When it comes to getting excited about games, there aren’t many instances anymore where there’s some radical new mechanic that grabs my attention. What ends up capturing my attention is theme and aesthetic. Gorgeous artwork really isn’t enough all on its own anymore, as it seems every game is simply gorgeous, but what can set a game away from the rest is a unique and whimsical theme.
Trolls and Princesses, designed by Pim Thunborg and published by Game Brewer after successful crowdfunding in 2023, has players leading a colony of trolls in their attempt to curry the Troll King’s favour. To do this, the trolls use their trollkraft (troll magic) to entice humans to work their caverns, swap babies, tear down church bells, and kidnap princesses and house them in luxurious caves.
The mechanical hook is that Trolls and Princesses is a worker movement game. You control 5 trolls and on your turn you’ll move them from one action space to another, then accrue action points that can be spent in that location. Every troll in that space gives one action point, plus any humans working that cavern, or if the troll king is present, are more action points. Out in the city, other players trolls will even offer you more action points.
Played over 10 to 12 rounds (depending on the number of players), each round gives each player two turns. A player turn begins by playing a round card, which may put some humans into a specific village, and dictates where the troll king will reside for that player’s turn, then they get two troll movements. A troll movement is moving a single troll from any single action spot (represented by cauldrons) to any other cauldron, then using up all the action points that exist in that location (again, adding up any trolls, humans, troll kings, or outposts that may be in that area). The home cave has 3 main sections, one for mining resource, one for building cave rooms and outposts, and one dedicated to troll power. Each of the villages in town are functionally identical, but the number of people in each village may be different depending on the cards players play.
Mechanically, Trolls and Princesses isn’t any better or worse than any other worker placement game with a tight economy. The game is to squeeze the most efficiency from your limited number of actions as possible, with very limited moments for players to meaningfully interact with each other. The interaction that does exist is mostly positive, as when you go to the village where someone else has gone before you, you get to use their trolls for an extra action point. Beyond that, everything else is a race. The number of bells are limited, the princesses are limited, and the available outposts and changelings are limited. This isn’t a game where you can build absolutely everything though, so the odds of there being NONE of the resource you’re gunning for is low, it is much more likely that the princess will be in the ‘wrong’ village and be beyond your reach without at least a few turns to set yourself up.
A lot of the actions can roll into each other, or pay for themselves in subtle ways. As you buy things from the main board, you cover storage spots on your player board, which offer rewards. Doing things like paying a diamond and two troll power to steal a baby, but that baby covers a spot that gives you a diamond back, letting you roll right into stealing another baby, make the turns feel efficient and exciting. On the other hand, when you need to spend 6 actions accruing resources to accomplish a single goal, and if that goal doesn’t lead into more actions down the road, the game feels like a grinding mess. It’s particularly frustrating when on the very last turn of the day you manage to finagle all your resources together and get your trolls into the right spot to snag that last princess, only to realize you’re missing a bed to store her in.
The artistic direction of Trolls and Princesses is fantastic. From the cover art, to the gorgeous art on the Kings cards, it’s evocative of Scandinavian fairy tales. The player boards and components have a separate, more simple aesthetic that works really well for the game. The boards can look really busy, but there are tones of fun details to find, if you’re willing to look close enough.
One of the highlights of the game is just overhearing people talk through their turns. “I’m going to move a troll, and spend a diamond to steal a baby, which comes over here, then with another action point I’m stealing a cow, and hiring a human to work this mine, then for my second turn I’m moving this troll to destroy the cow and put an outpost over here”. My wife giggled at us as we revelled in stealing cows and babies.
At higher player counts, I found myself checking out between rounds. Each turn is fairly involved and insular, that I didn’t really need to pay attention. What mattered more is if my plan relied on collecting a specific cave tile or card, that the market didn’t get wiped in between my turn, which is much more likely to happen in a 4 player game. In my opinion, 3 players is about as high as I want to go in Trolls and Princesses.
Adding onto the high player count experience, the box is woefully low on resources, we ran out of all three resource types (obsidian, gold, and diamonds) in a 4 player game, and ran up against that limit in a 3 player game. There are plenty of x5 tokens in the box, but that’s a poor replacement for just actually having enough tokens to fulfill a reasonable demand. A huge miss by the publisher.
