 different scenarios I really don't feel the difference between them. This is a real shame as RISING SUN despite having the same map, feels really dynamic from round to round as negotiations and trade-offs come left and right making it that you have to adapt tactically while thinking of the big picture. For me, with the exception of the BONUS SCENARIO in CMONS WEBSITE, most of the scenarios don't really change up the games and they all felt samey to me with the rule changes feeling more of a fluff.
2. There is a lot of fiddly-ness in this game. This is really disappointing for me, as your first game will have a lot of "oh yeah, I forgot to activate this!" tilting the balance of the game because you can't go back and change it. Even after my 6TH game, I was still periodically forgetting small things. I think most of this could have been avoided if the game had reminders or tokens. As it is, whilst the game has simpler mechanics and rules than RISING SUN, the amount of conditional abilities this game has makes it more fiddly and even more complicated than RISING SUN because of it. To it's credit I am happy that everyone shares the same ANKH POWER which actually does two things, it balances the game and as you get used to the conditionals it becomes easier to remember them.
3. It feels not as dynamic as RISING SUN. 884