Lost Ruins of Arnak is a resource management game with a touch of worker placement and deck building for 1 to 4 players, designed by Min and Elwyn, and published by CGE. In Lost Ruins of Arnak, players have two workers, a small deck of cards, and a huge board with various locations for their workers to explore and earn resources, which get spent on the temple track to move your two tokens up to earn more resources and victory points.
It’s a bit awkward because while Lost Ruins of Arnak has worker placement and deck building as mechanics, neither of those mechanics feels like the core of the game. The main board is broken into 3 main sections, the base camp, the level 1 locations in the middle of the board, and the level 2 locations at the top. As an action, players can send their workers to any of the locations to earn resources, but at the start of the game, the central and upper locations are entirely empty, they must be ‘explored’, which means 3 or 6 compasses must be spent before a worker can be put onto that spot, which generally yields more resources than the base camp, but also comes with a guardian to contend with. Guardians are essentially a recipe of various goods that needs to be spent to ‘overcome’ it, at which point it offers the player a small benefit, as well as an idol (which can either be traded in for more resources, or kept for points) If players don’t overcome the guardian before the end of the round, they simply flee, take a fear card (which clogs your deck and is worth negative points at the end of the game), and the guardian remains for whomever wants to adventure there in the future.
Compasses and coins can also be spent to acquire cards from a market row. At the start of the game, there will be plenty of tools and few artifacts available, and as the game progresses the staff slides along, offering more artifacts at a time. The last action you can do is to gain a temple tile. If your temple track marker reached the top, you can trade in a bunch of resources to get tiles that are worth more points.
From that description, you may have noticed that Lost Ruins of Arnak has a lot of ways to gain and spend resources, and that’s all that I feel that this game really is. Get stuff, sell it for more stuff, to get more stuff. I know skilled players find ways to squeeze blood from a stone. They eke out every last resource the game has to offer and manage to just barely pay the costs to gain more and more benefits.
I know my unenthusiastic stance on Lost Ruins of Arnak puts me into the minority of players. It’s rated #28 on the BGG ranking, and it routinely shows up on many top games of all time lists. I can see the joy in the game, it’s a satisfying experience to have the perfect amount of resources and can manage to take another half dozen turns after all the other players passed for the round, running up the temple track head and shoulders above the rest. But for all the other players who are just watching, or if you could have been that player but were missing just a single compass, it can be a painful experience.
I love the artwork, it’s bright, colourful, and vibrant. The guardians look terrifying, and all the cards feature artwork that looks like it’s straight out of an Indiana Jones movie. I can see the joy that other players talk about in Lost Ruins of Arnak, but I don’t really feel it when I’m playing it. I had picked up the expedition Leaders expansion, which adds a very nice layer of asymmetry to each of the players, but even still, it just feels like 2 hours of swapping items, and I need more excitement in my life than that.
I enjoy that there’s variety in the temple tracks, and even more so with the expansion mixed in. But at the end of the day, the whole game just feels like resource swapping. If you can get an action chain going, it’s quite exciting for that player, but for everyone else, they’re just sitting around watching you trade in a compass for an arrowhead, then trade in an arrowhead and a tablet for a movement up the temple track, which earns you a compass and lets you draw another card, that you can then spend for another compass, which lets you buy a card from the market that triggers immediately, and you get the picture.
Lost Ruins of Arnak does a lot, but it doesn’t do anything particularly well in my opinion. Which is a bit of a shame, it’s so popular and gorgeous that I so desperately want to like it and be a part of the club of people clamouring for every expansion. Alas, I sold my copy and will be looking for my next big adventure somewhere else.
