Ambition Quest

Ambition: the Quest for Immortality (often foreshortened Ambition Quest, or simply Ambition) is an Evermornan collectable trading card game produced by Glacier Springs Games. In Ambition Quest, players take the roles of alchemists attempting to discover the secret of immortality before their opponents and to prevent their opponents from doing the same. Ambition is notable for pioneering new physical rights managment techniques to prevent its cards, which retain their value based on rarity, from being counterfeited despite their compact nature.

Execution

Each player shuffles their deck at the beginning of play and draws seven cards. A player is chosen at random to be the first player. Play progresses in turns that move clockwise around the play table.
On each turn, the current player chooses a single card in their deck to use its passive ability according to its suit (see Components & Tools). Next, the player draws a card. Then, the player can spend any number of cards from their deck into their hand. Next, the player can expend any number of cards from their hand to use their listed effects, many of which require discarding other cards from the same suit to be played. Most of the game's mechanics are not central to the game itself, but derive from the mechanics listed on the cards in their hand. Most cards can only be played on the player's own turn, but some can be played at any time; card effects happen in the order in which they are played, and these effects can pre-empt or occur in response to the effects caused by other cards as stated by the player at the time at which the card has been played. Most cards are placed on the discard pile after they are discarded to power other cards, their mechanics resolve (in the case of actions), or some other mechanic removes them from play (in the case of auxiliaries).
Ambition features multiple degrees of success and multiple ways by which success may be achieved. Each player starts with zero victory points and is trying to reach 20 victory points first in order to win the game. If a player can no longer draw cards from their deck, they are automatically removed from play. A player cannot win simply because all opponents have been removed from play, however, as they must still have some route to achieve the required 20 victory points. Thus, play statistics for Ambition keep track of 'knock outs' as well as wins and losses. Very rare cards sometimes feature alternate win conditions which trigger when they are in play.

Components and tools

Cards

An Ambition card features a set of unique mechanics on the front. These mechanics are usually themed to the suit of that card and requires between 0 and 3 cards of a similar suit to be discarded in order to be used (see Execution). For example, a Life card might require the expenditure of 2 other Life cards to grant the player a certain set of victory points. In another example, each suit in each set features cards that count as 1, 2, or 3 additional cards when discarded to power these abilities. 'Auxiliary' cards, often themed around creatures, people, or equipment, go onto the table permanently (though various affects can remove them) and provide ongoing benefits that change the flow of the game, but can only be played on the player's turn. 'Action' cards have an instantaneous effect and can be played at any time at which they would apply. Cards played for their face mechanics are placed on top of the discard pile unless stated otherwise when their mechanics are fully resolved or, if an auxiliary, when they are removed from the table somehow.
The back of an Ambition card features a symbol and colored background to denote suit and a number to denote the set it came from. Importantly, each suit has a unique mechanic involving the manipulation of the deck (see below), and cards may be expended for suit to power the mechanics of other cards within the same suit (see Execution). These aspects of a given card can be activated even if the card is still face-down, do not require turning the card face-up, and, in fact, the deck manipulation mechanics are generally used when the card is still in the deck rather than when it is in the player's hand.
The eight suits of Ambition cards are as follows:

Life (white sunbeam): When a Life card is at the top of the deck, the player may place the card on top of their discard pile back on the bottom of their deck, then place the Life card that triggered this ability on the bottom of the deck beneath it. Life cards tend to be themed around returning or reusing cards from the discard pile. Life auxiliaries tend to be split between creature-themed cards and cards that upgrade other auxiliaries through themes of growth or evolution.

Earth (red crystal): The player may move an Earth card and any single card adjacent to it down one position within the deck. Earth card mechanics tend to revolve around preventing other effects from taking place and are themed around barriers and stability.

Heat (orange flame): The player may move a Heat card by itself up to two positions upward within the deck. If this would move the card above the top of the deck, it instead moves to the bottom of the deck. Heat card mechanics tend to involve directly damaging opponent's victory scores. Heat auxiliaries often have several 'phases' involved that progress over time and are themed around smelting, burning, or other processes driven by pumping energy into a system.

Air (gold dust plume): The player may move an Air card and any single card adjacent to it up one position within the deck. Air card mechanics tend to be small effects that affect multiple targets or are difficult to prevent for some reason.

