In the Ashes is a solo adventure book that plays remarkably similar to Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs. You'll control a hero who moves across a hexagon map, fighting enemies by checking off skills on a page and flipping through the book to determine any bonuses or penalties to your attacks - and do the same for enemies as well. Combat is short and puzzly, with you only having 3-6 rounds depending on the foe in order to defeat them.

The game has a few flaws. You have to write inside the book in order to track actions and movement, which I found was tolerable with a pencil and eraser but some people might be instantly turned off by. My main problem was how the game handles classes and specializations. Every fight is two facing pages, and since your skills are tracked on the page the game eventually had to have two, then four version of every fight, with the only notable changes being what skills are available. It's an inelegant way of presenting the mechanics and I wish they'd just made one version of each fight instead of four and just reminded plays which skills they could and could not use. It feels like a waste of book space and I think they could have fit in a few more encounters if they'd organized things better.

Ultimately, In the Ashes is a game I quite enjoy but I don't think I'd recommend it to everyone. Fans of Gloomhaven-style combat or people looking for a storybook game with robust combat rules will have a good time with this.