Overview & How to Play

Welcome to Arnak! This beautiful deserted island in the middle of nowhere! Let’s go on an expedition!

The Lost Ruins of Arnak is a game to get the most victory points while each player leads their own expedition teams. Points are acquired through exploring new locations, moving up on a research track, and finally buying cards to add into their decks.

Turns consist of managing 2 workers, as well as a hand of 5 cards drawn from each player’s deck! Players will do 1 action each, like playing a card from their hand to place a worker down on the board that matches that card’s specified colors (If you’ve played Dune Imperium before, this is very similar). To actually use a card’s ability, players can just play that card from hand as an action.

Players can also take an action to spend a bunch of resources to explore the island, that is placing a worker on a new location on the island, getting the new location’s payouts, as well making them encounter a “Guardian”! This Guardian protector is 5 points if handled/overcome/killed, that is the player on that space pays its specific quantity of resources. If the player has to run away from the Guardian come end round when workers return to their players, that player gains a Fear card in their deck, which is (-1) points and has limited use when drawn from your deck.

Another action is spending resources to move up a track on the right hand side of the board called the “Research Track”, that gives players points end game, as well as provide small benefits to players every time they move up on it.

And of course, players can spend an action to buy cards to deckbuild, permanently adding cards to their deck.

Last thing that isn’t technically a full action: the “Free” actions! Any time players see anything with a lightning bolt on it, they can perform that action without spending an action, meaning they have the rest of their turn to do whatever they want.

That’s the gist of Lost Ruins of Arnak! Players keep performing one action each until they all pass, meaning they don’t want to do any more actions, or can’t. Then, a round ends, where players draw back up to 5 cards, take back their workers, and cycle some buy-able cards out of the game. After the 5th round is up, count those victory points up to see who won!

Pros

This game just gets such high praise from us on presentation. Like, the board is beautiful with full art, cards have luscious graphics, and Guardians feel very mythical and daunting. There’s thick player boards, tiles, and even a place to put every single piece while playing!

These pieces are namely resources, and are phenomenal. There’s gummy looking Rubies, literal Arrowheads, and even engraved Tablets. Even the cardboard coins have jagged edges to differentiate them from the compass resources.

Arnak is also a breeze to learn for how many different actions it has, in fact, the rulebook is one of the best we’ve ever seen at Shelfside, full of clear, pretty diagrams, and will answer any question you have at its end. Player aids also explain the clear iconography if you get tripped up, and the game itself has no weird phases, rather Arnak is just one smooth flow of doing one action each.

Enough about the looks and accessibility though, let’s get into the gameplay, where Arnak’s central gameplay between exploring and researching to get points is incredibly satisfying. These are the two primary ways to get points, that play off each other in exploring having more point possibility, but with some degrees of randomness AND costing a worker. Then, researching is also good to go for because it has first-come-first-served benefits, as well as not requiring a worker to pursue. Check out the video review for more on this exploring vs. researching balance you must pursue.

Guardians may look pretty scary too, especially since they’re immediately sprung on you, outta nowhere after you explore! But they’re actually not that bad, and in fact Arnak has all sorts of awesome ways for players to play around random occurrences. For Guardians, they do not have to be taken care of until the end of each round, meaning that players have a bunch of time to find their requirements. What’s more, it’s actually a viable strategy to not overcome Guardians… at all!

The negative payouts from not overcoming a Guardian is quite minuscule, being a “Fear” card that is just a single negative victory point. It admittedly does slow down your deck, but can be gotten rid of through Arnak’s wide array of ‘exiling’ options, that is trashing cards from your deck. And so if you take this “Fear” card, and not spending for a Guardian, you’ll have a bunch of resources to spend somewhere else, namely the research track that also grants you points!

If you’re still concerned about Guardians because you really want to overcome them, Arnak has a neat Idol mechanic, where every time you explore, you’ll grab an Idol that is worth 3 points, but also can be spent as a free action to practically get any resource you want. So really, you have a good degree of freedom to approach Guardians!

