Dune Imperium (vs. Lost Ruins of Arnak) - The Highly Interactive Euro Board Game

hello fellow board game connoisseurs today i'll be talking about one of the recent hot games dune imperium now if you regularly consume board game media you'll know that there's been a massive hype around three games with similar mechanics dune imperium lost runes of arnick and endless winter all these games have worker replacement and deck building as their main mechanism i won't bother with endless winter because it's not even out yet instead i'll focus on dune imperium and compare it to our neck in the end because i've played both games several times in dune imperium you'll be taking turns placing your workers and playing your cards everyone is racing to get to 10 points first because it will set the current game round as the final one then everyone will add their endgame points and whoever has got the most points will be the winner there are 4 main ways to get points in the game from these influence tracks player conflicts from the entry cards and when you buy these spice cards we'll get to them in a bit just like many worker basement games there are spots on the board where you could place a worker to get actions or resources to ultimately gain points and win the game the spots can only take one worker though making it important to strategize as someone else could block you at the start of a new round everyone will take back their workers which will free up those spots before they can place their workers all over again pretty standard stuff right so all you need to do on your turn is place a worker right nope not quite you see apart from the two workers you start with everyone is also given an identical 10 card deck from where you draw 5 cards from each round to use a worker spot you need to play a card which has that spot symbol these worker spots are always associated with a symbol so say you want to go here you then have to play a card like this or this one because these two cards have the matching purple symbol not this one though because this symbol isn't there think of it as if you're in a train station those cards are like your ticket so you can only go to a specific location if you have the right ticket so some worker spots like this one straight up give you free resources others may require you to pay additional resources before using it while this one allows you to trade resources the most important spots will be these faction ones beside the tracks not only are these symbols harder to come by on the cards but whenever you go to these spots you'll also advance on the track beside it once anyone's cube advanced to a certain level on the tracks you'll get points and other freebies but then there are these faction alliances that you'll be fighting over with everyone you'll get the alliance if you're the first one to reach the yellow area on these tracks but someone can still steal it from you if they advance further than you these alliances give a point to whoever owns it plus some alliance benefits that may come up in the cards some spots that you go to might also have this sword symbol overlaid on it which brings us to the conflict part of the game at the end of every round a battle phase will occur that sounds really epic and all but it's really just comparing your strength points to each other the person with the most strength points will win the battle and receive the first tier reward the others will get lesser rewards depending on where they rank these randomized rewards are revealed at the start of each round and they progressively get better throughout the game you build up strength throughout the round by either collecting these troop cubes or getting those cards or intrigues that give you strength so if you look at the conflict area you'll see four circles and a big arena in the middle the circles represent each player's garrison or camp the troops that count towards your strength are the ones that are being put into the battlefield and that's where the swords come in whenever you have actions that give you troops you must place them in your camp but if you had gone to a spot that has the sword symbol you can instead put all the troops you just got into the battlefield right away plus up to two more from your camp if you want to the intrigues and the cards you didn't use for the workers may also add to your overall strength but you still need at least one troop in the arena to use them oh and these strength points also reset to zero every round so you don't want to overcome it one of the things that you can get from the conflicts or the worker spots are these in three cards there are three types of these in three cards they could either be plot combat or end game cards plot cards are usually tiny things that help you progress in game but sometimes they may also require you to spend resources to use them whereas combat cards can sneakily increase your strength when used during conflict these cards are basically those strap cards from yu-gi-oh and finally end-game cards will give you extra points if you meet a certain criteria at the end of the game speaking of cards let's finally move on to the deck building part most tech builders will fall into one of the two very common card market styles ascension or dominion a dominant style market will have most or all cards of the game available in its market games like eons and and quest for el dorado would fall into this category ascension style market on the other hand will only display around six random cards from a huge deck plus one stack of cards to help you buy those random six and another stack that usually helps you win the game games like clank and in this case dune imperium would fall into this category there are some things to consider when getting these cards from the market you already know that these cards determine where your workers can go but they may also give you extra freebies there are two kinds of freebies that you can get and they are listed on these two rows on all the cards you will get the top one if you use the card to place a worker back to the train station analogy it's like if you get a more expensive ticket you might get some perks like free drinks on a train or maybe a secret access to a puppy cabin that'll be awesome the other bonus which is just below that is only available if the card is still in your hand at the end of the round