Attack & Dethrone

"Amazed, jealous, disgusted all at the same time" - @jlipps

EDIT: I built this game in 2022, before cheap, low-effort, and morally questionable AI art generation tools became broadly available to all of humanity. I did it using python scripts and legitimate, public data-sets of verifiable provenance, and put a lot of additional effort into the output and layout of the cards - and I've made the output available for free. Please do not come at me with "AI is prima facie immoral" unless you're willing to engage with this project on these terms.

Here's a question: if you take a game that you like and re-do the art and rewrite all of the text, is it a different game?

Well, not really, but, like a recipe for beans or the game of Eat Poop You Cat, so long as you change all of the words and also art, it's different enough that it's technically a new thing! 

So this is just a print-and-play version of a popular game that I already like, "Ascension: Chronicles of the Godslayer", Ship-of-Theseused until it's a totally different and new thing that is, still, extremely like the original thing.

Replacing all of the art in Ascension is a big project, which is why I made a computer do it for me. All of the art for this project has been generated by VQGAN+CLIP and a beefy little GPU. That's right, a generative adversarial network did most of the work for me. Mostly all I had to do was sort through it and make a few small tweaks here and there.  Several days of dedicated Photoshop later and here we are, an entire game.

"How could you possibly charge money for this? It sounds like you copied an existing game, slapped on a bunch of art you made your computer generate for you, and called it a day."

How dare you! That is exactly what I did.  Which is why I'm not charging money for it.



Okay, me and my wife have also touched up a few of the paintings in the set by hand a little bit. But not much. This is 97% pure AI-generated abstract weirdness.

I think it looks really cool.

The game plays a lot like Dominion - it's a deckbuilding game where you mostly get points by fighting Demons.

The suits of the original game have been replaced with ones that were a little easier for the AI to wrap its head around. Now we've got Galaxy, Garden, Clockwork, and Forest heroes.

The Galaxy deck is all about direct damage and card-trashing effects.

The Garden deck provides a lot of cards that are good at getting you... more cards.

The Clockwork deck works best when played with lots of other cards from the Clockwork deck.

And the Forest deck is full of cards that generate victory points directly, as well as magic for use in purchasing more cards.

Once I got through the base game, creating a custom expansion seemed really, wildly, bananas easy, so I've also created an expansion for the game with a set of cards that was never seen in the original, The Orchestra Variant, which can replace any of the four original base decks.

Over the weekend I cracked out The Garbage Deck as quickly as humanly possible. I warn you: it is not playtested at all, and might wildly destabilize your game.

In fact, if you're interested, you can watch the entire process of producing The Garbage Deck, start to finish:

Heck, I've included all of my art and layout files, so you can build your own expansion if you like! (If you do this, please, for the love of god, send me pictures)

Actually if you build this game at ALL please send me pictures.  I would love to see this thing actually...  in the wild.

You're also welcome to tear this project open and feast on the delicious innards use any of the assets provided in your own games or projects!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Anyways, don't give me your money!  <3 - Curtis