Lost Ruins of Arnak Review - with Tom Vasel

[Music] [Music] and now it's time for another dice tower review with tom vassell howdy everybody i'm tom vassell and today we're taking a look at the lost runes of arnac this is a new big box game from cge and each year they tend to put out one during the fall the q4 of each year and i'm always very excited to see what it is this one here has you going through a mythological or a made-up world of our knack as you are indiana jones-type explorers going through and discovering new things it is a mixture of deck building where you start with your own deck of cards and you'll increase that as you go by and work replacement as you have some archaeologists and you put them out as well as moving up technology tracks and getting resources and getting points in various ways this all sounds very mechanical and it is but here's how it plays [Music] this is a very long board so there's a lot of stuff going on here but players are essentially trying to get the most points you're going to get points on moving up on the research track you're going to get points for collecting idols you're going to get points for cards that you buy you're going to get points for confronting guardians and the gameplay is going to take over five rounds and in each of these rounds players are going to take actions until they pass once everyone's passed the round will end and you'll set up for the next round each player is going to start with a deck of six cards four of their color and two fear cards you're going to shuffle these this will be your starting deck but your deck will change as the game goes by whenever you get new cards for the deck they'll go underneath your deck and at the end of every turn all the cards you've played that turn will get shuffled and put underneath the ones that you just bought or acquired and so that the game is going to constantly be cycling through your deck cards can be used for the travel icon in their corner cards can be played at any time on your turn as a free action if they have the lightning bolt so this gives me a compass this gives me a gold anytime i want and you'll get more cards as the game goes by that give you actions you can take so players are going to draw five cards and on a player's turn they will be able to like i said take one main action and free actions which are using these lightning bolts one of these actions is to go and dig at an excavation site and so the board is going to start with five of these and more of them will come out as time goes by and you just place your guy on these some of these might be covered up if you're playing with less than four players but to go to them you need to pay the icons that are on them so you'll notice that there are boots there so i could get rid of this fear card for one boot and go to this spot here but i could also use a car because a car is better than a boot i can count a car as a boot or a boat counts as a boot or as the game goes by you might even get an airplane which can count as pretty much anything a car can't count as a boat and vice versa but that's pretty much it once you go to the spot you'll get whatever it takes most of these are basic resources take two coins take two compasses take two scrolls take an arrowhead discard another card from your hand to take one of these gems and so this is kind of the order of how useful the different resources are players are going to likely want more places to go to so you can go out and discover a new spot as an action so to go here for example cost a car and three compasses to go here costs a boat and three compasses to go up here costs two cars and six compasses and again you can use airplanes as cars or boats when you go to one of these spots first you'll take the idle there not only is this idle worth three points at the end of the game but it will give you an immediate bonus like this lets you get rid of a card from your deck probably a fear card also you can use idols as a free action on your turn if you have them you can spend them to put them here and take one of these actions turn a coin into a gem take an arrowhead take two scrolls take a coin and a compass or draw another card however every time you do that you're giving up one two three and then four points as the game goes by when a player discovers a spot they'll take the idol like i said and then you'll draw a tile matching what area so this there's two different areas and you'll reveal it this is a new spot that you'll go to so you'll place your worker will go there and you'll get the benefits immediately and in the future people can go there now too this lets me draw a card and get an arrowhead however you also will draw a guardian from the top of the deck and a guardian will go on top of there now that guardian doesn't stop you from going there it's just scary at the end of the turn when you pull workers off the board if you pull a worker off where there's a guardian you'll add another fear card to your deck fare cards are useful for for feet but that's pretty much it they're also worth minus one point at the end of the game however i can confront that guardian and try to overcome it to do so i simply need to pay the resources on it this is an action so i can say all right i'm going to overcome this one pay two feet and a compass i will get the guardian then they'll give me a one-time action that i can use at some point and at the end of the game like i said they're worth five points and now anybody can go there without fear of getting a fear card and so lots of these different spots will come out that are basically better spots to go to this one gives a gem this gives a fear card but also gives a gem and a compass and the ones up here by the way you get two idols up there are even better a fear card two scrolls two arrowheads a coin a compass a scroll an arrowhead so there's lots of things you can get players are probably going to want more cards and so another action you can take on your turn is simply buying a card there's item cards here these cost coins at the bottom and then there are artifact cards which cost compasses each round of the game you'll discard the two cards that are here you're going to move this over and then refill with artifacts here and refill with items so as the game goes by there will be more item or fewer items and more artifacts when you take a card this card might give you an action in the future so as an action if i have this card i could use it as a car but i could also use it and discard a compass to take a scroll and an arrowhead the cost of this card is one coin it's worth a point at the end of the game artifacts here when i get this i can put a guy on a site for free and i can activate it twice instead of once that's pretty cool and i can do that as soon as i take the card however when i draw this card in the future i need to pay a scroll to use this artifact again it costs three compasses and again worth this one's worth one point at the end of the game so you can buy more cards they'll be replaced and people are going to make their decks better with cooler cards players can also research as an action you'll start with a magnifying glass and a journal and so when you research you just move one of these tokens up the only rule is you can't move your journal farther than your magnifying glass so i can move the magnifying glass and then the journal magnifying glass in the journal or i can just run the magnifying glass up and move the journal up later the cost of moving is listed here in between so for example to go from this level to this costs either a compass and an arrowhead or a gem to move up into these sections the first person to move into these sections with these tiles will get that tile and get whatever bonuses on it also when you move up you'll get the bonus over here on the