The 4 Squares Review - Ark Nova

[Music] welcome to the dice tower a series of video reviews about board and card games here are your hosts hey everybody i'm tom vassell i'm zeke garcia i'm chris yeah and i'm mike delecio and today we're taking a look at a new big game from capstone called ark nova in which you are designing a new zoo but you're not just capturing the animals in the zoo you're then trying to raise your conservation levels too even possibly releasing some animals into the wild correct has 255 different cards in it and it's basically well it's a bunch of different mechanisms put together i will show you that right now there's a lot going on in this game so i'm not going to go over every detail just enough to hopefully give you an idea of how the game plays each player is going to have two markers one is going to keep track of your appeal of your zoo and mostly you'll get a peel by adding more animals animals will give you a certain amount of peel and you'll be moving your track around like this your other track is moving on this green one on the outside of the board and this is your conservation effort and you'll notice this has fewer spaces when these two pass each other that's going to signal the end of the game and then whoever's pass each other the most there's a few cards that will let you continue moving them at the end the farther apart they are is who determines who the winner is if you're the only person to pass you win um otherwise whoever passes farther is the winner of the game the game revolves around each player's own little zoo here so this is my zoo and as the game progresses you're going to be building different enclosures into your zoo and filling them with animals you're doing so using this river of cards down here so you notice as a card and above each card is a number one through five at the beginning of the game your animals always starts in one the other four are random on your turn and the game's just going to keep going around the table one at a time you're going to pick a card take the action of that card associate it with the number that's there then you'll move that card to number one moving the other cards up one of the resources you can get in this game are these little x's you can have at most five of them you can add these when you take the action of a card even making it go above five now what these five cars are basically how the games run first we have buildings when you build you're going to spend money so everyone starts the game with 25 money but you're going to want to get more money as the game goes by and you're you can build one building you can build a building up to size whatever's here so here i could build a building up to size three so there's a size two building i would pay two per each space so this would cost me four my first building goes on the outside after that each building let's say later on i built a level three building or even maybe went up and built this level five building each building must touch one of the other buildings you can't go in the rocks or the water but you can cover up these different spots in the board which will give you bonuses draw a card get one of those x's get 10 money so you're trying to cover bonuses but also build these enclosures you're trying to cover up this whole board because it will give you seven appeal if you do so now there are special buildings each player has for example a petting zoo that you can build and then there's the aviary and reptile exhibit that can be built later on over the course of the game you can also build little kiosks or pavilions pavilions give you money kiosks give you appeal so that's what the build action does the animal action lets you put animals into your zoo so animals are going to come from the cards in your hand players are going to start with four cards you'll get more as the game goes by some animals are pretty easy to put out there this one costs 12 to get the dusky leaf monkey and it needs an enclosure of at least size two so if i have a size 2 i would turn it over and pay the 12. but if i didn't have a size 2 i could turn over a size 3 or even a size 5. it doesn't matter as long as it's big enough animals will give you different icons they'll give you an appeal this one gives you five appeal and have a special ability this one's clever this says after finishing a current action you may place any action card on the number one spot shifting everything else some cards will have a requirement this greater flamingo has a size 3 but needs to be placed next to water so i could use i could have put the flamingo in this one here because it was a size 3 and it was next to water some require themselves to be next to mountain or if you have a special building built instead of taking up the whole enclosure this rock monitor just takes up one spot in your reptile area and when that happens you would just simply take a cube and place it there to show how many spots it took up this elephant takes a five enclosure and requires a level two building card which we'll talk about a second this one needs to be next to two mountains in a level two and this has to go in the petting zoo it's the only place it can go in some other animals will have various requirements that they need that you need to have icons you'll see there's different icons sometimes you'll need to have those icons to even put that animal in your zoo then there are sponsor sponsor cards let you play sponsor the sponsor actually once you play sponsored cards from your hand these sponsor cards are free to play as long as the sponsor is at that number or higher so you simply play the card in front of you some of them are pretty basic the science institute just gives you two science symbols letting you play other cards this federal grant is going to add three to your income immediately gives you three and gives you an extra point at the end an extra movement on the conservation track if you've reached nine on your reputation this one here is going to give you an immediate appeal for every predator that you have in your zoo and during the income phase will give you more money if you have enough predators in your zoo and i'm showing you three out of dozens and dozens and dozens of cards that you can play these are special ability type cards sometimes some of them even come with their own special like i might get a turtle sanctuary it comes with its own tile that goes in my zoo and gets added to everything so there's a several special tiles that go with specific cards that you can play the next card is the association card and this lets you do an association task you're going to take one of the people that you have at the beginning of the game you only start with one and you'll place it on these spots this moves you up the reputation track which i'll show you later this gives you a partner zoo in another country when you get a partner zoo you're going to place it here that's going to