Trolls and Princesses revels in its efficiencies, and rewards repeat plays. Understanding how to roll actions into each other, when to build your engine and when to run it dry are all important considerations that players get better at with multiple plays. While the mechanics aren’t really anything innovative or unique, the theme carries a lot of my enjoyment for Trolls and Princesses. I don’t know if it’ll crack into my top 100, but if you’re in the mood for a medium weight worker placement game, Trolls and Princesses is a whimsical romp and more than an enjoyable way to spend an evening with a friend.
The photos in this review were provided by the publisher, Road to Infamy Games
Cheese! Who doesn’t like cheese? The lactose intolerant, I suppose. But even then, the few friends of mine who have issues with lactose still enjoy cheese, even though it causes them pain later on down the road. I pride myself on my charcuterie boards, and will take any opportunity to put one together. I have a few friends who will casually mention how much they enjoyed my meat and cheese selection, and drop hints that ‘we should totally do that again soon’.
One of the best things to pair with a cheese platter are fun and engaging board games. Therefore, obviously I would be intrigued by a board game about cheese! When Fromage popped up on Board Game Arena, I dove right in.
In Fromage, players run a creamery and are vying for prestige by producing the most valuable and coveted wheels of fermented dairy products. The main play space in Fromage is cheese wheel that rotates players through resources gathering spots and places to showcase your cheese. This wheel limits your placement options, creating a strategic rhythm as you plan for upcoming actions. Each player has 3 cheese tokens available to them, and in this simultaneous worker placement game, you only have the option of placing your cheese workers on the segment that’s currently facing you. Then, when all players have completed their turn, the whole wheel turns a la lazy susan, and you’re faced with a whole new segment.
Now we all know that cheese takes time to make. A well aged cheddar has a depth of flavour that a freshly made cheese just can’t compare against. To simulate the aging of cheeses, your workers only come back to you when they’re facing you. Each of the action spots on the wheel will dictate a specific direction for your cheese worker to sit, so when the wheel turns, your workers will eventually face you, and you’ll be able to collect them and reuse them again.
This whole system is reminiscent of Tzolk’in, although in a much less convoluted way. You’re not trying to time out 5 separate moving gears, there’s just one wheel that spins, and placing workers just means that you’ll have them back in one, two, or three turns. There is an interesting trade-off when making that aged decision too, as you’ll sometimes really feel the need to place a 3 aged cheese in a spot, but doing so will leave you with less, or even no workers for the next turn. Choosing between having actions next turn, and filling up the specific spots to earn points, is a tough trade-off.
Each of the 4 wheel segments earns points in different ways. From pairing your cheeses together on tables, to trying to have a large contiguous area of cheeses, to having an area majority on a tiny map, choosing which of these segments to spend your time in, is an important decision. One that is most likely going to be influenced by the buildings that you draft at the start of the game.
The starting draft is just for blueprints, you still need to gather the building resources, and spend an action to build your blueprints that are on your player board, but getting a good set and building an engine is part of what makes Fromage fun to come back to over and over again. In one game, I built an engine that generated free fruit, then rewarded me with bonus points for using those free fruits. In another, game, I ended up ignoring buildings all together and focused on total map supremacy.
Fromage feels unique, and it boasts lovely artwork from Pavel Zhovba. The pastel colours give it a fantasy storybook vibe that looks unique, and the screen printed tokens have wonderful looking accents. Both the lazy susan public board and the building tiles that go on your player board are dual layered, letting you slot in your pieces, which end up looking really sharp as it fills up. Some of the tokens look different, but are interchangeable, like the building tokens can be barns or silos. When you build a building, putting 4 of those tokens into the slot makes your player board pop. I really appreciate a theme that is widely beloved, as an appealing theme and approachable look is the perfect recipe for getting people to sit down at my table to play a game.
