Unearth treasure, tame monsters, enlist minions—all par for the course with The Lost Ruins of Arnak, a wonderful medium-weight boardgame where every turn is (usually) fun! 💎
The premise
The idea is pretty simple. You have two meeples and a hand of cards. The meeples go exploring, based on what cards you play. You manage five kinds of currency and race for points.
We are explorers on a strange and wonderful tropical island, balancing our time between opening up new places to go and building up a strong deck. Watch out for monsters 😉
Every turn is fun (usually)
The game economy creates a ton of choice: taking an action often gets you some form of currency, and that currency can be exchanged or upgraded or buy you another turn—so you're usually getting a sense of moving forward with every choice.
For instance!
Every round, you draw five cards. The round ends when Players pass, so you can take as many turns as you'd like (or can) per round. Your action choices include:
🗺️ Play a card to explore with it
🎣 Play a card to use its main action
🔎 Move up a space on the research track (right side of the picture/board)
👾 Fight and tame a monster
💰 Buy a card from the card market
So on top of having five cards to start, there are four other things that you can do. And almost every action gets you something, which might cause a chain reaction so you can do more things. A common reward is 'draw a card' which is, in effect, another potential turn. There are also "fast actions" (denoted by a lightning bolt symbol), which you can do that don't count as taking a turn.
Fun mechanics
⚔️ When you fight a monster, you pay the resources printed on its tile. It's worth 5 points and grants you a one time resource that you can cash in on any of your future turns.
📚 Research vs. Notebook. A big part of the game is the race up the research track, which grants you many rewards. But you have two tokens that race up: a magnifying glass and a notebook. Thematically, it represents research and discovery, and then documentation of what you've learned. Therefore, your notebook can never be higher up than the glass. This presents a fun choice: do you pump everything into the glass or balance it out?
📉 The shifting card market. At the start of the game, the card market is 5 items (they cost coins) and 1 artifact (they cost exploration/compasses). Each round shifts the balance, so on round two it's 4:2, then 3:3 and so on.
⚠️ "Emergency" actions. You start the game with 10 points printed on your board. As you gain explore tokens (worth 3 points each), you can cover up these starting points to take a fast action. It gets costlier to do this, with the fourth emergency action resulting in a net -1 point. But sometimes you really, really need that one resource.
How our last game went
The picture at the top is the end state. It was a really close game, with Red edging out the win.
You can see that Yellow committed to getting their Notebook very high up the track. It was worth a load of points... but they also neglected to fight any monsters. Plus, they accumulated 'Fear' cards worth -1 each. This wiped out their Notebook advantage.
Blue and Red had similar tactics. Good monster fighting and focused on the Glass. But Red got to the top of the Research track first (worth slightly more points) and had a lot of points in cards. Plus, they had no Fear cards and one extra explore token.
More Arnak info
Tons of pictures, reviews, and discussions on the game are avaiable at its BoardGameGeek page.
And I can't not link the delightful SUSD coverage (Arnak is at 25m22s, video should start in the right spot):