give you a discount of three on animals that have that icon on them and also as you cover up these different spots you're going to get bonuses the same thing can be said when you go over here you can get a university this gives you a bigger hand limit it moves you on the reputation track and these give you science symbols and then very importantly if you take the level 5 action you can contribute to a conservation effort so the game starts with these out there but players have a chance to play more of them from their hand if you draw some into your hand if you meet one of these let's say for example this requires reptile icons in your zoo so let's say i have four reptile icons in my zoo i'm going to be able to place a cube on here which moves me up the conservation track this is one of the main ways to move up the conservation track not only that the cube is going to come from one of these spots here which are going to give me some immediate benefits give me another worker that i have a chance to place give me some cash or x's or give me an immediate benefit but also this will add to my income during the income phase so the moving putting on this association board is going to help make your other actions better you're also going to want to draw more cards that's what the card action does depending on what number you play it's going to let you draw a certain number of cards and discard them or you can snap if you play level five snap simply means you can take any of these face up cards wherever they might be on the board now you'll notice at the top here it says break two and incidentally on the sponsor card you can always break the number it's at and gain that much money and what that means is you'll move this break token down that many spaces on this track when the break token hits the end of the track whoever makes it go there gets an x and it basically ends around players will have to discard down to three cards or five if they have that university you'll refill any of the empty spots here so that players have a chance to get them again you'll disc card some cards in the lineup up here and then everyone gets income next to the spot where your appeal is is your base income so this player is on 21 appeal they would get 17 income plus any cards that give you income once that happens the break tokens reset and players keep going one of the very cool features of the game is as you do different actions sometimes an action like for example getting your second level partner zoo getting your second university will let you upgrade one of your cards and you can flip it over to level two and over the course of the game you'll be able to if you play the game perfectly you'll be able to upgrade four of your five cards so when you do that for example the animal card lets you play zero at level one but when it's at level five you can play two animal cards but when you flip it over the numbers change and as you saw earlier that elephant card that i had could only be played if i have a level two animal card so that's the only way to get an elephant in your zoo the cards here lets you not only draw more cards but lets you draw cards from your reputation range so we've been talking about reputation a bit here and there's a reputation track that each player is on and you'll move down here what this does is as you move farther down that track it gives bonuses of course but also as you move down that track when you draw a card instead of drawing cards from the top of the deck or in addition to you can draw any of the cards that you are passed on here which is sort of like the snap if you double on the build you can build more than one building when you're building in your area you can build on top of these spots that normally you can't build and this is where you can build the large bird aviary or the reptile house in the sponsors you get more money you can play more than one sponsor card and then the association you can do more than one association task and you can play your own green cards and you can make donations which is basically spending money to move up on the conservation track so that is essentially the basic rules of the game there's more stuff going on there's all like i said there's bonuses as you pass different things there's ways to put a double times two on one of your cards to double the action on it and there's different zoos i'm showing you the most basic zoo some zoos have special buildings in that give the player special abilities and there are ways to play a card to release one of your animals back into the wild that one just needs a partner this one here i can release an animal with an australian icon into the wild which makes you lose your appeal of that animal but moves you up on the conservation track and so lots of different things and a humongous deck of cards no game will ever play the same way twice [Music] now there is a lot of icons in the game but i don't find them to be particularly difficult this is a huge deck of cards uh in a four player game you might go through maybe more than half of them maybe but you're not even going to play all of them you'll be discarding cards a lot but i really like for example on the different cards it will tell you this keyword dominance here but then it explains what it is and if you want to know more you can look it up in the glossary to see exactly what that keyword does but i also there are some cards that are kind of negative towards other players they're cars that will attack other players and i think it's fairly minor what they have here but if you don't want to play with that there's a little blue line here that you can do if you want to play a friendlier game without any take that in it the the rule book itself i found to be i mean there's a lot of rules here but the game i have found has been fairly easy to teach people because it has a nice flow to it there's also a glossary which helps if you know i want to learn more about constriction again i think the card explains it but if you want to know more it's written in the glossary which is easy and then there's an extra sheet here that shows you all the different tokens and what they stand for so it's it's a busy game don't i don't i'm not gonna pretend that there's not a lot of things floating around but i found that it became a little intuitive as you started playing so when i talk about arc nova the people who played games before it's impossible to i don't talk about this without always referencing other games yes i'm like hey the track is going to cross in the winners that's just like um the game card play it's very similar to terraforming mars and the cards maneuvering is from civilization and new dawn right yeah so there's a lot in fact i think i'd be hard-pressed to find anything in this game that feels original to this game i'm not saying that's a bad thing at all i'm just saying that it's using a lot of stuff that if you play a lot of these type of games