Lost Ruins of Arnak is one of the biggest breakout hits in board games over the last couple of years, and in his review keithlaw explains why.
is a late 2020 release, a bit older than what I typically review here, but it’s become such a breakout hit—and a surprising one, given its size and the daunting setup—that it’s worth reaching back a little to give it a full breakdown. The game was one of the three finalists for the 2021 Kennerspiel des Jahres , losing out to, but has raced into the top 40 on the tough-to-crack BoardGameGeek all-time rankings, and is the #2 “family” game behind only the runaway hit.
The game takes place over five rounds, and within each round, players may continue taking actions as long as they’d like, until they run out of possible moves. This often means exhausting everything in their hand of five cards, placing both explorers, and spending most or all of the resources they’ve acquired to either buy cards or move up the research tracks.
One common mechanic I see in many complex board games is track advancement, where players have to push their tokens up two, three, or even four tracks that might represent things like science or research or culture, but that are physically and thematically disconnected from the rest of the game., a heavy game I think is overdesigned.
The mechanics themselves are not that complex, but there’s a bit of a high cognitive load for a “family” game—and I do not agree with how Boardgamegeek defines that term. You’re asking a lot of a kid under 10 to keep all of the possible moves and the sequence of actions they might want to execute over multiple turns in their heads while they wait for other players to go.
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