Lost Ruins of Arnak Review – A Spreadsheet in a Leather Fedora

After two eventless days upon an empty ocean, you head back into your cabin. The maps said it was around here, but so far nothing. Then a cry overhead. Land ho! A day’s travel and you find yourself where you never thought you’d be. In the Lost Ruins of Arnak.

How to Play

Your expedition to the Lost Ruins of Arnak requires you to excavate as many victory points as you can. By exploring the jungle, fighting off monsters, or researching ancient temples.

Through your journey, you will find relics to aid you with special abilities, and equipment too. Although that comes at a cost of coins.

In terms of gameplay, you start each round with five cards and two wooden archeologist tokens. On your turn, you’ll use a combination of cards and tokens to perform actions.

However, if there’s one constant on this island, it’s that nothing is free.

• Exploring new areas of the island requires you to spend cards for their transportation icons.
• Fighting local wildlife needs spearheads – preferably attached to spears.
• Researching mandates that you spend stone tablets, gems and other knickknacks.

You’ll keep taking one action per turn until you’re out of resources and your only recourse is to pass. Once everyone passes, everyone draws another five cards and retrieves their archeologist tokens. Starting a new round.

Beyond these main actions, you’ll also pick up free actions on your travels. Including research assistants, monkey totems, and monster carcasses (ew!). These provide an array of bonuses, deepening the thinking and strategy you need to win Lost Ruins of Arnak.

After the final round, count up all of your victory points from their various sources. Take away any points for leftover fear cards. Then whoever has the most wins.

A Game of Two Genres

Like Spirit Island, there’s a lot of freedom in what you can do in Lost Ruins of Arnak. From climbing the research track to exploring the ruins, almost everything you do earns victory points.

Powering all of these actions though is the multi-use cards in your hand. By themselves, these cards provide you with special actions. But combining them with your archeologist tokens lets you send them out into the jungle where they can fight monsters, or find resources.

Often this leaves you in a state of wondering what to do. Because both options are great but you can only pick one.

Speaking of the cards, I loved the way purchased cards go to the bottom of your deck. Usually in deck-building games, bought cards go straight to the discard pile. By changing this, instead of waiting for it to resurface, you know you’re going to get to use your new card the next turn, or one after.

The near-instant gratification of buying a card is something my matchstick-sized attention span absolutely adored.

In saying that, it is kind of a big deal when you buy cards in Lost Ruins of Arnak. Because it’s not your typical deck-builder. Yes, it’s a main mechanic, but it’s not the only one.

It shares that honour with worker placement.

We’ve already talked to it, but players can spend their cards to place their archeologists onto the different action spaces on the island. Gathering resources, or fighting local fauna as they do.

More importantly, they’re probably blocking you from taking that space you wanted or opening up new worker action spots for you to explore. Because of this, the board is frequently changing. Forcing you to continually re-assess your strategy.

It’s incredibly engaging.

Opposite Ends of the Spectrum

Look, I’m glad Lost Ruins of Arnak isn’t another farming game, or trading game set in the Mediterranean. But there are few games with a greater mismatch of theme and mechanics than this one.

Both the cover and artwork throughout the game fill you with the idea of an Indiana Jones type of adventure. Where you’d expect things to be a little impromptu and risky. Something like Escape: The Curse of the Temple.

Lost Ruins of Arnak plays the exact opposite. It’s more about thinking about your moves than making them, and sometimes this slow decision-making just doesn’t make sense in the context of the theme.

For instance, fighting monsters is so abstracted that you only need to turn up on the spot with the correct items and it runs away. Meanwhile, the art for these monsters is cool, they look ready to tear you apart. Yet in-game, it feels like it’s a pre-arranged deal between two middle-schoolers swapping lunch.

So, despite their appearances, the monsters feel toothless.

Apt, because it’s indicative of the whole game.

There are no nasty surprises in Lost Ruins of Arnak. Outside of taking someone’s spot, there are no ways to slow down your opponents through interaction or ‘Take That’ cards.

So when someone gets a lead it’s near impossible to catch up. The only punishing mechanic within the game is the fear cards. But they feel less painful than a slap on the wrist.

Back on the topic of theme vs gameplay, maybe I’m being too harsh. One area where they blended together perfectly is with the items cards.

These come in two different types, equipment you buy from the market, and relics you uncover in your adventures.

When you buy item cards, it makes sense that they take time to be delivered so they’re added to the bottom of your draw deck. Artefacts, on the other hand, are found during your journey. They don’t need to be delivered, because you just pick them up off the ground. So they are added straight to your hand.

Although maybe that’s not such a good idea. Because we’ve all seen too many movies where picking up and using an unknown artefact has gone wrong.

Resource System Excellence

While exploring the Lost Ruins of Arnak, Min & Elwin found something special; the Simon and Garfunkel of board gaming.

Who knew worker placement and deck-building would create such a rich and satisfying combo?

Well, Paul Dennen for one, who in the same year created the exquisite Dune: Imperium. That contains a similar combination of mechanics but with a heavier focus on war and conflict.

What Dune: Imperium lacks is Lost Ruins of Arnak’s excellent resource system. Putting you in the think-tank as you constantly figure out where the resources you need are going to come from.

As well as, Lost Ruins of Arnak’s reward structure. Whenever you put together these resources and pull off a great action, you’re rewarded with resources as though you’re prying open a supply crate.

So on top of everything else you’re thinking about within the game, you’re also looking for your next big score.

Because of this constant scheming, Lost Ruins of Arnak is incredible at putting you in the zone. When everything fades into the background and playing becomes almost a meditative experience. It’s always a wonderful sign when you’re so engaged with a board game.

But, given it’s only five rounds and you’re so engaged. It always feels like it ends too soon. The only thing you can do is reset the board and have another play.

I don’t care that it’s 11 pm and I have work tomorrow.