you've seen before i agree yeah i don't think innovation is its calling card i think that it feels familiar uh in a lot of ways but like you said that's not necessarily a bad thing sometimes familiarity is a comforting feeling um especially for a heavy game for a heavy game right you have that's a good point you have a little bit more kind of contextual head starts almost shorthand yeah shorthand shorthand hey i'm familiar with these ideas therefore it's easier to pick up yeah but that being said the two mechanisms that that very much are similar to other games were the two paths crossing and the card river that's what you call it the card river yeah mark underneath there that's from civilization they're barely used in games i remember when we played that civilization game i said the game was okay but i love that card thing and i wish they used it in a better game and now they have yeah and when i played rajas well i'd love rajas of the ganges and i thought i wouldn't mind seeing this in more games either and so i yeah i i don't have an issue with that being kind of the victory condition across the two paths yeah so the game is themed about building a zoo in fact a lot of people call this terraforming zoo um but when i introduce this to people and i've introduced it to many folks they all always get excited about the theme and i gotta say i like that and normally i know you don't like uh pictures in games i don't normally yes but i didn't and i don't normally like that either but i thought they were fine here because they're actual pictures of animals and people but i thought it looked pretty good i think it fits okay in this game and i think it is um there's a certain seriousness to it all that pictures and pictures lend to that that works well for me in this game this is a thinking game this is a very crunchy game and so a real illustration of a parakeet you know this this person who is dressed apart at least of you know park ranger whatever it adds to the mood i did not find it distracting or bothersome in this i think uh a big part of that in other games for me is screen captures it's not really the same thing sure you know screen capture might take a character in the background and blow them up to be their own card and they'll look all pixelated and messed up this is just photography yeah this is one where the art i'm a little bit ambivalent about it i don't think it's bad it's not like oof but i also don't think it's a knockout to me the the visual it is functional and that's important like you said in a game like this where there's so many cards and you're having to reference different aspects of these cards usability is the the number one concern and so on that front i think it's great but the the appeal that the table presence is not more i'm like whoa that's a looker you know what i mean what i mean to say is i think the art style like that look is like what they went for is functional that's true you know i know that it is also functional yes yes but like that seems to be the main driving force of like we're going for a uh retro sci-fi yard work you know it might be one game or like oh we're going for like you know a viking inspired blood-soaked landscape functional is what we're going for it looks like zoo books or national geographic for kids or something not like not children's but like there's a there's literally a picture at one point of like a third grade uh field trip to a zoo which makes sense this is about building a zoo you're going to attract kids it was it was a little jarring at first to see a bunch of you know dorky looking third graders like oh we're going to the zoo and i remember oh yeah that's what we're doing it works i don't have a complaint about the art and i think that theme though in this game really helps drive it uh you guys have said it's a complicated game there's a lot going on in this game but the theme is really helps drive home the mechanisms i am building a building i am using my government funding power to get these sponsors on board i have a sister zoo so therefore getting animals from that country are cheaper for me to bring in um this animal is a bigger animal so needs a bigger pen right all that stuff makes sense and this game has icons like iconography yeah sorry you're trying to say both icons and iconography right at the same time iconography oh equivalent to the race for the galaxy there's a lot of icons in this they're all yes but i don't have a problem with them because they make sense thematically and also a lot of cards explain exactly what the stuff does they do they do and i'm glad that you mentioned that because while playing the game feels to me pretty procedural and mechanical sure the game is a procedural mechanical feeling game but the theme kind of helps you with that so it never feels like burdensome if that makes sense i never feel like i'm having to work against the iconography or what i i don't feel like i'm having to remind myself what things do because everything makes sense it just makes sense so i think that they have a nice thematic connection to the mechanisms and i really like that card thing i mean i'll keep coming back to that i can play with that all day long i think it's interesting and when you combine that with the fact that i know the cards in my hand no one else has them yes and i really like that because my zoo has the bengal tiger in nobody else has the bengal tiger yeah and i like the fact that you can do that and there's all kinds of cards you can get and you can try so many different strategies from game game i think yeah it lends itself it's taking that page out of terraforming mars right gigantic deck you will not cycle through it you will not reshuffle the discard pile you won't get to see things again if you discard a card you're never going to get to build it that's true you throw the hand away hand coming back no more panda and i like that a lot i think the thing that bothers me a little bit about the the deck of cards is that it's very difficult to draw cards there's a lot of cards that have restrictions on them which usually i'm fine with right i have to have certain types of things in my zoo certain features in order to be able to play the panda panda is a difficult animal to maintain in a zoo you got to have some standards i find that some of the icons i don't mind others i do when uh when an animal requires a lot of other animal symbols uh in order to be able to play it out you know i really want to work towards this do i just discard it now uh you know i've got one of the two ape symbols that i need let me start drawing cards get the other ones i need i feel like that part bothers me a little bit too much it's too restrictive when something needs multiple of the same type of animal requirement to build it out so what are your thoughts what would your thoughts be on if instead of the way it is now which is this massive deck that you have there which makes it super