The downside of Fromage, is that those 4 wheel segments don’t change, and each one represents a fairly simple mini-game. Your actions in one wheel do not affect other wheels, everything is quite self-contained. While the worker placement and aging mechanism is clever and neat, I wish the stuff you are actually doing was a bit more interesting. Really what you’re looking at in a game of Fromage is trying to figure out which one of your 3 workers you’ll need for the segment you’re really trying to win hard on, and ensuring that you have the right workers at the right time.
Because of the simultaneous action, the game flows quickly and smoothly, you aren’t often waiting for the other players to finish their turns, nor do you really spend THAT much time planning moves for wedges that aren’t directly in front of you. You aren’t often going to complain that someone stole your spot right before you were going to go there, mostly because you don’t have the option to go there until that wedge slides in front of you. It’s great to engage with a midweight euro game that engages your problem-solving abilities so well, but also doesn’t take two whole hours to play.
Fromage is a beautiful, quick-playing euro game with unique mechanics that should appeal to those looking for a quicker game, without sacrificing strategic depth. However, its self-contained scoring segments and lack of interaction across the wheel might impact its long-term appeal. I’d happily come back to Fromage if friends wanted to play or if there were a new expansion to explore, but I don’t think it’ll be one that I’ll be pulling out when there isn’t a thematic reason to do so. That said, I do really like serving my friends cheese, and if I know they have game playing proclivities, Fromage is an obvious choice when hosting people outside my regular core gaming group.
In the second page of Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton, she talks about how Cape Breton used to export fish, coal, and steel; but in 2005, its main export is people. Empty chairs around tables, fathers, siblings, cousins gone to Ontario or Alberta. “The only message we got about a better future was that we had to leave home to have one. We did not question it, because this is the have-not region of a have-not province, and it has not boomed here in generations” and then a few pages later “I learn that I can have opportunity or I have a home. I cannot have both”.
The introduction hit me hard. I grew up in northern Manitoba, in an ex-mining community, population ~700. The mine shut down a few years before I was born, and the 17 years I lived there were marked with a slow exodus of people. What separates my experience from Kate Beaton’s, is that she has a love for her home, her community. She is an East Coaster, an Islander. It’s a part of her identity, and she’s proud of it, it’s her safe place. I don’t have that same reverence for northern Manitoba. I didn’t have a large family or cousins nearby, or really a tight community. I suspect part of that has to do with isolation, there was no other town around us for 100 Kms, and the next town over was another ex-mining town also in decline. The closest “boom” town was Thompson, 300Kms away.
I suspect another part of why Kate has a heritage while I do not is that Cape Breton has history. The first settlers arrived in 1605, and setting hamlets all over the island. While Kate’s hometown of Mabou is only slightly more populous than my hometown, there are hundreds of years of history in Cape Breton. People being proud of their homestead. My hometown was founded in 1950, with most of the homes in the town having been moved across over the frozen lake after a nearby mine ran dry. We didn’t have generations of history to establish ourselves, we had a single generation of transplants.
I’m getting away from the point here. What I’m trying to say is Kate’s words hit me hard. As an adult that feels without a real hometown, I get the melancholy she’s expressing here. Mine is a bit more bitter, but I can relate.
Kate chooses to move to Alberta to work in the oil sands until she can pay off her crippling student debt. She graduated from a University with an arts degree, paid for entirely by student loans. She feels like a boot has been pressed against her neck, and she’ll never be able to pay them off if she chooses to stay on Cape Breton Island, because of the lack of jobs, let alone anything well paying. With protests from her parents, she packed her bags and headed west. What follows is a deeply personal accounting of her experience working in the oil sands as a woman. Being a woman, living at camps, in a workforce that is 95% male is an experience I cannot relate to, but I can absolutely emphasize with. So many of the stories Kate tells are the derogatory comments made to and around her while she’s just trying to do her job. The constant advances, propositions, and misogyny wearing down her mental health, and that’s not even to mention how crappy working a tool shed job in -30 weather can be. The one time Kate tries to talk to a supervisor about the misogyny, she gets shut down, hard. “We’re a team here”, and “What did you expect when you came to work here?” essentially telling Kate to put up and shut up, or leave. Kate spends the next two years enduring casual toxicity, threats, invasions of privacy, gendered violence, and sexual assault.
