- Design: Min & Elwen
- Art: Jiří Kůs, Ondřej Hrdina, Jakub Politzer, František Sedláček, Milan Vavroň
- Publisher: Czech Games Edition
- Year of release: 2020
- MSRP: $59.95
I’ve never been a fan of coyness, so for this inaugural post of Worker Meeples let’s just get right down to brass tacks: Lost Ruins of Arnak is one of my favorite games. Lede sufficiently safe from burial, please allow me a moment to discuss exactly what it is about Arnak that makes it my kind of game, and why it might not be yours.
Ostensibly about old-timey adventurers exploring a mysterious, formerly inhabited island in the Pacific, it takes little effort to peel up the thin veneer that is Arnak’s theme to see what it’s actually about: calculating, unforgiving, cold-as-ice efficiency.
That’s not to say that certain aesthetic and thematic elements of Arnak don’t work to its credit. Arnak features some of the nicest artwork and component quality of any game in its price range, and it all looks decidedly Indiana Jones-y. As far as component quality is concerned, while the cardstock is nothing special, the cardboard tokens are nice and chunky and one would normally have to plumb the treacherous depths of Kickstarter to find resource tokens as tactilely pleasing. It’s just that, lovely as the whole presentation is, no element of Arnak’s setting or theme can cover up the unmistakable euro-y-ness of the whole affair. This game may look vibrant and colorful, but it plays 50 shades of beige.
At first blush, you may look at Arnak’s mélange of mechanisms and find them somewhat uninspired. To be sure, designers Min & Elwen aren’t reinventing the wheel here. Worker placement, resource management and deck building aren’t exactly new to the hobby, even if, to some extent, their amalgamation is. Look more deeply, though, and you’ll find some truly unique and interesting twists on the basics. Take, for instance, the method by which players add new cards to their respective decks…
There are two types of cards to purchase in Arnak: tools and artifacts. Tools are the items you’ll use to navigate and overcome the island’s various obstacles – picture things like canteens, torches, utility knives, a giant ostrich… typical, everyday adventuring gear. Purchased tool cards are immediately sent to the bottom of your draw pile. For most deck builders, it’d likely be several rounds before you’d see that card in your hand. Arnak, however, provides a number of different opportunities for you to get that card into your hand a great deal quicker. First off, with a slim six-card starting deck, and given the fact that you draw five cards at the beginning of every round, adding a card to the bottom of your deck all but guarantees that you’ll draw it the following round. That’s information you can plan around.
While that slight change alone would be enough to set Arnak apart from a lot of deck builders, the game isn’t nearly content to stop there. From card effects that will allow you to pull cards directly from the bottom of your draw pile, to ample methods of churning through your entire deck in a single round, there are myriad ways to use those opportunities for card purchases tactically.
Artifacts are an altogether different and even more interesting story. Unlike tools, you’re able to use artifacts immediately upon purchase. This puts a big twist into the game which it’s design smartly capitalizes on. As more and more artifacts become available for purchase the deeper into the game you get, the odds you’ll find just the right one at just the right time are ever increasing.
Card purchases in Arnak aren’t just future-engine-building, the rewards of which will only be realized at some indeterminate point. There’s an immediacy to deck building in Arnak that not only feels much more satisfying than traditional deck building mechanisms, but also allows for clever, timely purchases that can extend one of your five meager rounds by several turns. I adore games that make me feel clever, and Arnak has that element in spades.
And speaking of extending your rounds as long as you can, that is the real meat-and-potatoes here. Something of a point salad, Arnak is not a stingy place. There is rarely a time when playing that you can’t get the resources you need to go from A to B, and this is especially true as the game progresses and a wider assortment of worker placement sites and artifacts become available. The trick – the cold, unfeeling heart at the core of every resource-management eurogame – is doing so efficiently. Going from A to B is only a small part of one round; if you’re able to play your cards right, your complete journey will take you through an entire bowl of alphabet soup.
Stringing together the perfect sequence of turns to get the resources you need, so that you can go up the research track in order to get a bonus you need to overcome the guardian at your worker’s spot, so that you can use the guardian’s boon to send your other worker to a dig site where you can get the compasses you need to buy an artifact that will reward you with some resources you can use to go up the research track, so that you can unlock an assistant that will give you the money you need to buy a tool card which you’ll be able to draw to your hand immediately if you slot an idol into your player board…
That feeling – seeing all those seemingly disparate pieces come together perfectly to form a cohesive whole – that is why Arnak is one of my all-time favorite games. But it also may end up being the reason why it won’t be one of yours.
The efficiency puzzle in Arnak is far more tactical than it is strategic. If you’re the type who likes setting long-term plans or goals for yourself in games, you may find Arnak to be a little too unstructured. While it’s imperative to plan two or three turns ahead in Arnak, the ever-changing nature of the board state makes it virtually impossible to plan any further ahead than that. You just can’t say “okay, I’m gonna be the site-discoverer this game” because the game may simply not allow that to shake out, and if you try to force it, the game will punish you for that choice.
While there isn’t really any direct player interaction in Arnak, the nature of the game’s systems is such that nearly all of it feels like a race against your opponents. A limited number of dig sites makes exploring a race. When there’s an especially powerful card available for purchase, gunning for ownership of it becomes a race. Going up the research track to score points is a race. Getting the little bonus tokens that sit on top of the research track is a race within a race! If you’re like me and you relish the competition, you’ll feel like this game is whispering sweet nothings into your ear, but it could just as easily end up feeling like the game is actively spitting into your mouth when you keep just missing out.
While discussing Arnak after our first play, a friend described the research track in particular as a “win-more” mechanism (that is to say, it’s designed to directly benefit the players who are already doing well), and I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment. Arnak doesn’t have a catch-up mechanism, and doesn’t really seem to give many shits if some players fall behind. It’s an old-school approach to eurogames, and it doesn’t shy away from punishing inefficiency. While that may be your jam, just as it is mine, it may ultimately end up leaving some players feeling battered and broken by the end of the game. It’s certainly an aspect worth considering if you plan on introducing Arnak to players who are newer to eurogames, at least, and I feel like I’d be remiss not to point it out. Another common criticism I’ve seen levied – one which I cannot deny is true – is that Arnak doesn’t feel especially different from game to game, either. For me, I still find the core puzzle to be endlessly replayable, but if you’re the type who needs a fresh experience every game, Arnak will probably get old pretty quickly for you. The puzzle is always the same, the solution is just slightly different from game to game.
But that’s enough of the SUSD-style mid-review turnaround. I said Arnak was one of my favorites and I wholeheartedly stand by that. It’s certainly not above criticism, both for its mechanisms and for its more questionable thematic choices (see Shelf Stories’ excellent take on that issue in their video, embedded below), but between several dozen sessions of the incredibly elegant solo mode, two full playthroughs of the wholly unnecessary but amazingly good solo campaign, a handful of in-person multiplayer games, and more three- and four-player games on Board Game Arena than I’d care to admit, there is simply no denying how much I’ve enjoyed my time exploring Arnak. I mean, Hell… I’m over 1,000 words into this review and I’ve barely stopped gushing about it, and I haven’t even mentioned that its multi-use card system is good enough to make Alexander Pfister pee his pants with glee. If that’s not a glowing endorsement, I don’t know what is.
Photos courtesy of Czech Games Edition
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