easy for setup right you take this deck out set up your your river or your market do you think it would have worked better to have staged cards so that cards that have fewer requirements are available to you in the first quarter of the game then as the later game goes on you add you know second or third stage cards to it do you think that would have worked not me most of the time you know it's fine terraforming i mean i cannot help but think of terraforming mars the board game or the card game right when i play this it's such a it acts as a such a similar part of the brain the engagement the sort of like short-term pursuit of i want to build this card long-term pursuit of i want to have this many african animals for that over there and you know in 45 minutes i like that and it very much makes me feel the same way now one you you're mentioning one limitation you found bothersome one thing i found could have been a little bit better and this is a graphical issue actually some of the cars well the card type is denoted by a colored frame yeah sometimes the image works against the card type so animals are one card frame but there are other kinds of cards that might have a picture of uh a horse or whatever oh like a sponsor card that yeah and it's not an animal got it yeah the icon that was a little wiffy the icon in the top corner let you know it does but also the big splash of color is the you know like big picture that draws the eye and then you got to look at the kai khan and the color and be like this is not a horse this is some company to chris's point i like that i think that's a feature of the game because i like to being able to pivot i sit there with the panda which is one of the animals that's harder to get out you need like two other bears before you can put it out and i sit there and go is it worth hanging on to so maybe it's not from a gameplay perspective maybe it is for me it's a from a thematic perspective i'm like it's happening but i might at some point see something else and go sorry panda right right in fact then one game i got to pan and then next time i was like and he's released come to my zoo everybody the panda's here i'm kidding but look how conservative we are right how can we help fix nature i do like that feeling in games that feeling of i'm gonna keep hanging on to this i can do it i can do it and finally you might let that go and then later you can do it in the game you know several turns maybe you're like oh can i hang on i gotta hang on to it yeah i enjoy that feeling it forces you to make choices and to be clear i like those choices a lot i like restrictions on when can i build this card out i like being able to strategically move towards those restrictions i feel like some of them have a little too much luck for the length of the game and for the thoughtfulness of the game right but i do like especially the restrictions where you can meet those requirements by doing other actions by going to the worker placement board on the side getting a partnership zoo unlocking some of the other types of things i love those interactions a lot yeah and much like terraforming mars you might just have a situation where one or two players of the table have a much better starting synergy of the cards that they have you know that they're able to build and then put an animal out within the first couple of turns and other people don't actually i played a game against somebody and they were sitting and i was like where are the animals in your zoo and they have the government funding and stuff i was like i see what kind of zoo this is right but i if the one thing that's gonna appeal to people about this is that constant you're getting good things you put a building in your zoo you cover up icons you get that stuff you move up a track you get to do this flipping the card over to the number two side gives you such a you want to flip a rush of like and all these good options and that's always where i'm at with the game i like is does it give me a lot of good options and in this game i felt the whole time this is a long game yes um yeah uh i i feel like you should play max of three honestly that's one of my negative points well i don't know i i don't disagree on that but i also one of my favorite games la hop i won't play with more than three sure and it's one of my favorite games right i feel the same way here i feel like this is really good at two and three fantastically but i will say for as long as the game is not once am i ever bored in it ever because turns are so fast and the longest turn is when the break happens or when someone does something that then lets them take another action and then i'm waiting a little bit more time but usually i'm like i'm building you go now i'm building this animal it's pretty fast yeah it's got a nice forward momentum it really does it does and even when you have that break which is downtime you're making money and you're getting out and bringing back your people right and so you always do our propelling forward even when you're releasing an animal yeah you're letting that animal go but you're getting something right you're shooting up some track i love working the two tracks you know um it all works together very well yeah this game also just a small thing but it does something that i like a lot it doesn't i don't see it in a lot of games which is at the beginning of the game you're dealt two end game scoring cards right oftentimes what happens is they'll say hey take two of these end game scoring cards pick one and discard the other one and you're like i have no idea i don't know the way this game works is that it's staged a bit so it's what how many when you get to ten once the first person hits ten on the uh conservation right on the conservation rate which is a pretty significant length into the game then everybody has to discard down one yeah that's so much smarter why why that should be the standard in every game ones that you're picking at the beginning of the game and it's a sensible trigger point it's not it's not something arbitrary it's when someone gets to this point of the game which means the game has had that forward momentum already you have an idea of what your park is going to look like hopefully i just appreciated that as a design decision and that's not something that i see in a lot of games that feels pretty unique to this one and it's the best of both worlds it's not you have to pick one at the end of the game to score right it's and it's not what you said it's somewhere in the middle of the game you need to you got to make up your mind right right pick one work towards it and another good design decision is the attack cards they're fairly innocuous in my opinion they're annoying right i play a card against you i've annoyed you you now have to pay two or whatever or you this card is a little bit less valuable but you can choose at the beginning of the game to not play with those and then it has another