Lost Ruins of Arnak

Lost Ruins of Arnak is the sort of game that settles nicely on the table and immediately makes an expedition feel plausible: deckbuilding, worker placement, a race for progress, and several routes worth pursuing. It does not reinvent the wheel, but it keeps the thing tight enough that I am happy to set off again.

You build the deck a little at a time and spend workers to unlock options, gather resources, and advance where you need to. It feels like a race. Doing something good is not enough; you need to do it before the round ends, and before the useful spaces stop being useful.

Exploration brings sites, Guardians, and artifacts, which is where the game gets twitchiest. Yet you are often playing beside the others rather than with them. An early exploration can punish you badly if it produces a fear-generating site and the Guardian is awkward to handle, while the cards that simply remove a Guardian — War Mask and another artifact — repeatedly looked far too decisive. One player clears a path. Another gets to admire it. A fine start to an adventure story. Less fine in a game.

In my first plays, that solitaire feel, the runaway leader problem, and the luck in early exploration put it a notch below Dune: Imperium, and nowhere near the small stunned silence Beyond the Sun can produce. Still, it never left the table. It is filling, clear about what it asks of you, and pleasant enough that I was always willing to give it another outing.

Updated session

Later plays did not support my first reservation as the final word. With Expedition Leaders, Arnak remains a properly strong game; the base game, by contrast, feels almost solved. If you find it at a good price, especially with the Leaders, it is worth finding out what you have been missing.