There’s more good randomness considerations with deckbuilding: every time you buy an Item, it goes on the bottom of your deck, so you will probably draw it next round! That’s a great way to get players thinking about strategies for next turn. Plus, every time players buy the Artifact cards, which are like Items but are more expensive, that ability triggers right away! Buying Artifacts is just a fun way to inject new abilities into every round, and give your deck a permanent strong ability.

In fact, cards are multi-variable to buy, as you check which locations they will let you place workers on, as well as how many points they are worth late game! Since this game is deckbuilding, you don’t want to dilute your deck’s strategy too much through constantly buying cards, even if you can afford them. It’s common for Arnak to throw little card decisions at you when you have 5 in your hand, where you’re debating whether to play something for its free lightning bolt action for a free 2 Tablets, or to use it land on a very good location, but in doing so will use one of your valuable workers, and take your entire turn.

Strategies you can employ are buying “Bow and Arrow” early, which rewards you with compasses if you have killed many monsters! Or how about using the “Idol of Ara-Anu” to give steep discounts in trying to move up the research track! There are just many many cards with no duplicates to let you really mix and match, where the order in which buy-able cards come out really matters.

We have to go out on a limb and praise the Lightning Bolt free actions though, which are not only on cards, but are in more places, ranging from your Assistants you can tap for resources, or to manipulating Idols on your player board. The free actions really open up turns, despite players only having 1 actual action, since they can do as many lightning bolt actions as they want on a turn! It is just great tempo injection of your choice, making you feel like you’re cheating resources in a good way. There is great satisfaction in seeing 2 lightning bolts matching exactly what you need.

One of the Arnak’s biggest pros is its very satisfying sense of progression. There’s 5 rounds, where early rounds may seem a little tame at maybe 4-5 actions per player… and then late game this will explode, to see well over 10 actions a player that each mean and do more. Not only will your deck be getting better, players can choose from more Artifacts to buy, as with each round’s passing, there will be one more slot for Artifacts. So in Round 5, there will be 4 Artifacts to choose from, that each do something immediately when bought! It’s like the game is providing every player with more abilities.

Progression pros continue with researching and exploring giving players better payouts, all while worker placement continues to feel tight, since explored locations are so power crept that players will keep competing over them. Even basic locations, like the one to grant compasses, can continue to be fought over late game if there is no compass giving site as well.

Replayability stays quite strong with 40 Items, 35 Artifacts, making games feel quite fresh with all sorts of combination of these. There really is no shortage of combinations from exploring, where 15 Guardians and 16 Site tiles get randomly combined. The Research Track and Idols on the board also get randomized payouts at the beginning of every game.

Solo play, all the way to 4 players also has great scaling. Solo play has a very clean Automa that just has you flip a tile for each of its turns. 3-4 players will have players rushing to explore new locations before others do, or maybe there will be more undefeated Guardians just existing on the board, that anyone can come in and take for themselves.

Nitpicks

There are no cons for Lost Ruins of Arnak! Only some minor nitpicks, like how downtime can be a little on the longer side for newcomers, especially in the last round, because players do not have an equivalent amount of actions. Then this careful calculating that leads to downtime actually makes the game more like 30-45 minutes per player, not 30 minutes as the box says. And half of the plastic bags included are terrible quality.

Final Thoughts

Lost Ruins of Arnak is truly excellent, maintaining a sense of exploration in a Euro, while giving players plenty of ways to mitigate weird randomness. It ends up being a semi-casual resource conversion puzzle, great for family and counts from 1-4 players. It is not be the Indiana Jones exploration of hopping to ruin to ruin with a sense of danger, but rather a careful shifting of resources to maximize your research track and deckbuild well.

For fun: one of our patrons, Fodder, likes to call Arnak a Gaia Project lite with its heavy resource conversion. For more on that, check out our Recommender Score in the video below!