 It just so happened, there's a recent game from 2020, the Lost Ruins of Arnick or Arnac or Airnake, which is moderately popular, got a pretty high rating on board game geek right now. And also, it happens to be supported on board game arena. So the stars came together and we played it the other day. I've only played it once. I had a friend who learned it and went out of their way to teach it to us. And that helped a lot. Designed by Ben Elwin. So yeah, so this game is a game that combines basically two of the biggest mechanics in the Euro gaming world, deck building, like Dominion and worker placement, like every worker placement game ever, Agricola, right? So we had already previously played a game that did a similar thing, the same combination, which is do an Imperium. I don't think we did a show on it. Nope, because I got, I got to play that one again before I have an opinion that I'm going to share publicly because we didn't do a show right away. So it wasn't fresh in our minds. Not just that, but we only, our first playthrough had several errors and issues that I need to play again with knowledge to decide if I like the game or not. I need to like read, read the rules. It's been so long, but ruins of our neck. We just played it the other day, and it was much simpler and easier to comprehend in our minds as much more streamlined, you know, and whatnot. So I don't feel like we need to play it again to do an episode. We can't obviously talk about how to win, especially not the way I play it. I played like trash. Yep, I did okay. But I was, I was basically doing what the player who one was doing, but one round behind them. So yeah. But yeah, so obviously, you know, it take the two biggest mechanics of Euro gaming that are, and combine them into one game. That's obviously a great idea. It's, you know, going to be a winner. I enjoyed both of those games. So I don't know if there's any other games that have attempted that combo. I expect more to come, but, you know, both of those games I enjoyed, ruins of our neck, I think was like the, you know, more accessible. The theme is obviously less fun because it's not doomed. There's no worms and whatnot, but it's just the game is very like elegant for this kind of game. Like imagine all these mechanics together, but they're matched together pretty elegantly. It's a very fast play. Once you know the rules, like this is a 20 to 30 minute game among people. I think the reason it's a fast play is for two reasons. Number one, it does the thing I like where on your turn, you do an action and then it's the next person's turn. You don't take your whole goddamn turn like root and then everyone else takes a nap, right? You do one action that it goes around and then you do one action that goes around like ticket to ride. So that makes it feel faster because you're constantly, you're doing actions and you're not waiting too much. And two, the game is always a set number of rounds and it's not that many. It's like five, six, it's not a lot of rounds, five rounds, ever no matter what it's five rounds. So you're really only taking, and especially in the early rounds, you're taking like two actions in the later rounds, maybe six or seven, you know, not that many actions and you've got two workers and that's all you ever get. You start with two workers and end with two workers. So it sidesteps a fundamental issue with most worker placement games is that if they're not designed extremely well, the get more workers action ends up being the most important thing in the game. And that tends to cause certain styles of play that aren't actually that fun. In ruins of our neck, you are, you know, there are some actions where you don't need workers, but of the actions that you do need workers, the big actions, you basically have 10 actions the whole game. That's it. It's take 10 actions game over. So it's going to be a quick one and each action is going to matter a lot. We'll get back to that. Some actions don't need workers because that actually really adds to this game. And I will actually, what I would compare this game, the most two of all the games I could say, I don't think, I don't know if you'll agree, but I played this game more. It's, it does a lot of whatever Dell does in terms of your directional heuristics, but it does them so much better. I mean, I think I'm going to compare it the most to Dune Imperium still, which is another game that is worker placement and deck building. So basically the theme is a typical, you're exploring some ancient ruins in some forgotten continent somewhere, some sort of, you know, fantasy archaeology, Indiana Jones deal, you know, you know the theme, but the game at least makes it clear board games. It's not a real world place, nor are there any people there at all. Like they're very explicit about that. And there is a temple with ridiculous magic nonsense in it. And you're the first people ever setting foot here basically. No, but you're still looting an ancient or lost civilization that just, you know, of some kind. Yeah. So basically you've got this board that has some near areas that are like a base camp, some kind of far away areas and some really far away areas. And then an exploration like track on the right. So on the, on the first part, you can spend movement actions to put a worker in one of these places and the further away it is, the harder it is to get to. And there can be monsters and there's resources and you're basically will be monsters. Yeah. You're basically opening up more spaces to put workers to get resources and also get victory points. And then the track is the most fascinating thing because it's really the core of the game. You're basically spending resources to move your, your, your book and your magnifying glass up this track. And there's different paths through the track that require different resources, a little bit clank like in that regard, like spend, spend two arrow heads in a ruby to move from this space to this space. And the shtick is that as you move the magnifying glass up, you get increasing numbers of victory points. It's clearly the primary way to get victory points and whoever gets to places first gets additional boons. And then there's some end game scoring at the top. Moving your book up gives you way fewer victory points, but it gets you powers on your own board. And the sort of interesting, fun mechanic there is you could never move your book past your magnifying glass and all that combined magnifying glass symbolizes like you're, you know, you're