bar of text there which is also a good thing to do you don't have to take them out of the deck yes that's nice it's just an alternate way to play that card yeah the solo mode i will say every game i've played with so far people have chosen to play with take that and nobody at the end of the game said i wish we had it none of them are like game breaking no they're not crushing they're not i'm stealing your animal right right that kind of thing burning down a building of yours [Laughter] all right chris what do you think i i'm of two minds because i really enjoy the game i really enjoy pretty much every mechanism in it it also just is a little bit longer uh we've we've talked about how it's so hard not to compare this to other games i love terraforming mars but i play this and i think this one could have been a little bit quicker than terraforming mars is and it's it's not quite there i mean it maybe with more plays and maybe with more plays that with people that particularly know it uh but i have so much fun with the card manipulation that the action driver of the game is so enjoyable and i like that it's not just drawing cards off the top as you progress throughout the game you get more access to the stuff that's face up on the table i think that's good and that's a small compensation for my earlier complaint about not being able to draw too many cards over the course of the game so i think i'm coming in at an eight because it's very very fun good theme uh and i feel like almost everything matches well really well with the theme so i'm i'm liking it i want to play it more all right mike well it's going to be very simple we actually have very similar thoughts my main beef about it is i do feel like it it's a bit long for for what the experience is because i feel like three-quarters of the way through the game you've kind of done everything you're you know what i mean i feel like i'm ready at that point let's let's you know let's let's uh get this to a close but what you're doing is fun and you're right the downtime is not a huge issue it's this kind of like constant little endorphin hit every time you do something everything you do feels good and uh but it doesn't feel like arbitrary it's not one of those point salary it's like i play a card i get three points it's not like that but everything you're doing is that forward momentum and that's a really strong feeling i just wish it was maybe a quarter shorter i'm also at an eight i think it does a really good job as as a total package but a little shorter okay well paint me bright red and call me a parrot because um i was hoping i was gonna go after chris because i was gonna just you know parrot what you were saying um i feel the same way as you guys do largely i like it i think it suffers for me in my head because i know terraforming mars yeah that's almost the biggest knock i have against it yeah you know but if you like terraforming mars you and you know what kind of game this is you saw the overview you've heard us talk about it i can almost like 95 guarantee you that you already know if you would like this game or not there's not a lot of i feel like you're not going to discover something especially if you've played some of those games halfway through where you go oh this isn't what i thought it was going to be this is what you think it's going to be yes it's good right it's a little long yeah it's a couple of tiny graphical issues yeah it's a heavy euro game it's going to happen um but it's solid i really did enjoy it i think it's once you've internalized what's going on you're gonna have a good time putting your big old zoo together an eight as well strong eight the length doesn't bother me sometimes i want to play longer games sure and for the past two weeks i've not wanted to play any other game in the studio i just want to keep playing this to the point where any time people come by i'm teaching i want to play this i really like this game i don't think i'm going to play terraforming mars anymore wow um because between aries expedition you like the fear of this better anyway i mean i like sci-fi i don't like the theme of this i'm not always shouting about space but i love i love zoos i really do i like the idea of building the zoo but that card river the upgrading the cards the making the choices as to i like to getting an animal and then releasing it the two tracks it takes it takes my favorite mechanism of a bunch of games and puts them together in a theme that you love and it does the one thing i love about these style games is you give me a plethora of good choices i don't have an animal i can build right now but i can upgrade my zoo and i really disagree with you where you said that you were running out of things to do in the end i oh i i'd like i'll make my zoo bigger no i wasn't pointing out like doing the same thing yeah yeah no but you there's a hard switch at one point where you start releasing animals and you know going towards the conservation side yeah anyway for me this is a 10. oh this is my favorite game of this i played in a long time i feel just privileged to be here no because this is just everything i want a game to be i the first time you talked to me about this game he was openly weeping i remember i was like i thought you might come in at attendance i you you were so so enamored with this i really really like you you keep showing it to me yeah i do because i don't know there's i just like everything i just like everything about it i like the upgrades i like i don't feel like oh i wish it was more animals because i haven't seen them all yet oh my gosh every time i play it someone shows me a car says look what this does i'm like wow it's cool right right at some point i'll get there yeah but and then it'll be it'll drop down to a four at that point no but there's it's it's neat it's a table hog although it's smaller than some of the games we played this year yeah no i i think it's reasonably sized for well i mean there's cards spread everywhere it looks like a mad scientist is done when you're finished you've got cards driven game i mean it is yeah it is what it is yeah absolutely one thing i want yeah one thing i want to show a shout out is that it has one of my favorite mechanisms wherein you create end game scoring conditions for the table or i guess through you know mid-game scoring conditions for everybody you also create your own endgame scoring conditions with some of those sponsor cards you play out and they're not guaranteed points there are more things that you can open up and work to i think maybe that's what i need to focus more on that last quarter of the game right but yeah i don't know that's very cool thank you it's an excellent game i'm still debating whether we're going to diced our library or not oh please please but that's arc nova anyway check it out until next time i'm tom vassell i'm z garcia i'm chris yi and i'm mike delicio have fun going to the zoo [Music] you

