Lost Ruins of Arnak – Second Opinion

In Lost Ruins of Arnak, you take on the role of an expedition leader whose team are setting out to explore a mysterious uninhabited island where traces of an ancient civilisation have been found. In your quest to discover more about the island, you will have to bravely explore deeper into the unknown, facing the island’s guardians, collecting artifacts and relics along your adventure. At the end of the game, you will look at your various accomplishments to determine who is the most successful expedition leader.

Basic Gameplay Overview

The game is played over 5 rounds, within each round players take as many turns as they can so long as they can take a main action on that turn. Main actions include; digging at a site, discovering a new site, overcoming a guardian, buying a card, playing a card, and researching. If you are unable to perform any of these actions you must pass on your turn and wait for the next round to start. Along with your main actions, you may take an unlimited number of free actions on your turn, these can be done before, during, or after your main action.

The game is a mix of worker placement and deckbuilding where the cards in your hand can be used to either cover travel costs to a location or for their main card abilities. Each location you place a worker at will gain you a number of abilities and resources, these resources can be used to buy new cards, progress up the research track, or overcome guardians.

The game has no set path to take, you have the freedom to choose what suits you and your play style best. Allowing your focus to be on one thing or a variety of things.

At the end of the game you look at the guardians you have defeated, the position of your two research tokens on the research track, any idols and temple tiles you have, and any cards in your deck that have a Victory Point value associated with them to calculate your Victory Point total and the person with the most is the winner.

How It Plays

Lost Ruins of Arnak was an interesting introduction to a group who had limited experience with modern board gaming, as this is very much a pick how you would like to go about this game situation. What helped is that I had introduced my partner to it before playing with a full group of four so the other two players quickly noticed it's very much up to you when it comes to this game.

My partner very much likes going after the new locations and defeating the guardians, he hoards resources till near the end of the game and shoots up the research track with everything he has collected. Whereas my early focus is on the research track while tackling new locations and guardians every now and then, more waiting to use the spaces revealed by other players. After a couple of turns the other players picked up on it’s about how you want to play and there is not one sure strategy to win the game.

The mix of worker placement and deck building does work well when you know at least one of the mechanisms prior to playing. I wouldn’t want to use this to teach both mechanisms at once but found it easy to introduce my group to deck building as they already understood the concept of worker placement so part of the way this game works already made sense to them.

So how does a four-player game compare to a two-player game? Though the game does play well at both player counts I lean in favour of the four-player game so far. In both games I am basing this review on we used the bird temple side of the game board, not the snake temple side.

In the two-player game, though both me and my partner did explore and move our way up the research track, the end result felt a lot less like a grand adventure as by the end of the game we had opened up less than half the available new dig sites so there was still a good amount of mystery about what the rest of the board may have contained. Due in part to this, there were fewer resource-heavy locations to go to so we made it roughly only halfway up the research track.

On the other hand with the four-player game, every location had been uncovered, every guardian defeated, and all but one of us made it to the top of the research track with one of our tokens. It felt like a more grand adventure that we were all sharing in. Not that this game has a lot of direct player interaction but you find yourselves all leaning in waiting to see what the new dig site is and what guardian it brings with it, discussing new cards that come to the market, and joking when you trash a fear card just to be made to pick up another that same turn.

That's not to say Lost Ruin of Arnak doesn’t play well with the lower player numbers it just doesn't have enough to allow for everything to be revealed. I would happily play it again with two players but never opt for it over a four-player game. I do feel like a three-player game could be more in line with the four-player experience.