investigating, right? You're looking at artifacts, you're, you know, you're, you're look right. And then the book symbolizes your recording, your findings, right? Publishing what you've learned for the world, right? You could choose just never, never move your book, just explore on your own and then go home satisfied. Like you could do that. That's a valid strategy. Yep. You probably wouldn't win, but you can do it. And otherwise the only other thing on the board really is a track that has artifacts and items that you can buy artifacts and items are basically just cards that you put into your deck. The deck building is important, but the deck you build is extremely small. Yeah. So the items are basically early in the game, the card market is mostly items. And the item cards are not very powerful. Some of them can be, and if you get good combos and whatnot, but you know, they do good stuff, right? But they're also easy to get and you just sort of play them. The artifact cards are very powerful. And when you buy one, it activates immediately, right? But if you, if you draw an artifact again later after, like you bought it, it activated immediately. It eventually makes its way into your deck. You draw it again. If you want to play it again, you actually have to spend a tablet resource every time you play one. And so it's harder to get the repeat effect on the artifacts. And as the game goes on, that card market where you can get new cards from shifts to basically consist of more artifacts and less items. So it's like, eventually at the end of the game, it's like, yeah, you know, first of all, it's late in the game. Why are you even buying items? They're so weak, but also, right? It's like, here's more artifacts to choose from late in the game. You know, go ahead and especially if you buy them late in the game, you probably will never draw them. You're just going to buy them, get their immediate effect, and there are worth victory points. Even though the most victory points comes from the magnifying glass, there are so pretty much everything you do gives some number of victory points. A good thing about this game, one victory point matters and three victory points is kind of like the unit of significant advancement. Like three victory points is a big fuck you and everyone else at the table, but one victory point could easily make or break the game for you. Yep, sure enough. So the cards in your deck are interesting too, because remember what we said earlier, you have two workers, but you could take more than two actions. Some actions require you put a worker down to do a thing. Usually the worker things involve getting resources and cards can be used as free actions to do a thing, usually give you a resource of a particular type, but they can also do other things depending on what the card says. And you keep going around, taking turns until you pass. Once you pass, you're out. So you could use all your cards first and then use your two workers. You could use a worker to do a thing, use a bunch of cards, then use your second worker to do a thing that you couldn't have done before. You could mess up and not have any workers left and then there's a thing you really wanted to do that someone else unlocked or changed the state of the game. So you're always having this decision of what do I do and how do I limit my options, because every action you take severely limits what additional remaining actions you can take in a given turn. The two workers that you have, basically the actions they do are the ones in the middle of the board. Go explore a new spot, go collect resources from the camps at the bottom, the easy free spots, fight a monster, those sorts of things. You could only do that twice per turn. And that's it. You got the two workers at the end. The moving the magnifying glass, that's just spending resources. You spend resources and you move it. That's just an action. Buying a card, you just get the resources and you just buy the card from the market. You don't need a worker to do that. But it is your action. So for example, if you have no valid actions on your turn, you're forced to pass even if you didn't want to. So you might do actions that make sure you have additional possible actions to stay in the round, hoping someone else will do something waiting for a new item to come out. There's a lot of surprising tactical depth for how simple this game is because of that. The other thing this does is that typical balance, right? Normally in a worker placement game, a lot of them tend to either swing in one direction of the other, right? One direction being I want to get my workers out first to get the spots before they get blocked because yes indeed in this game, if someone else went to that spot, you can't go there. But also some worker placement games, you're like, well, I kind of want to hold out to the end. I have the most information, right? Then I can go, I can run wild with my workers, right? On whatever remains, you know, blocked or not blocked. In this game, you're sort of, since it goes around and around and around, you're sort of in this constant like struggle between the two, right? If I put up my workers quickly, right? One, two, then that's sort of it. And I won't be able to respond to anything that else that happens, but I'll get what I wanted. But if I hold out, well, yeah, sure, you're going to get more info, maybe get what you wanted, right? So you actually have both pressures at once, whereas then I think in a lot of other worker placement games, only one of the two pressures is present at any given time. But the most important thing this does is that the way these actions play out and the way the magnifying glass and book track works, where you're limited, is like once you move onto a space, you can only move to other adjacent spaces as you go up. So it's constraining what resources you will need, which reduces the cognitive load of considering all the possible options. If all your biz doesn't need rubies to advance, you don't need to worry about rubies on the board most likely. So you can avoid some of the analysis paralysis that happens with more open games. There's only three, like there's two resources, right? The compass and what's the other one? Well, there's compasses, there's gold, there's rubies. So compasses are mostly used for traveling to get your workers to go to more distant places, right? But some artifacts use them, some other things use them. Yeah, gold is mostly used for getting cards, right? So those are your like early game