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Ancient Knowledge is an engine-builder. But it’s an engine-builder in which your engine keeps falling apart, and you have to constantly create a new one. You play as the last survivors of the civilization before ours, the ancient builders of this world. Don’t let your knowledge go to waste as you leave your mark on history. The theme fits the game mechanics nicely but I wouldn’t call it a richly thematic game. It’s all about the cards.
How Does It Play
The main thing that you’ll be doing on your turn is playing cards to the area above your player board. As you play each of these cards, you will put a certain amount of knowledge tokens—shown by a number on the card—onto it. These cards will give you powers that are either one-time use as they’re played, ongoing abilities, endgame scoring conditions, or abilities that you can activate once each turn. At the end of your turn, all of your cards shuffle down one space to the left, with the leftmost card going into decline and into the past. You now no longer have access to the power of this card unless it is an endgame scoring card, which has to be in the past to score. Any knowledge tokens left on this card go into your lost knowledge zone and will count as negative points against you at the end of the game.
There are some other actions, such as creating an artefact, which are cards that are played on your player board. You can have a maximum of five artefacts, and they stay on your board throughout the whole game and never go into decline. These give you extra abilities that you can use.
You can also learn new technologies which are taken from a shared area. These essentially work as mini-objectives. They can give you one-time benefits or are just worth points at the end of the game.
You can also draw more cards or discard cards to remove knowledge from your played cards, preventing you from losing points when they drop into the past.
What’s Good About It
I’m not the biggest fan of engine-builders, especially card-based ones. I’ve played too many of them where you can tell, from the first couple of turns, who’s won. If someone gets a great combination of cards to start with, it snowballs, and they romp off to win. If I can generally predict who is going to win very early in a game, then I don’t like the game.
You can start Ancient Knowledge with a great set of cards that all synergize nicely together and give you a great engine. But as each turn goes by, your engine is falling apart, giving other players a chance to go past you by creating their own engines.
There is a huge stack of cards that comes with the game, and this allows for different paths to victory. You can focus on technologies, getting points for just collecting them, but if you tie this in with other endgame scoring cards in your main display that give you points for technologies, this can be a winning strategy.
You can race towards the end of the game, which ends when any player has 14 cards in their past. If you can do this quickly enough, your score won’t be huge, but it could well be enough to beat everyone else.
There is even a strategy where you get as much lost knowledge as you can. Certain cards will give you points for how much knowledge you have in your lost knowledge zone. This can be fun as you are doing the complete opposite of how you would normally play.
What’s Wrong With The Game
Why, oh, why do some game designers feel the need to add a few take-that cards into a game that is otherwise free of all that nastiness? At least in Ark Nova, there is the option to use alternative abilities. In Ancient Knowledge, there is already some player interaction in going for the different technology cards. It borders on a multiplayer solitaire game, but the technology cards and how fast your opponents are progressing towards the end of the game is plenty enough interaction for me.
If I’ve built up an engine, I don’t want it messed with. That’s the opposite of fun. I can’t even say it’s fun to play the take-that cards on someone else because you know that you’re draining their fun.
There are enough cards in the game that you can ignore the take-that cards and just use them when you need to discard cards. That’s how we play. But there’s a problem with this, too. The majority of the take-that cards are blue, which means that strategies where you’re going for blue cards become less viable. I’d love to see an expansion that replaces these cards.
Conclusion
So I don’t normally like engine-builders, and I’m not normally that keen on cards with powers games. I feel that reading a lot of cards slows down the turns, and I love fast turns in games. Yet I rate Ancient Knowledge very highly.
I’ve only played this game with two players, and I think that would be the best player count. Three would be okay, but four would involve a lot of downtime. At two, you have competition over the technology cards and a nice amount of time to plan your turn.
You have to have an overall strategy, but then you need to constantly rebuild an engine that fits into your strategy. This game has a puzzly nature, where you have to plan carefully the order in which you play your cards so they can combo together and drop into the past at the right time.
It’s an Iello game, too, so you know it’s going to be a nice production.
The only way I can see to improve this game is to have the take-that cards replaced, and over time, some new cards would be nice, too. All-in-all, this is one of the best games I’ve played this year.
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