Kate often touches upon the juxtapositions of being surrounded by people, but also being isolated. The shadow population living out two lives. Their real life back home, often with spouses and children, and the camp life, where you never really know what each other gets up two on their weekends. Drugs, sex, and relationships are all a shadowy undercurrent amongst a population of people who are in a place to do a job. The men she’s surrounded by are blue collar, apparently devoid of empathy, compassion, or respect.
After a year, she tries to leave. She gets a museum job in Victoria, B.C, but doesn’t get enough hours, so picks up a part-time job as a maid. She goes on dates, but doesn’t know how to relate to ‘normal’ people. After a year of working in Victoria, she gets the bad news that her student loans are due, and she’s not earning enough money to pay them off in Victoria. Without any better options, she makes her way back to the oil sands.
Then comes the sexual assault. In one camp, she talks about how often her door would open, someone would poke their head in and see that she was with people, mutter “wrong room”, then leave, or how often someone tries to open her door during the night, rattling the handle to see if it’s locked or not. The boys of the group mention that never happened to them. When Kate attends a party that migrates from room to room, she gets drunk, realizes she forgot her drink a few rooms back, and when she goes back to retrieve it, the man she’s with closes the door behind them and advances on her. She depicts the moment like an out-of-body experience. The scene goes dark, she floats home, then the scene changes. Later in the book she says to her friend “It felt like I had a second to decide and an eternity to live with it” This scene reminds me of Bear Town, but unlike in that fiction, Kate doesn’t get any justice. In her afterword, Kate writes, “I was nothing in his life but a short release from the boredom and loneliness endemic in camp life, but he was a major trauma in mine.” As a man, the constant awfulness that Kate endured made my skin crawl. I can only imagine that any woman reading this will be reduced to a ball of seething rage and misery.
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands touches on the environmental impact of the oil sands, but the focus of the book is Kate’s story. It’s not a tragedy, but it is an unhappy tale. Rife with melancholy and bitterness. Complex feelings of being exploited, while also being party to a larger evil. Kate feels alone and weird when she’s in ‘normal’ situations, friends come and go as jobs ebb and flow. I can’t relate to the experience of being a woman in a male dominated workplace, but I absolutely have empathy for this poor woman who just wants to do her job but is constantly leered at. Even worse when she invites friends into her workplace, and they catch men ducking under the tables trying to catch a glimpse up a skirt.
Kate never invites the comments, but she’s constantly subjected to them. Her mental health takes some brutal hits. Near the end of the book, Kate comments on that while the comments and misogyny has been constant, she recognizes that there have been hundreds of men who have just been in the background. On one hand, not all men have made comments, but they do have a role in being complicit when a guy makes a shitty comment and doing nothing.
I really enjoyed this graphic novel in the same way that I enjoyed Bear Town. I sit here, angry at men. I have a deep sadness for Kate, and the world that created the situation that made Kate feel like she had to endure that, and the world that let men feel like they can behave in these ways. The author’s afterword bring a lot of context to this deeply personal story. I would not hesitate to recommend Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, but that recommendation comes with the caveat that this book can be deeply painful to anyone who has a history of sexual assault or gendered violence.
I tell myself every holiday that I need to create a content calendar so that it’s not October 28th and I’m suddenly looking for a Halloween game to review. One day I’ll get my ducks in a row, but it’s not this day. It also doesn’t help that I’m not a big fan of the entirety of the horror genre. I don’t like scary movies, I don’t read spooky books, despite my birthday being on Halloween, it’s just not my vibe. For me, the holiday is represented by pillow cases full of candy and fun, friendly witches.
While horror is not my vibe, flicking games, certainly are. Flick ’em Up! Dead of Winter is the board game marriage between the disc flicking western, Flick ’em Up! and the narrative crossroads game, Dead of Winter. Flick ’em Up!: Dead of Winter is a cooperative game where players are striving to survive and explore a city of cardboard buildings in 10 different scenarios. The players take on the roles of survivors, each of which is named, has a default weapon, and their plastic figure has a backpack that helps you remember if they’ve been activated this round or not.
