PAX Discovery: The World of Kylia’s Ascendant Is D&D Meets Go Fish

PAX is one of those places where you can walk past hundreds of games you’ve heard about and somehow end up spending your time with something you had never seen before. The World of Kylia Ascendant actually caught my…

Map TrailJuly 25, 20266 min read

PAX Discovery: The World of Kylia’s Ascendant Is D&D Meets Go Fish

Ascendant is a trading card game set in the World of Kylia, and I’ll admit that when I first sat down with it, I didn’t immediately understand what it was trying to do. There are cards, stacks, resources, dice and terminology that doesn’t resemble the TCGs most players already know.

Then Chase, the games creator, gave me probably the simplest explanation possible before sending me home with review copies: “D&D meets Go Fish.” Strangely enough, that helped.

Publisher: The World of Kylia
Designer: Chase Lambert-Crittenden
Art Director: Collin Ha
Players: 2-6
Playtime: 20-30 (shorter if you roll better)
Genre: Trading Card Game, d20 Combat, Stack Building
Release:2024 (Saqiya Festival); creator calls it ‘technically beta.’

So Where Does Go Fish Come In?

One of Ascendant’s most interesting ideas is that drawing duplicate cards isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s part of how you actually play them.

Cards have costs that determine how many matching copies you need before they can enter the battlefield. If a card has a cost of two, for example, you need two copies of that card in your hand and play them together as a stack.

That immediately changes the way you look at your hand. You’re searching for matches and building the combinations necessary to bring your equipment and abilities into play.

That’s the “Go Fish” part. Except instead of asking somebody if they have any threes, you’re assembling enough copies of a weapon to hit them with it. If you roll high enough of course.

And Then There’s the D&D Part

Combat is built around the d20.

Players roll for things like Aim, Speed, Damage and Defense, while cards modify those rolls and determine what your character can actually do. Ranged and melee combat even operate differently, with ranged attacks requiring an Aim check and melee attacks involving contested rolls and the possibility of counterattacks.

That’s where the game started making considerably more sense to me. Can you out-roll your opponent to hit them or did they dodge? Then, hopefully, you roll for damage.

Ascendant describes itself as a first-person TCG, and that’s probably the most important distinction.

You are the combatant. Think Flesh and Blood, where you are your hero, but with a d20 deciding whether your swing lands and how much damage is done.

Your Arsenal represents your weapons, techniques and abilities, while another deck called the Fountain contains resources such as Finesse and Genki.

Playing Ascendant felt less like commanding an army and more like assembling a tabletop RPG character out of stacks of cards and then throwing that character into a fight.

Latin Is Built Into the Game

Something else caught my attention while learning Ascendant: the names.

The game’s Genki energy is divided between seven different Paragons, and several of those names are taken directly from Latin or built from Latin roots. A deck commits to one Paragon: every Genki card in your Fountain has to match the Paragon of every Jumon in your Arsenal.

More importantly, their meanings aren’t random.

Callidus can mean clever, skillful or cunning, and the Callidus Paragon specializes in versatility and manipulating the battlefield.

Interritus means undaunted or fearless, and that Paragon is built around raw offensive power.

Divinus, Inspirante, Profectus, Consilium and Praesidium continue the theme across the seven Paragons. By color, Callidus is white, Consilium purple, Divinus yellow, Inspirante orange, Interritus red, Praesidium blue and Profectus green. (I had to look up Latin as I don’t know any.)

I like this considerably more than inventing seven fantasy words and asking players to memorize them. Once you understand what some of these words mean, they actually give you a clue about the philosophy behind that part of the game.

The terminology goes beyond the Paragons, too. Your main deck is your Arsenal, resources are stored in the Fountain, discarded or destroyed cards enter the Scrapyard, and cards permanently removed from play enter the Abyss.

It sounds like a lot when you’re first sitting down. It was a lot when I first sat down.

But once the terminology and mechanics started connecting to each other, the game became much easier to understand. However, that did take a few games and a lot of looking at the rules.

More Than I Saw at PAX

My PAX demo was only an introduction, and Ascendant goes considerably further than what I experienced at the convention.

Turns move through several phases, ranged and melee combat function differently, weapons and abilities modify your d20 rolls, and natural 20s can provide additional bonuses.

Underneath all of that is the stacking mechanic.

It creates this strange combination of collecting matches, building a character and rolling dice to see whether that character can actually pull off what you’re trying to do.

One of My PAX Surprises

Ascendant wasn’t something I went to PAX specifically looking for. That’s also why I’m glad I found it.

I like a challenge and this game gave me one. It’s not as intuitive as some others but it ended up being a lot more fun once I got moving. The d20 was something different that added excitement. to be honest, I spent a few games wondering what to do with a spare copy once a stack was already in play. Usually the answer is nothing: it sits in your hand until you can build another stack, and only cards with keywords like Recharge or Stockpile let you add to one already out.

They also have other aspects to the world such as books that can help you get immersed.

Explore it here https://worldofkylia.com/

Ascendant starter decks are available at the World of Kylia store for $29.99 each at the time of writing, with booster packs at $5.99.

Ascendant from World of Kylia is a unique first-person TCG that combines card collecting and deck building with d20-based RPG combat. Its unusual stacking system makes drawing matching cards part of the strategy, while weapons, abilities and dice rolls make you feel more like the character in the fight than someone commanding units from above. There is a definite learning curve, especially with the amount of game-specific terminology, but once the basics click, Ascendant becomes a surprisingly fun and different take on the trading card game formula. (Based on the demo I played and 6 games at home)

Pros

Unique combination of TCG and tabletop RPG mechanics
Matching-card stacking system gives duplicate cards a purpose
D20 combat makes attacks feel more active and unpredictable
Latin-inspired Paragons and terminology give the world its own identity
Much more fun once the core systems start to click

Cons

Heavy reliance on the glossary makes the game harder to learn than it needs to be (most people don’t know latin)
Large amount of unique terminology can be overwhelming during your first games
Some mechanics aren’t immediately intuitive, making the initial learning experience a little rough (took me a lot of research to really get into gameplay)
Starter decks list at $29.99 each, and since a deck commits to one Paragon, trying more than one adds up quickly.

Overall 4