side based on what you move up so if i move up my magnifying glass i get a gold coin when i move up my journal i get one of these assistants here assistants are people that you can use once per round so this assistant here gives me a compass that i can use once per round i get her around one that's four compasses that i'll be able to use and later on as you get if you get your journal up to these spots you can upgrade them to their gold side so now she'll give me two compasses each turn also at the end of the game these are going to be worth points on where you have them on the side of the board in fact when you get to the top of the board if you're the first person to get there that's me 23 points at the end of the game but you're still not done researching you could research more you simply will just pay a coin or two scrolls to take this two-point token pay a gem to take that two-point token pay a compass in an hour to take that two-point token or pay a combination of those two to take a six or pay all of them to take an 11 point token so even if you get all the way to the top you can still keep uh researching at the end of the game you're simply going to your research tokens are going to get points where they are your temple tiles that you've got will score points your idols will score points your guardians will point your item and artifact cards get points fear cards are minus one points and whoever has the most points is the winner of the game component-wise the game's fantastic i like that these little plastic you know scroll pieces arrowheads and these they're really neat i like that they're here on this separate board although i kind of wish like i said this board adding this extra board makes the whole thing long and i would actually stick this board somewhere else except it has a spot for the compasses to start but i don't know it's that big of a deal i might move it somewhere else artwork wise the game is just beautiful i mean look at all these different spots here on the board and all these guardians here i mean that spider is a nasty scary guardian but they're all pretty scary and they all have different costs to get rid of but i mean each one is a unique piece of artwork and i really like that as is the different spots that you can go to on the board and once these get placed in the board the whole board just has this really neat jungle kind of i don't know just i just really like how it looks the whole productions i mean even these little temple tiles that you take have different kinds of artwork on them and i just like that i mean there's some duplication here but this is something that you wouldn't even have to make different but it is and it just adds to the flavor and then the cards the cards could have been maybe slightly better quality but again they have different artwork the symbology in the game is really clear and easy to go through i'm just very impressed with how everything looks and that's not all the main board here has two sides to it now the differences in sides are mostly the costs to go explore new areas this one costs two feet this one costs an airplane and the research track is different on the side yeah so if you just want some variety in your game that's what you would do [Music] the lost ruins of arnac is sort of a frankenstein of sorts of board games because it is a lot of mechanisms we've seen before and in fact there's not a lot of new here if you asked me and said what's different about this game than other games i would say well when you go discover a new worker placement spot you're finding a new place to go to there's that guardian there who makes it slightly negative as you get those fear cards uh but you then can fight off that guardian and get rewards for that it also mixes deck building and worker placement and while that's not the only game this year to do that there's not a whole lot of other games out there that mix those together that being said just because all that stuff there doesn't mean that the game is bad and in fact the game is quite good i tend to like games where i get resources and have a lot of different actions that i can do i call this a worker placement game but you only have two archaeologists that you send out so you have to think carefully how you do that you want to move up that technology track you want to buy new cards for your you know that you can have in your deck you want to be the first person to go out and explore you want to fight off the guardians and the game feels very balanced really balanced now this is something of course that cg excels at they're very good at having games that are what i call point salads again where you score points from doing a variety of things but this game you know then they do that but you can go down different paths like i'm going to really push up research forget research i'm going to go explore and fight off as many guardians as i possibly can and it's neat how this works together in fact you can see us playing this version of this live on the dice towers you can see how it works through that and just even after the first time the second time as you go through like wow these are neat cards and and every game feels different because the cards that show up the artifact cards and the item cards are gonna be different the locations are going to come out in a different order the guardians are going to be different and so the variety here is huge and you're kind of just rolling with the punches like okay well this is available so and so went for this i'm going to go for this there's a solo variant for the game i've not played that mike is gonna play that and talk about that on our channel but as a multiplayer game i think it scales really well and for two to four players and i found it to be very enjoyable the artwork certainly doesn't hurt the theme is one i like but taking those out of the equation the game itself offers some really meaty choices and it's not a place to workers and you're done it's take actions until you pass so my action might be buy a card which i'm then going to use that will help me do something better it's not who i want to place at my workers as fast as i can you might want to but you might want to do some other actions first some i want to buy a card first and then i might want to move up the track i might want to do some of these free actions at some point they set myself up to then place my workers or i might want to place them as quickly as i can and i feel like this game has more depth but it doesn't feel heavy either it's a very what i would call almost medium weight game you look at the things they're pretty simple i want some coins i want some compasses the ascendancy there of how much things are worth makes sense pretty quickly but how to best do things how much on that research track do you want to push up how much of the guardians do you want to focus on i think it works well it doesn't overstay its welcome it's a 90 minute game or so i feel like it comes across really well and each game is going to play very differently it's a solid game in this genre with a fun theme on top of it a beautiful looking game cg once again does what they do well put out these great uh worker placement lots of point style games that i think are going to appeal to a lot of people including me i'm tom vassell we'll see you next time dice tower judgment approved [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: The Dice Tower

Views: 111,739

Keywords: board game, board, game, dice, card game, cards, catan, monopoly, tower, dice tower, vasel, review, tom vasel, vassel, settlers, gaming, GeekUsername: TomVasel, board game review, boardgame, uno, ticket to ride, apples to apples, educational games, educational, top 10

Id: 0ZsatB7eNP0

Length: 14min 51sec (891 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 03 2020