REVIEW: Find Treasure in LOST RUINS OF ARNAK and Its First Expansion, EXPEDITION LEADERS
Going on an adventure with friends to explore the unknown, find treasures, and fight monsters can be lots of fun even if it is just on a board game. Lost Ruins of Arnak gives you that sense of adventure in a complex, but rewarding, worker-placement board game. Along with that, the Expedition Leaders expansion adds a perfect level of asymmetry to make each game far more unique, challenging, and rewarding. It also adds a load of new artifacts, creatures, and other things for even more replayability. Overall, these two together give an extremely strong gaming experience that can be played many, many times.
Let’s focus first on the base version of Lost Ruins of Arnak. It is a game of exploration that involves juggling a few resources and building a deck that lets you do more impactful actions turn after turn. You’ll be collecting artifacts and items, using those to take stronger turns actually placing your workers. Those workers/explorers find new areas, fight monsters, and gather resources. Without going into a lot more detail, there are a lot of different mechanics in the game to say the least, but they interconnect well and are easy to handle after the first few rounds of playing. The base version of Lost Ruins of Arnak is a strong worker-placement game that has a wonderful amount of variety to keep players well interested.
The expansion, Expedition Leaders, adds another layer of complexity to the game that really makes this game feel more fun, strategic, and smart. This expansion also adds a number of new monsters, temples to explore, artifacts, assistants, monsters and more. However, the most important part of this expansion is the asymmetric leaders. Each player will get a leader which gives them unique cards to play, mechanics, and strategies. These, in combination with the large variety of other things, makes the game feel surprisingly fresh each time you play it. The only complaint to be had is that it would be nice if there were a few more leaders to choose from and some of them get a bit too complicated for their own good. Other than that, this expansion is a perfect addition to the base game and is almost a must have to get the full experience of Lost Ruins of Arnak.
If you enjoy worker-placement games and want something moderately complex that has a lot of replay value, then this is an easy recommendation. While the rules and mechanics might get to be a bit much at times (especially a few of the leaders from the expansion), it is well worth learning and playing multiple times if you have players that are willing to put in the energy to appreciate and learn the complex strategies.
