Lost Ruins of Arnak

I have a soft spot for games that let me have a good time without demanding a PhD before the first play, and Lost Ruins of Arnak is exactly that sort of game. The Czech team at CCG once again proves they are worth watching: this is a feel-good game, tight and interesting enough to fit comfortably into an expanded collection. It does not reinvent the wheel—it is rather vanilla and resembles plenty of other games—but it serves what it does in a satisfying way.

At its core, it combines deckbuilding, worker placement, and a progress race. I choose how to use my cards and workers, explore locations, and try to build an efficient route through the game. There are enough strategies to pursue, so I did not feel that the game was monotonously pushing me toward a single answer.

Interaction, though, is where I wanted more tension. Arnak felt very solitaire to me: players run their engines in parallel, and the race does not always create real friction. On top of that, the first exploration can become annoyingly random; if you draw a site that produces fear and its guardian is not manageable either, you can feel pushed out of the race before it has properly begun. And when someone gets the war mask along with the other artifact that simply kills a guardian, I have seen a lead open up that is hard to close. That, along with the runaway leader issue, needs a little attention—perhaps even some tuning.

After my first three plays, I did not put it in the game-of-the-year conversation. It did not have the same mind-blowing experience that, for instance, Beyond the Sun gives me, and next to the related Dune: Imperium I consider it a notch lower. Still, it is absolutely not a game I would leave on the shelf: it can easily earn around ten plays over the course of a year.

Updated session

The later session did not overturn my initial reservations, but it did confirm the game’s staying power. With the Expedition Leaders, I still consider it a strong game: satisfying and just enough; without them, the base game feels almost solved to me. If you do not already own it, I would look for it at a good price on the second-hand market.