Wouter & Ymke 
It’s 1989, and things have gone rather badly. Decades of political conflict have ended in the Great Nuclear War, most of humanity now lives underground, and the surface isn’t exactly somewhere you’d go for a relaxing weekend. The surviving colonies are trying to rebuild what’s left, sending evacuation teams into the wasteland to rescue survivors, collect materials and establish new shelters. At the centre of those efforts is the Phoenix Project, a shared attempt to eventually make life above ground possible again.
In ASHES: Blackout Protocol, one of the new releases heading to Spiel Essen ’26, each player controls one of these colonies. You’ll develop your underground base while sending a vehicle across the shared map, rescuing people and contributing to the Phoenix Project. There are several systems running alongside each other, and when we first looked at everything spread across the table, it was difficult to know where to start. Three rounds later, the problem was almost the opposite. We knew exactly what we still wanted to do, but the game was already over.
👥 1-4 players, ages 14+
⌛ Playing time: 35 minutes/player
📝 Designers: Jorge J. Barroso, Jesús Fuentes & Eduardo Pavón
🎨 Artwork: Jorge Tabanera Redondo
🏢 Publisher: Perro Loko Games (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
A game of ASHES: Blackout Protocol lasts three rounds, and whoever has the most victory points at the end wins. Most of the action takes place between two areas. There’s a shared map divided into sectors with different radiation levels, and every player has their own colony board where they manage survivors, production, materials, technologies and shelters. Survivors gradually appear on the map, giving everyone more reasons to venture further into the wasteland.
On your turn, you choose one of three protocols: move your evacuation vehicle, activate a survivor or pass. Moving your vehicle costs two fuel and lets you travel between neighbouring areas. Along the way, you can pick up and drop off survivors before using the area tile at your destination. Depending on where you stop, this can give you materials, missions, scoring opportunities or access to other actions. Your vehicle also protects the area it occupies from radiation, so where you park it can matter beyond whatever you immediately gain there.
Activating a survivor is how you run your colony. You take an active survivor from your colony entrance and place them in one of your available activation zones. This can trigger technologies, produce resources such as fuel, data and colony strength, and then allow you to perform a main action. Each activation zone can only be used once per round. You begin with three survivor activations available, though an upgrade can increase that later.
Your main actions are used to develop your colony and your presence on the map. You can construct shelters, which provide new shelter cards and can improve your production. Shelters also determine which nearby survivors you’re able to rescue. Those rescued survivors arrive at your colony entrance and can later be decontaminated and placed into shelter pods. Filling those pods gives bonuses, and completed shelter cards can eventually be moved into scoring areas beneath your colony board.
You can contribute to the Phoenix Project by installing upgrades. These require materials and data, and provide technologies, victory points and progress on the shared knowledge track. The more upgrades players install at a particular level, the more expensive later installations can become. Materials can also be combined into more advanced materials. Missions give you additional objectives to work towards, and shared milestones can score points when their requirements are met.
Eventually, you’ll need to pass. You decide which activated survivors to recover by spending anti-rad doses. Survivors you don’t recover return to the bag and reduce your happiness. You then receive income from eligible shelter pods, score a limited number of areas on your colony board and choose your position in the next round’s turn order. Radiation becomes another problem between rounds, with exposed survivors potentially being lost. After the third round there’s a final radiation step, followed by scoring for your colony, happiness and contributions to the Phoenix Project.
Artwork & Components
For a game set after a nuclear war, ASHES is surprisingly colourful. The map moves from pale blues and greys into bright purples and pinks. The colony boards look more industrial, with exposed wiring, control panels and tracks running between different sections. It’s busy, especially when everything is set up. We like that they didn’t go with the predictable post-apocalyptic combination of brown, grey and slightly different brown.
There’s quite a lot packed onto each colony board, with spaces for resources, survivors, technologies and upgrade tiles. Removing those tiles during the game gradually changes what your colony can do, which is something I always enjoy. The Phoenix Project has a similar industrial look, with technologies sitting inside what looks like a large engineering network. Most information is communicated through symbols rather than text. Some of those symbols took us a while to remember.
The wooden pieces were probably our favourite components. Survivors are wooden meeples, and each player has a small wooden evacuation vehicle that’s easy to find on the map. Materials use wooden cubes, with discs for shelters and various tracks. There’s also a branded drawstring bag for the survivors, and plenty of cardboard tiles. Everything feels sturdy, and despite how much ends up on your colony board, we didn’t have much trouble keeping track of where everything belonged.
Once a game is underway, the table gets quite crowded. There’s simply a lot to look at between the shared board, your colony, cards and the Phoenix Project. During our first game we spent a fair amount of time moving our eyes between them, trying to find the icon we needed. It became easier once we knew where to look. ASHES is never going to be mistaken for a minimalist design.
