The world of Astria Ascending is characterized by an overwhelming obsession with harmony, but even that won’t distract people from parlor games. J-Ster is Astria Ascending’s love letter to Triple Triad from Final Fantasy 8 – a grid-based game where the tokens are emblazoned with monsters and characters from the game.
It’s more than similar to Triple Triad, too. J-Ster uses various rules that dictate how you trade cards and even what cards you pick in some cases. Knowing how these rules and how the game works at its core is key to being successful at J-Ster. Oh, and it’s pronounced “jester.”
J-Ster Rules
The game of J-Ster is played on a seven-tile grid of hexagons. The setup and opening of a game are the same every time:
- Each player selects five tokens from their collection to play with.
- One token is selected at random from both players’ hands.
- Of these randomly selected tokens, one is discarded and one is placed in the center of the board.
- The first turn goes to the player whose token was discarded.
Both players take turns placing tokens down into the hexes and the game finishes when the board is full. The winner is the player who ends up with the most tokens of their color. This will be red for you, the player, and blue for your AI opponent.
So how do you end up with more tokens? Well, in the same vein as Triple Triad, Tetra Master, and B&D, you must capture your opponent’s tokens with the power of maths. To do this, you’ll have to understand the anatomy of a token and how they actually work.
The Anatomy Of A J-Ster Token
Apart from the snazzy art in the center of a token, there are two qualities that a token has that actually matter in a J-Ster game:
- The token’s power level, which is denoted by a number at the bottom of the portrait.
- The token’s defensive ring, which is marked with various letters and symbols on each of the ring’s six sides.
These can be considered a token’s attack and defense stats and they come into play when an opponent’s token is placed next to it. If the attacker’s power level is larger than the defender’s power level, the defending token will be flipped to the attacker’s color.
However, the power level of a token can be altered by the defensive value of the side that is being attacked. There are five different values that can be on a token’s sides:
- A diamond shape is neutral: nothing happens to the token’s power value and there are no special rules.
- W stands for “Weak” and reduces the token’s power level by two points.
- R stands for “Resist” and increases the token’s power level by two points.
- N stands for “Nullify” and totally prevents any attacks from this side, giving it immunity to being flipped.
- A stands for “Absorb” and reverses the attack of an opponent’s token, flipping it to the owner’s side.
It’s important to remember that this is only relevant for defending against attacks, not attacking. Attacking someone with a token on a Weak side will not reduce your effective power by two points.
To illustrate this, imagine that this Beringei token is in the center of the board and the opponent is deciding where to place their token – let’s say that has a power level of four. If they placed their token directly to the right of the Beringei token they would take it, since four beats three. However, if they placed it directly to the left they would not take it, since the Beringei’s Resist side improves the token power to five when being attacked.
If the opponent had a token with a power level of two, they could take the Beringei token by placing it next to one of the Weak sides.
| Important Note: Failing to take an opponent’s token does not mean you lose your token, once a token is placed it cannot take another token for the rest of the game. |
The strategy of the game comes into play when you actually get to place a token: you can rotate a token’s defensive ring to make them more defensible before placing it. Using the Beringei token above as an example, it would be best to place it in a way so that the Weak sides are blocked off by the board’s edge and the center token, so that your opponent cannot target them.
Game Rules
There are a few variant rules that can be added onto J-Ster to make the game more exciting (or more devastating). Every NPC who plays will have their own preferred Game Rule and Trade Rule. Game Rules alter the game in significant ways and Trade Rules dictate what tokens the winner of a game gets to keep.
Game Rules:
- Open: All tokens are visible, letting you see your opponent’s hand.
- Hidden: Tokens aren’t visible, meaning you don’t know what tokens your opponent has until they are placed.
- Lock: You cannot rotate the defensive ring of a token, meaning they are locked into their default setting.
- Random: Your hand will be selected randomly from your entire collection of J-Ster tokens.
Trade Rules:
- One: The winner will get to take one token from the loser’s hand.
- All: The winner will take every token from the loser’s hand.
- Flip: The winner takes every token from the loser’s hand that they managed to flip.
J-Ster Tips
There are a few things that you can pick up to get good at J-Ster and accumulate a nice collection of tokens.
- Always note the difficulty of an NPC opponent. The difficulty levels are very good at approximating the skill level and token quality of an opponent – if you can reliably defeat two or three NPCs of one difficulty, you can probably defeat them all.
- Don’t be afraid to simply save and reload if you lose some valuable tokens. This is most relevant when playing against NPCs who use the Random Game Rule or the All Trade Rule.
- Use NPCs who use the All Trade Rule to fill out your collection easily, you’ll amass a ton of tokens doing this.
- Do everything you can to avoid letting any Weak sides end up targetable on the board. This will be difficult in the early parts of the game when most tokens have multiple Weak sides, so it may be best to get ahead in the game a little and use Arpajo’s ability to turn high-level monsters into tokens.
- Sometimes you’ll be up against an opponent with the same general quality of tokens as you – in these situations, it will likely be a luck of the draw in who goes first, as in a game where no tokens can be taken it’s the player who goes first who wins.
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