Channel: The Dice Tower

Views: 130,223

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, juegosdemesa, Brettspiele, ボードゲーム, brädspel, jeuxdesociété, משחקילוח, 보드게임, deskováhra, graplanszowa, bordspel, 棋盘游戏, gioco da tavolo, desková hra, gra planszowa, настольная игра, trò chơi trên bàn cờ, jogo de tabuleiro, لعبة اللوحة

Id: DOz2NLD5WOI

Length: 34min 33sec (2073 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Grenian]

I never liked TfM, don't know why. But Ark Nova is so damn good. Little downtime, satisfying play and nice theme. I have 5 plays already and I can totally understand why Tom gives this a 10. IMO 9.5/10.

[u/jayceja]

Looks like an interesting game that I'll probably try out some time, but man the visual design and art is is only slightly better than terraforming mars and that stops me from getting excited about the game.

[u/Zaorish9]

This is great evidence of why people should take game reviews with a grain of salt. Each reviewer has preferences--and that's ok!

[u/ThyFemaleDothDeclare]

I'm shocked.

Was easily the unanimous pick for most disappointing game we played at BGGCon for my group of 3.

We already weren't much into TM as group, thought it was ok and prefer Ares Expedition. But this felt like it removed all interaction from TM EXCEPT the attack cards (the worst part), and some how made it even longer...

Guess this will be a hotness that I just am not in on.

[u/johnjon85]

Seems fun, and I like the theme. Other reviewers have stated that it overstays its welcome. At 2.5+ hours, I would tend to agree. So a pass from me for now. I just picked up Ares Expedition recently, so that'll scratch about the same itch for me anyway.

[u/materix01]

Wonder if there's a list of games he's given a 10 to.

[u/LinFTW]

The interactivity seems kind of low outside of the cards that let you attack your opponent and I'm not a huge fan of attack cards in long games of this style. In something like Res Arcana it's fine because the game is short but if you've been building your plan for 1-2 hours and someone uses an attack card randomly that ruins your plan it feels really bad.

I also don't like the "art" if you can consider a direct copy and paste of stock images to be one.

[u/thekingofthejungle]

I'm sold. Just pre-ordered at my FLGS, was $58. Anyone know when it's supposed to hit shelves?

[u/ratatouille_skinner]

Wish it was up to 5 players