A game begins with setup, and I find Flick ’em Up!: Dead of Winter to be tedious to set up. Cardboard buildings are scattered around the table in a specific orientation, various obstacles are placed, then zombies, and survivors also litter the table, all dictated by the scenario you’ve chosen to play. Also, before the very first game, all those components need to be snickered, and buildings need to be assembled, which is not an insignificant time commitment.
The gameplay mostly consists of moving, which is achieved by choosing a survivor and flicking a movement disk. You’re often trying to get into a building, which requires flicking that disc between the two supports of the building, but more often involves crashing into a wall or ricocheting directly into a zombie’s grasp.
Flick ’em Up! Dead of Winter uses the 10 scenarios to scaffold the players into more interesting and complex items. When you first start playing, you’ll only have a basic handgun, which is just a single disc that you flick at zombies. And sometimes, you can shoot with TWO guns. Crazy, I know. There’s also the shotgun and sniper rifles. The shotgun is a cardboard stencil that you press 4 mini discs into, and flick them all out in one mighty motion. The sniper is another stencil with straight sides, which should assist in long range shots. In addition to guns, there are silent melee weapons to offer some tactical considerations for your turn.
On the subject of noise, most of the actions in the game can trigger a zombie reaction. Any loud action, or a quiet action when the next closest zombie is standing, triggers a zombie rush. A zombie tower is placed behind the closest zombie, and that zombie is placed upon the trap door on the top of the tower, If it was a loud action, the next two closest zombies join in the rush as well and are placed on the trap door. Then, the support is pulled away, and the zombies fall toward you, damaging anyone they hit.
Flick ’em Up! is a dexterity game. No amount of planning or strategy is going to change the fact that you can’t nail a shot that’s 6 inches away. The physicality of the game is simultaneously what makes it a joy to play, and utterly frustrating at times. The little shotgun pellets that seem incapable of knocking over a zombie, or playing on a different table surface, making all of your shots either way too strong, or pathetically weak.
You’ll need to commit to your shots. A gentle tap to a zombie’s leg won’t cause any damage, you need your bullet to barrel that monster down. But also, playing on a table or surface that doesn’t have walls does mean you’ll spend a fair amount of time looking for that stray bullet that flew off the table and bounced off the wall. Not a game I recommend playing when you have a curious 10-month-old roaming the floors.
The artwork is cartoony, colourful, and goofy, despite the zombie theme. All the characters and zombies are bulky plastic pieces, and are lacking in heft. It’s a bit unsatisfying to hold, but I suspect at least part of that is taking into consideration that these zombies need to be relatively easy to knock down, which is aided by their abnormally large flailing limbs raising their centre of gravity. All this goofyness brings a light-heartedness to the game, which is welcome, as the vibe isn’t so much of “we’re being hunted”, it’s more of a “let’s kill these zombies”. A rip-roaring hack and blast adventure of slaying monsters while sometimes, optionally, chasing an objective. In the same breath, the zombies can be quite terrifying. A missed shot means 3 zombies barreling down on you, and trying to provide backup has the potential for friendly fire in the back.
I love dexterity games. I really do. And I want to love Flick ’em Up! Dead of Winter. But it’s just so damn fiddly. So many rules on who is standing and who has fallen, being too close to zombies, what’s silent and what’s loud, constantly needing to stand terrain back up because of a knock on effect, and the absolute tedium of setup make this game such a pain that I rarely ever play it anymore. On my first play, I spent so much time flipping back and forth in the rule book trying to remember how everything worked together, that I pined for a rule summary on the back of the book. Just something to help my game along, even a little bit.
At higher player counts, the game feels like it drags. The number of survivors doesn’t change depending on player count, so 5 survivors in a 4 player game means you’ll probably only be taking one activation per round. And if you miss, it’s a long wait until your next chance to act. Really, I wouldn’t recommend this game at 4 players, and would even hesitate at 3 players.
Flick ’em Up!: Dead of Winter can be a blast if you’re a dexterity game fan with patience for setup and a penchant for precision flicking, However, the game’s fiddly components, annoying rules, and long setup can easily overshadow its charm. If you’re up for the challenge, set it up on a bordered table and keep the player count low to maximize your enjoyment.
