The board game market has absolutely exploded over the past 15 years or so, and with thousands of titles on the market it gets harder and harder to come up with something original. One solution has been to combine different mechanisms that might previously have driven a game design on their own. That is what the designers of Lost Ruins of Arnak went for, combining two extremely popular game elements, worker placement and deck building, to power what is essentially a euro-style resource management game.
How Does It Play?
In Lost Ruins of Arnak, players take on the roles of archaeologists exploring a newly discovered island filled with mysterious temples guarded by giant creatures. The goal is to assemble a body of research, moving as far as possible along the game’s scoring track. Additional victory points are scored by acquiring artifacts and equipment and overcoming temple guardians.
The game is played over five rounds, which doesn’t seem like a lot but is about right for a 90 minute to two hour game once everyone knows how to play. Each player starts the game with two worker meeples and a deck of six cards, from which they draw a hand of five. The game play then involves playing cards and placing workers in order to collect different types of resources: funding, exploration, tablets, arrowheads, and jewels.
These resources are then spent to move two different tokens, a magnifying glass representing investigation, and a journal representing documentation, along the research track on the side of the board. Progress along the track comes with rewards in the form of extra resources, card draws, and other advantages. Additionally, the farther up the track you’ve managed to move your tokens, the more points you’ll get at the end of the game.
Place the Workers
Cards are also used to generate travel icons, which determine which worker placement spaces are available. These consist of either base camp spaces, which provide basic resources, or temple sites, which are more challenging to get to but provide greater rewards in the form of idols, which are exchangeable for resources and also worth victory points, and also temples, which provide more and better resources than the base camp spaces.
However, each temple tile is protected by a guardian, a fantastical creature who requires a combination of different resources to be spent in order to be overcome. Any player who has a worker present with a guardian who hasn’t been overcome by the end of a round must add a Fear card to their deck – these cards only provide a single movement resource, and subtract from your score at the end of the game, so you want to try to cull them from your deck as soon as you can.
Build the Decks
Apart from placing workers or spending resources to move along the research track, players can also spend coin and exploration tokens to buy equipment and artifact cards to add to their decks. Equipment tends to be mechanically useful, while artifacts have more powerful abilities but often cost more to use. These cards are purchased from a row of five at the top of the board. At the start of the game there is one artifact and four equipment cards, but each round the number of artifacts increases while the number of equipment cards decreases, one of many ways the game escalates over the course of the five rounds.
With only two workers and five cards, the early rounds will go fairly quickly. But once players have built up a deck of useful equipment and artifact cards, and have a few discovered site tiles on the board, they’ll find that they have a lot of options for ways to spend their turns. When playing it’s important to remember that the ultimate goal is to score the most points, and the primary way to do that is by advancing along the research track. There are a few other ways to score points, by defeating guardians or adding artifact and equipment cards to their decks, but the beauty of the game is that all the mechanisms work together, so you don’t really want to ignore anything.
Is It a Deck Building Game with Worker Placement, or a Worker Placement Game with Cards?
Well, kind of both, and kind of neither. At the core, Lost Ruins of Arnak is a resource management game, in which those resources are gained and manipulated by deck building and worker placement. The two mechanisms work well together – in most deck building games, cards are played to generate one or more currencies, which are used to accomplish whatever it is the game wants you to accomplish. In this game, those currencies are movement, which is used to place your workers, and either coins or exploration, which is what enables you to gain the more advanced resources you need to have in order to advance on the research track and score victory points.
Lost Ruins of Arnak is fairly typical in that it is really about collecting resources converting them into other resources, and eventually converting those into victory points. But it does so in an interesting and engaging way that is supported well by the Indiana Jones-style exploration/treasure hunting theme. If you like deck building, worker placement, euro games in general, and/or the 1930s archaeology and adventure theme, Arnak is probably worth a look.
Every Saga Has an Ending
Like any successful board game, a few expansions for Lost Ruins of Arnak have come out over the years, but not as many as you might think. Expedition Leaders adds the one element that was possibly missing from the base game: variable player powers. Rather than starting with the same basic deck, players choose a specific character who comes with unique starting cards and an in-game ability. The Missing Expedition features a 2-player cooperative campaign, and each expansion adds new equipment and artifact cards along with a double-sided board with two new research tracks to add variety to the game.
Twisted Paths is being billed as the game’s final expansion. It consists of material originally included in Adventure Chest, a big box storage solution designed to fit the base game and all the expansions in one box, and is focused primarily on two new boards that vary the research track and worker placement parts of the game.
The Spider Temple board adds a new resource type, dark tablets, which function like normal tablets but also fuel a new feature of the research track – altars. These are spaces scattered throughout the track, in which artifact cards can be placed. Players can then make use of the game text on these cards by spending a dark tablet. But there’s a catch: there is a finite number of dark tablets available (based on the number of players), and at the end of the game, players lose points depending on how many dark tablets they used, and how many are left in the supply.
The Owl Temple board adds a third token to the research track. In addition to their magnifying glass and journal, each player now has a lantern which is used in conjunction with secret passages that appear on the research track. At any point in the game, a player can choose to enter a secret passage by placing their magnifying glass token on one of several available spots, where it will stay for the rest of the game. This then activates their lantern, which starts on its own path along the research track, with its own set of bonus resources to be gained. It adds an interesting decision point to the game, as you have to carefully consider how far you want to go before entering a secret passage – too early and you’ll miss a lot of the magnifying glass bonuses, but too late and your lantern won’t progress very far along the track before the game ends.
In addition, both boards mix up the travel icons required to place workers on the base camp and temple site spaces, adding variety to that part of the game. It’s interesting that Twisted Paths doesn’t add any new cards for deck building, but in the end that was probably a wise decision – the game already has more than enough cards, so it’s not worth risking either diluting the decks with too many cards or creating a need to pare down the piles of available cards.
I don’t know that Twisted Paths is essential to enjoy the game (I would definitely suggest adding Expedition Leaders first), but it does hit that sweet spot for a game expansion: it adds some interesting variety without getting overly complicated, and it easily fits in with the previous expansion material. If this is indeed the end of the journey for Lost Ruins of Arnak, it’s a good place to leave it. Between the base game and the three expansions there is a lot of great content that will keep the game engaging for many years to come.
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