Lost Ruins of Arnak BGG ↗

My BGG Comment

A deck-builder with two workers in which you try to optimize your resources in such a way that you can squeeze as many actions as possible from each of the 5 rounds to discover as many locations as possible, research your way to victory or buy the most valuable cards. You get two workers to send on expeditions but there are a lot of other main actions that do not require workers. It gets compared to Dune Imperium a lot but besides the „worker placement“ and „deck-building“ elements these two play quite different. In Dune every action needs a single card and a worker and at the end of a round there is conflict. I enjoy both of them. Which one is better depends on my mood. More conflict to be had in Dune, more exploration in Arnak. Leaders seems to make a good game better by introducing more good stuff and slightly asymmetric player abilities.

• 2026: Top 20 of My Euro
  Absolutley up there with the combination of deck building and worker placement and action chaining. Min & Elwen make it work.
• 50 Best Games played 5+ times
• All my Deck (and other) Building Games
• Games with Women Designers
• My Solo Games
• Yashima's 2023 Top 20 Solo Games
  It's a very neat and easily managed solo despite being an automa. And it is a very good game. But still some of the novelty has worn off, so down it went. Ranking last year: 10 (🔻6)
• Yashima‘s 2024 Top 20 Solo Games
  I know the reason this came in so high because I recently played all 6 scenarios in the campaign mode and so the immediate familiarity ranked this higher than a lot of other games. Also the scenarios are all excellent and one could easily play each single one outside of the campaign. As a bonus they kind of train you to become better at the gameplay in a way that is sure to spill over into multiplayer as well. And they force you to familiarize yourself with the different temples and maps. Really a great addition to an already great game. In theory I want to like Dune Imperium more but it seems the ranking engine threw out that theory… Solo Plays 2024: 6 Ranking last year: 16 (🔺1)
• Yashima’s 2022 Top 20 Solo Games
  #10 Yay, Top 10 I very much enjoy deck builders and the recent number of combinations with worker placement are such an interesting variant that I cannot seem to get enough of. It‘s really whichever one I played last that is better in my mind. This one has that mechanism we know from Terra Mystica (have not touched the new solo Automa or it might have made this list) where you try to drag out your turn for as long as possible. And so each of the 5 rounds gets longer and longer. The bot is easy to handle—I have yet to scale up the difficulty. And I will very much only play with the expansion content because it makes the game more interesting to have a unique player power. But the expansion is not required, the game is great without it.

Owned Expansions

• Lost Ruins of Arnak: Expedition Leaders
• Lost Ruins of Arnak: The Missing Expedition
• Lost Ruins of Arnak: Twisted Paths