Our Experience
We’ve now played ASHES: Blackout Protocol several times and at different player counts, with three players becoming our preferred setup. At that count, there was enough happening on the shared board that we kept following other turns, without much downtime. Our first game definitely took longer than the suggested 35 minutes per player. Later games came much closer once we weren’t stopping every few minutes to check an icon or work out the order in which something happened. None of our games really felt long, though. We usually reached the end with several things still sitting on our mental to-do lists.
We understood the basic actions quite quickly. That didn’t stop us from making some questionable choices. During the second round of our first game, one player committed their remaining active survivor to a shelter and then realised they didn’t have enough fuel to move their vehicle. That was pretty much it. They had to pass while the rest of us continued with the round.
In our first game, we spent far too much time staring at our own colony boards. Once we knew our way around them, our eyes started wandering towards everyone else’s plans. We watched where shelters appeared, which locations were still useful and where the evacuation vehicles were heading. End-game objectives sometimes made a particular part of the map suddenly much more interesting. More than once, someone started moving towards a location only to discover that another player had apparently had the same idea.
We started watching the Phoenix Project in much the same way. Early on, we mostly looked at what an upgrade would give our own colony. Later, we were checking what other players had already installed and whether waiting would make the upgrade we wanted more expensive. There were a few occasions where someone installed something just before another player was ready to do the same. No tables were flipped, but there was definitely some staring across them.
Missions took us a little longer. We initially treated them as separate jobs and sometimes spent too much effort trying to force one into our plans. After a few games, we did almost the reverse. If a mission wanted materials we were collecting anyway, or asked us to go somewhere our vehicle was already heading, great. If not, we were much happier leaving it alone.
By then, we were checking the rules less often too, though it never disappeared completely. Sometimes it was an icon. Sometimes an interaction we hadn’t used for a while. And sometimes we’d have everything planned out before discovering we were one resource short. That last one, unfortunately, wasn’t the rulebook’s fault.
Our Thoughts
What I find most interesting about ASHES: Blackout Protocol is how often one part of your colony is connected to something somewhere else. Survivors can become workers or shelter occupants. Shelters put you on the map, change production and can contribute to scoring. Your vehicle transports survivors, gives access to area actions and protects its location from radiation. Phoenix Project investments provide technologies and affect public costs and scoring.
I particularly like what happens with the colony upgrades. Many aren’t simply giving you a bigger number. Instead, they remove restrictions by increasing things such as storage, movement, survivor activations or how much of your colony you can score. Your colony gradually becomes less constrained, which left us wanting to improve just one more thing before turning our attention towards points.
The resource we felt shortest on was often not fuel, data or materials. It was time. There’s nearly always something else you’d like to squeeze in. A shelter can be useful on its own, but placing one where it also improves the production you need, puts you in the right area and helps with scoring saves you work elsewhere. And there are only three rounds. At some point you have to stop improving everything and use what you’ve built. I’m usually quite happy to keep upgrading an engine long after common sense says I should stop, so ASHES is rather good at telling me no.
Even after several plays, ASHES still asks you to keep track of quite a bit at once. You can’t really arrive with one plan and expect it to work every time either. The technologies change, the missions change, and the scoring conditions might point you somewhere else. We enjoy adjusting our plans around that.
I don’t think we’ve played enough to say much about balance yet. There are too many characters, technologies and scoring combinations for that. So far, we’ve found reasons to invest in different parts of our colonies rather than seeing one route that obviously outscored everything else. Ask me again after another ten games.
The post-apocalyptic setting gives some logic to what you’re doing. You move survivors away from radiation, build shelters and contribute to a project intended to restore the surface. Still, this is a systems-driven eurogame rather than a narrative survival game. We spent considerably more time discussing fuel production than the emotional consequences of nuclear annihilation.
ASHES: Blackout Protocol is mainly one for experienced eurogame players who enjoy building an engine and don’t want to spend the whole game looking only at their own board. Most of the interaction is indirect. Nobody is attacking another colony, yet where people build and move, and what they install in the Phoenix Project, can change what you wanted to do.
We went into our first play mostly trying to understand what all the different parts were asking us to do. Now there are characters we still want to try, technologies we haven’t properly explored and approaches we’d handle differently next time. ASHES asks quite a bit from its players, but for us the effort has been worth it. I’m curious to see whether the plans we currently think are good still look quite so good after a few more games.
And, well, there’s only one way to find out.
📝 We received a copy of ASHES: Blackout Protocol from Perro Loko Games.
Going to Spiel Essen ’26? You can find ASHES: Blackout Protocol at Perro Loko Games in Hall 3, booth U115.
You can find our other Spiel ’26 reviews here.