Light (green maple leaf): The player may look at the Light card and single card adjacent to it, then put them back into the deck in the same positions and order. Light cards, both action and auxiliary, have mechanics involving revealing cards from decks and hands, whether as a means of providing deck knowledge in and of itself or as a way of powering abilities (i.e. an auxiliary is stronger if the player choses to reveal a card from their hand when they first put it down).

Water (blue wave): The player may move a Water card by itself up to two positions downward within the deck. If this would move the card below the bottom of the deck, it instead moves to the top of the deck. Water cards tend to affect multiple targets, like Air cards, and have incremental increases in effects, like Heat cards.

Sound (purple concentric rings): The player may move the card above a Sound card one position upwards in the deck if possible and the card below the Sound card one position downwards in the deck if possible. Sound cards tend to allow the player to repeat or delay actions. Sound auxiliaries can sometimes hold cards to be triggered under set conditions rather than at the usual discard costs.

Void (black circle): When a Void card is at the top of the deck, the player may choose to place it at the bottom of the deck. Then, the player and one opponent of their choosing place the next top card of their respective decks on the bottom of their respective discard piles face up. Void card mechanics are typically themed around removing auxiliaries and forcing cards to be placed into the discard pile.

Decks

Each player constructs their own ambition deck out of cards in their possession. A deck must have between 48 and 64 cards to be tournament legal, though there are not restrictions on the number of a given card that may appear in a given deck. Notably, because the backs of cards indicate suit and set, all players at the table have some limited knowledge of what might be in the deck and in which order they are likely to appear. This is an important feature of Ambition, as deck manipulation based on the unique mechanics of each suit (see above) is an important aspect of play. A player is eliminated from play if the rules cause them to draw a card from the deck but there are no cards left in it (see Execution).

Physical Rights Management

Each suit of Ambition cards generally has 20 cards per set. Each of these subsets generally has 8 common, 6 uncommon, 4 rare, and 2 super-rare cards. Uncommon and rare cards often interact with suits outside of their own in some way, whether by borrowing a mechanic from that suit at a diminished capacity or by accepting discards from specified other suits to trigger additional mechanics. The starting market value of these cards is initially based on simple rarity, but those with effects that are also particularly useful gradually increase in value beyond that ascribed by rarity. Because the market value of these cards is directly tied to expansion pack sales, the company that produces them puts significant efforts towards ensuring that official cards are difficult to counterfeit and disallow non-official cards from all officially sanctioned tournaments. While the physical rights managment technologies improve between sets, eventually leaving prior sets obsolete in their protections, the company has already gotten their value's worth by the time counterfeiters 'crack the code' and start making fakes.
Ambition cards are polymerized rather than being made of traditional paper, making them both more durable than the cards found in other games and more difficult to spoof with standard printers. The exact process by which the 160 card master sheets are made is a closely-guarded trade secret, but it involves embedding encoded microprinting strips into the artwork and doping the polymers with specific blend of quantum micro-dots and other trace elements that can be measured to establish authenticity. The card blanks are also known to be exposed to hard vacuum during their construction to drive off surface volatiles; when a collector determines a card to be assessed is of dubious providence, he might say the deal 'smells fishy' - and that wouldn't necessarily be just a turn of phrase.

Participants

Ambition: The Quest for Immortality is best played by two to four players. There is no upper limit to the number of players baked into the rules themselves, though games with six or more players can drag on - especially in decks involving lots of out-of-turn mechanics and counter-actions. Tournaments often use four-player games early on to narrow large fields of competitors down until only the best competitors remain.

Observance

New set master sheets are produced on a yearly basis so that the announcement of the new cards can coincide with the start of the tournament season in mid-fall.
Glacier Springs Games makes almost as much money from events surrounding the tournament as it does the cards themselves. Because the companty is relatively small and not publicly traded, it isn't beholden to constant pressure from shareholders and, as such, has a reputation for being very responsive to the needs and wants of its players - at least, within local space. Unfortunately, unlike games like Territories or Piktas, the game pieces are not standardized and, as such, players beyond the bounds of the Evermorn-Armoa Binary System have to rely on proxies or, in more populated regions of the Cobalt Protectorate (i.e. Lepidos), subsidiaries which have delayed contact with the home office on Evermorn.

Primary Related Location

Planet Evermorn

Important Locations

• Glacier Springs

Related Organizations

• Glacier Springs Games

Related Ethnicities

• Evermornan