ASHES: Blackout Protocol
Rescue civilians after a nuclear collapse, build shelters, move an evacuation vehicle and contribute to Project Phoenix before radiation overwhelms the wasteland.
ASHES: Blackout Protocol is a 1–4 player post-apocalyptic eurogame from Perro Loko Games, designed by Jorge J. Barroso, Jesús Fuentes and Eduardo Pavón. The game lasts three rounds, and players lead underground colonies trying to rescue civilians, expand shelter capacity and rebuild humanity through Project Phoenix.
Perro Loko published the official English rulebook in June 2026. BoardGameGeek currently shows hundreds of wishlists for the title ahead of wider 2026 availability.
What happens on your turn?
Your main decision is between using a survivor at your base to perform a protocol or spending fuel to move your evacuation vehicle across the board.
Base protocols include building shelters, installing Project Phoenix upgrades and rescuing survivors. These actions also generate production bonuses such as fuel, data, mission cards or colony strength.
Build shelters
Shelters increase the number of civilians you can protect. Construction uses colony strength and can create immediate rewards plus recurring income.
Once a shelter is filled, you can seal it. That can reduce future income but improve its victory-point value, creating a timing decision between continued engine production and final scoring.
Rescue survivors
Civilians remain exposed on the wasteland until transported into shelters. Rescuing them creates immediate benefits and can add recurring income to your colony.
The tension is that leaving civilians outside is not neutral: the end-of-round radiation phase punishes unresolved exposure.
Project Phoenix
Project Phoenix is the long-term reconstruction system. Players craft materials and spend data to install upgrades, improving their colonies while contributing to the project that may eventually make surface life possible again.
This creates a classic engine-versus-rescue tradeoff. Investment in Phoenix can strengthen later turns, but civilians need help now.
The evacuation vehicle
Your vehicle moves by spending fuel. It transports civilians, opens additional actions and collects materials needed for Project Phoenix.
Because movement connects several systems at once, route efficiency matters. An inefficient detour can cost both fuel and the opportunity to rescue another group before radiation advances.
Additional actions
Beyond the main turn choice, the published rules include additional actions such as completing missions, crafting Phoenix materials, decontaminating survivors, sealing shelters and searching for new survivors.
The result is a turn structure with many small efficiencies rather than one isolated worker-placement action.
Radiation creates the clock
At the end of each round, radiation affects civilians still left on the board. This lowers your happiness and converts unresolved logistics into a scoring or efficiency penalty.
Because the entire game lasts only three rounds, a rescue deferred once may have little time to recover its lost value.
How do you win?
After the third round, players total victory points. Shelters, survivors, missions, Project Phoenix development and other scoring sources contribute to the final result.
The game is competitive even though all colonies share the same broad humanitarian goal.
The three-round economy changes how upgrades should be judged
Because the game ends after round three, an upgrade does not have unlimited time to repay itself. A Phoenix investment made early can improve several later decisions; the same investment late in round three must justify itself through immediate scoring, rescue capacity or mission value.
This is the main strategic lens that follows directly from the published structure: compare every engine investment with the number of productive actions and income steps still remaining.
Related games
If the appeal is building infrastructure under pressure, compare Underwater Cities. If you want a longer resource engine with a shared planetary objective, see Terraforming Mars. These are mechanism comparisons, not interchangeable versions of ASHES.
Who may like ASHES?
It should appeal to players who like worker placement and route planning but want those systems tied to a visible humanitarian logistics problem. The three-round structure also makes long-term investments easy to evaluate against a fixed horizon.
FAQ
How many players?
1–4.
How long?
60–120 minutes.
How many rounds?
Three.
Is solo supported?
Yes.
Are English rules available?
Yes. Perro Loko uploaded the English rulebook in June 2026.
Sources and scope
Checked 7 October 2026 against Perro Loko Games’ official page, the publisher-uploaded English rulebook listing and the current BoardGameGeek record. This article summarizes the current system in original wording and does not reproduce rulebook text. Strategy observations are editorial deductions from the published three-round system; no firsthand playtesting is claimed. Editorial policy and corrections.