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The devastated landscape of Arborea is in dire need of aid. The once-flourishing wildlife remains displaced, the great old sages are withering away in the memory of their once-worshippers, and the village is reaping every horror that comes with the broken ecosystem that surrounds them. You are not a mere villager. You are but a patron spirit of the people here. You are the chosen protector for all who live in the world of Arborea. You must rebuild it and allow your once-home - and those who live among it still - to thrive.
Shifting Landscapes and Bountiful Branches
One quick look at the beautiful board of Arborea is enough to make your head spin. The winding, abstract spaces for workers to move along, the bold and blaring usage of almost every colour under the sun; it’s all so… Dizzying. A little hypnotic, even. Perhaps it’s a little too much for some; but what a unique and beautiful presence Arborea has on the table! It’s enough to attract the eyes of anyone even vaguely interested in board games.
Enough about the art, let's describe how the game functions for a moment. Hold on to something, as there are a lot of moving parts. I really can’t get too deep into the intricacies because this game, as fluffy as it looks, is quite complicated to explain. Arborea is a worker placement and movement game. The game is won by the player with the most “Regeneration Points”, which will certainly sound similar to anyone who has ever played a Eurogame before.
How to Win at Spiritual Ecology
To obtain Regeneration Points, a player must wander the board aiming to generate resources for the ecosystem, attract creatures back into their parts of the forest, give gifts to the ancient sages and prove their worth as a patron spirit of their village. To do this, each player has their own little player board with a selection of villagers on it, some available right off the bat and some requiring “recruitment” to use in the future. These villagers may be faster, able to perform special actions, or simply are able to be consistently used without disappearing once their tasks are done.
Villagers are placed onto segmented tracks in the shape of a long rectangle, and this is where something quite odd becomes visible to players. This worker placement game only has a whopping four spaces for your workers to be placed onto. What? On that entire winding, confusing board? Yes, that is correct, and it’s because Arborea has a trick up its sleeve; those tracks you place your workers on? They move every turn as long as there are applicable villagers on them. The branching iconography that stems vertically from the tracks? The real choices you have to make are there. This game is all about timing. Whenever a track moves, a villager can choose to jump off of it and line up at the top of a branch, ready to activate and reap the rewards of each icon displayed on that trail. How satisfying.
Another fantastic mechanism at the core of Arborea is the idea behind your resources; everything, and I mean everything, is shared on the main board. Whenever you generate resources to use you can choose to gain Regeneration Points from it, or you can use them for yourself this turn. If you choose the former, the resources you generated can be used by anyone at the table. Every time you attract a creature to the board? Yep, other spirits can snatch them up if you don’t time things well enough. Even placing workers on tracks will help other players who share the track with you; because now they get another player pushing the track every turn, and more off-turn chances to leap off onto a branching trail! Is your brain melting through your ears yet?
Well, shovel it all back in for a moment, I’m not done. I haven’t even mentioned the completely separate minigame that is at the core of this system. The resources you generate and the creatures you attract will go into your own ecosystem, and your own ecosystem is made up of tiled cards that connect to each other and overlay one another to generate fields of different types of flora. Each creature can be placed onto your little puzzle of an ecosystem to score points based on what flora surrounds them, what creatures line up with them, and other spatial (and sometimes not spatial) elements of tracked scoring in the game. This is the meat of your scoring, for the most part. So yes, you have to not only handle the mental attack that is the main board, but also need to create your own deep spatial puzzle alongside it. Alright, I think that’s all I need to talk about here. Try and keep that brain intact for a few moments longer, the stressful part is over.
What? Where am I?
I understand your confusion and wish you a swift recovery for your eurogame-explanation-derived issues. I want to read off a few of my opinions on this game, the good and the bad, and I have even had some extra opinions given to me by a slightly less eurogame-experienced friend who helped me play it again to get all that rules sludge back into my memory in order to write this review. I promise the hard part is over.
Firstly, the art of Arborea is delightful. Gorgeous. I can see it being a little too much for some, but to me I truly fell in love with it. It is very rare I find the appeal for a board game to purely be the artwork, but in truth I picked this up on a whim because it really attracted me to it with those beautiful colours and silly looking creatures. To play devil's advocate, however, it is also quite overwhelming. I don’t think the game is particularly difficult to parse once you’ve learned its language, but the board can be quite hard to read at a glance and that’s not particularly good for a forward-planning heavy game.
Secondly, the mechanisms are supremely satisfying, and the tactility of the pieces only add to this. The way you slide two separate pieces of the wooden resource tiles together, snapping them upwards to reap the stacking point rewards of leaving them for opponents to use; or the way you puzzle out your little card-based ecosystem on the side, placing little colourful meeples down to keep everything flat and in line. Even the way you move your villagers on their little moving platform, or the combination of little rewards you get as you push them down a trail! Agh, it’s all delightful to perform physically. That being said, it does lack a certain… Adhesive? Some of these moving parts don’t always feel like they were built in conjunction with each other, particularly the little ecosystem minigame; which is great, but feels like it’s doing it’s own thing in the corner of the table and requires a strange captivity rule to stop people from speeding the end of the game up - a rule that has seemingly required re-readings and re-explanations with everyone I’ve played with thus far.
A Spirit Friend
Speaking of people I’ve played with, one friend of mine had some notes. I, in all fairness, struggled a bit with the teach each time I played this game, as there are lots of strange moving parts (as you’ve already read; but I even left out some bits! There are randomised tracks to move up, and a currency tracked on the board itself that allows you to manipulate actions, and… I’m feeling faint.) Nonetheless I, myself, am quite numb to the oddities of Eurogame design at this point, so I figured having someone slightly newer to the broadly-stroked genre to give their personal opinions on the game. Ultimately, they felt the iconography was quite broad. This is a common complaint with these kind of games, but I do agree particularly for the randomised track goals (I feel like some text could go there, I always forget what they mean. The rulebook even forgot to describe one of them, and you have to gleam it contextually).
Another issue my friend had was to do with the scoring, as despite it being a rather well-organised system, it is very convoluted; hidden bonuses, multiple contextual modifiers, and generally a lot of steps to follow to add up your final score (which can exceed 300!). I can agree with this, though the board has a handy reference to follow (albeit written in its rather cryptic iconography). Lastly, there is a short turn reference on the board, but a handy turn reference card would be useful for players. There aren’t many different phases or actions, but the extra ways you can manipulate certain actions might be better visualised in front of every player. My friend found the game rather intimidating, which is likely why I would not recommend this to people unless they’ve already played a fair few games with these mechanisms already under their belt.
As a final note, I would like to add that the pace of Arborea is very strange. The turn timer only ticks down when you attract creatures to the board, which means players have a lot of control on the game time. It’s very interesting, but can sometimes lead to the game varying in length (albeit not drastically). I think I like it, but I feel like it is something that will take a few plays for people to realise how to utilise it properly and use it to their advantage. Overall though, I really do like this game. It appeals to me, and it is wonderfully deep and beautiful. I highly recommend it if it sounds like it would appeal to you too.