meaning that you didn't use the card that round so when you are out of workers 2 place the only thing you can do on your turn is to reveal that's the time when you show your unused cards in order to obtain that other benefit and possibly buy more cards much like other deck building games those diamonds are your temporary currency that you use to buy cards from the market the cost of each card in the market is listed on the top right and they may also give you immediate bonuses upon purchase and of course the cards that you just bought goes into your discard pal which gets reshuffled when you don't have any more cards to draw from your deck pretty standard deck building the card market then gets restocked immediately after a purchase and you can buy as many cards as you can afford you could also skip using your remaining workers to enter this phase say because you wanted a card in the market so bad and you don't want it to get snatched you could do that but this phase always immediately ends your round one of the cards that is always available to buy in this phase are the spice must flow cards where for a whopping cost of 9 you could get an instant point oh and this ring card you start with corresponds to the activation of your player power everyone has their own unique powers depending on which character they chose and that's basically 99 of the game's rules so what's good about this one for starters the player interaction in this game is absolute gold it adds so much tension to the entire game without being mean spirited well mostly people will try to snatch your alliances away or try to outdo you in conflict but you would have seen it coming many times before meaning you have time to react to it so it's all fair game it is perhaps the big selling point of this game as usually worker placement and deck building games like some kind of player interaction dunes shines in that aspect and really ups the fun factor of this game there are a lot of things to consider in june because there are various ways to gain points and all of them are quite important sort of like a balancing act you cannot win everything and yet if you put too much effort on something say the conflicts you'll miss out on all the other stuff that also helps you in the game the game also feels very streamlined and surprisingly simple the two individual genres seems to be integrated quite well as none of the rules feels ham-fisted if you have played pure work replacement and pure deck building games you basically know most of the rules to this game already okay moving on to the issues that i have these intrigue cards are really swingy most of the intrigues in the game are actually fine and i do prefer some randomness in these zero games you know keeps the game from being too stale but why the point once man you could literally draw one near the end of the game and instantly meet the criteria for those cards which basically give you one point by sheer luck and may i just quickly remind everyone that one point is massive in an average of 10 point game wait some of them might even give you two points you've gotta be kidding me what it's my biggest complaint about the game because i might or might not have experienced a very similar situation in another game and then we have that extra worker spot where you trade eight money for a permanent extra worker getting an extra worker is the holy grail of work replacements because it gives you more turns for the rest of the game the problem is everyone is going to rush for it first every game before finally diverging to other things and actually playing the game it's just a really boring samey start all i'm saying is why not just give everyone free workers at some point during the game just like lords of waterdeep that way everyone can get into the game right away and not worry about workers also i have discussed the ascension market in another video that it has a potential to reveal really good cards to your opponents after you have bought something which can really suck regardless of the flaws i still like the game because it's fun and interactive okay so how does it compare to lost runes of anik arnak by comparison is really euro and sorry to say this but that's probably why the game is relatively quite dull there is bare minimum player interaction in the game and even saying that is a bit of a stretch you know the good old blocking a spot with your worker or go up on this only track and get slightly more points if you are at the top first on top of that our next tech building mechanism is a bit more unconventional but in a confusing or unintuitive way for example if you buy these item cards you straight away put it under your deck but if you buy these artifact cards you'll get to use it right away but you have to pay a resource to play next time oh and it goes to your play area and did i mention that there is no discard pile like you see what i'm saying just like dune your cards are needed to assign your workers to a spot but in anec you could also use other resources than your cards to place a worker which i quite like because it's more lenient and speaking of that in anec your turns are not tied to your workers meaning your whole turn can just be playing a single card in fact part of the challenge in our neck is to extend your round as much as possible to buy the cards in anec you pay these resources which are also used in other parts of the game so there's no special currency for the cards like in june also this might be a bit of a nitpick but the cards in our neck has a lot more text than dunes and i'm sure you know about the amazing art and production value of anec which really annihilates dunes so i obviously would recommend june more than anik but if you really dislike player interaction you'll probably like anak more despite the harsh comparison arnak is actually not a bad game but it really doesn't live up to its hype so yeah that's all for this video hopefully you enjoyed that and if you do check out my channel for more board game reviews like this one and maybe comment down below and tell me what you think about this video see

Channel: Real Jon

Views: 4,641

Keywords: Dune: Imperium, Dune Imperium, Dune:Imperium, Lost Ruins of Arnak, Ruins of Arnak, Board game, Boardgame, Broadgame, Imperium Dune

Id: FoK8R8DU72o

Length: 9min 10sec (550 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 02 2021