I have a tenuous relationship with the games designed by Alexander Pfister. On one hand, I generally dislike Great Western Trail, Blackout Hong Kong, and Maracaibo. On the other hand, two of his co-designs, Broom Service, and Isle of Skye are some of my favourite games ever. While I’ve learned to steer clear from his bigger euro games, I hold out hope that I’ll continue to find joy in his smaller games.
Port Royal is a card game for 2 to 5 players originally published in 2014, although I played the big box edition with art by Fantasmagoria Creative and published by Pegasus Spiele in 2022. In Port Royal, players are trying to extract as much value out of a series of Caribbean mariners as possible to hopefully win the award of most prestigious company.
I’m actually not sure what the players are supposed to be, the theme does no service to the gameplay. The gameplay is a straightforward push your luck game, where the active player flips over cards one at a time until they either choose to stop, or they reveal two ships of the same colour. If the active player chooses to stop, they can take 1/2/3 cards (if they revealed 0-3/4/5 different colour ships), then every other player gets a chance to buy one of the revealed cards, but must pay the active player a coin for the privilege of doing so.
The goal of the game is to reach 12 or more points the quickest, and points mostly come from the crew you hire. Most of the crew members will give you special abilities while they’re in your tableau, such as earning extra money for specific colours of ships, or offering you more card picks, or giving you bonus income if the card market has 5 or more cards when you start your turn. The ships on the other hand, just give you money and are discarded. There are also tax cards, which make players with 12 or more coins lose half their money, and expedition cards that sit off to the side until someone trades in the prerequisite crew members to claim the expedition. Around and around players play until someone hits that 12 point threshold, and after all players had the same number of turns, the player with the most points is the winner.
The fact that Port Royal is naught, but a single deck of 120 cards is really clever. Every card has a coin on the back, and when you take coins, you just draw them face down from the top of the deck, ensuring no one can really be counting cards. This also means when the deck runs dry, and you shuffle the discard to form a new deck, you’ll be likely be seeing new cards that were drawn face down the first time around.
That said, I did not find the game itself to be particularly engaging. More than once someone flipped two ships of the same colour after just 2 or 3 card draws, busting their turn. Money felt fairly hard to come by if your turn busted, as the active player was most likely to take the highest value ship, and taking the lower value ships on their turn means you’re just feeding them more money. Managing how much money you hold is a delicate balance, as having 12 or more puts you at risk of just losing half of it, which is the equivalent of at least 2 turns of taking ship cards. The crew cards themselves cost as low as 3 coins, but as high as 9, meaning if you want to hire a crew on someone else’s turn, you need to have 10 or 11 coins, lest you find yourself at risk.
I see small trappings of engine building in Port Royal, but they didn’t come to fruition during our play. Yes, you can hire multiple traders to get extra value out of those ships, if they come up and are available on your turn. Also, having traders of a colour is a sure-fire way to ensure that the other players don’t let ships of that colour make it to you on their turns.
Luck is a major factor in Port Royal. Having the right cards come out at the right time is key to your victory. It doesn’t even need to be the right cards, it can just be cards that you can afford, or a ship to earn you money. As I said in the paragraph above, if you have a merchant to earn you bonus money if the right colour ship comes out, hopefully you’re lucky enough to draw that ship before you draw two of the same colour and lose your whole turn. I get that this is a push your luck game, but I never really felt excited drawing cards and seeing crew members that I couldn’t afford and ships of the wrong colour flip up.
Port Royal is a clever deck of cards with good flow. It’s easy to teach and understand how to play, but my issue lies in the fact that there are so many more push your luck games that I’d rather play. Incan Gold, Can’t Stop, and The Quacks of Quedlinburg all come to mind. Port Royal failed to create any stand up moments. Every time someone busted it was just a shrug, an “oh well”, and pass the deck to the next player. At no point did I feel tension or excitement. There were no real stakes, nothing exciting to be gained or lost. A ho-hum yawn of an experience.
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.