resources that mostly are used to build up your engine. The other three resources, the tablet, the ruby, and the arrowhead are sort of the victory point, move your magnifying glass, do research resources, right? Which are mostly used for that purpose. But then each resource has a little bit extra, right? It's like towards the top of the track for victory points, you're eventually going to need some compasses to go with the magnifying glass, right? To play an artifact card, like I said before, you're going to need a spare tablet resource left over from somewhere. So they do mix it up a little bit with the costs to keep it interesting. It's not like locked in. They even have a really clever win more at the very end of the game. If you make it to the top of that track, there's like this pyramid of extra victory points you can buy out of where there's three places that require different amounts of resources and you can buy one, two, or three of them in any combination every round if you somehow are sitting up there with extra resources at the end of the game. I guess the last thing is that every card, in addition to having like an effect of some kind, if it's like an item, right? Or even like the basic cards the game just gives you from the start, like you can spend them for free to get a compass or a gold or whatever. Every card has some sort of travel possibility on it. Yeah. Boots, boats, cars, planes. Boots, boats, cars. So it's like when you want to send your worker out into the world, not only do you need enough compasses to get them where they're going, so you have to get those compasses from somewhere, you also have to have, you know, play cards with enough correct transportation symbols. So now you can't use those cards for what their effect was because you had to use those cards to make the worker go to the spot that you wanted. And so then you get some tough choices as well, right? Sometimes you might pick up a crappy item just because, well, I'll use it as an airplane on it, right? You know, whatever. So it might be forced to be like, oh, I really want to play this, this good item, but that's the only way I can get that worker out is to use it as a boat. And well, if I don't do that, then the worker won't even get used this turn. What do I do? Yeah. So this is, this is sort of where the reason I want to compare and address this a little bit to Everdell is that Everdell, well, it's a very different game. This game and Everdell share a few very core heuristics in that in the early game, you're buying items and sort of either collecting resources or collecting ways to collect resources. And in the later game, you're doing victory points and other stuff. But the big difference is Everdell, as you get into later phases of the game, the possibilities open up and explode and cause extreme analysis paralysis. But in this game, your options are constrained by the decisions you have made up to this point. So it never opens up enough for you to get just completely overwhelmed with options. If you're in a spot where you need a ruby and you don't have a lot, you fucked up, you should have gotten a ruby. You could see it come in the whole time. I do think that is a problem for just many games in general, right? Is that, you know, you think about like, you know, something like monopoly or character civilization, bushiness, the concept of bushiness. You cannot have a game where bushiness increases over time. That will greatly extend the length of that game. A lot of games, the bushiness goes up and up and up and up like Civ six, you know, any Civ really towards the end of the game. The bushiness is huge. You got a ton of cities, a ton of units. It's just like, it's too big, right? You got to deal with all this crap, right? And usually early in games, you don't want to start people out with like a whole pile of resources, right at the beginning. That's too, it's like you didn't earn it. So the bushiness is small in the beginning and I think what you want to take alone. That's the only thing you can do. Take alone. Right. So I think, you know, the ideal game is going to increase bushiness quickly, right? To get your options out. And then we know that bush is down, right? Constrain them and push the game towards a conclusion. And this constrains you by a, it's hard to get a huge pile of resources and keep, there's no engine building really, right? You just, you know, builds, there's like no way you might get one combo between like an assistant and an artifact. But I tried it when I played, I tried to take the Dominion path of, uh-huh, I'll build and make a really polished deck of deck. You had the best deck by far. Yeah. I was like, I'll clear the crap out of my deck. I'll bring in all the really powerful cards into my deck. I'll build an amazing deck and hopefully then I'll draw this ridiculous hand of amazing cards, play them and score a pile of points, right? And the thing is, it took so long because you have so few actions to build that amazing deck took all five rounds. And I was never, if there were six or seven rounds, I would have won for sure, but there weren't six or seven rounds. There were five rounds and I had not scored basically any victory points worth of shit because I couldn't get the valuable resources cause I was spending my resources on polishing my deck instead. And there was, there aren't a lot of, I had basically all the draw mechanics that you could get and there aren't enough of them. So it's not like I could, I was drawing cards during my turn as much as anyone could and it wasn't enough to like play some combo. It's like, you can only do so much. You start with two workers. You end with two workers. It's like, that's it. You're 10 worker actions or the whole game, right? Plan those out and you're done. So second point of comparison between this and Everdell, the cards are the reason the game does not fall into a stale meta. The cards are the thing that shuffles the game up. Same with Everdell. The cards are every time. Yep. The cards guide like what's possible, what people are fighting over, et cetera. But the cards do not use a lot of word language so much as they have a very simple lexicon of very straightforward actions with symbols. So it takes a couple seconds to figure out what a new card does and no card. As long as you have the how to play guide is necessary for some of the symbols, right? It's not quite a race for the galaxy situation, but you do need a little guide cheat sheet to understand some of the cards. But none of the cards. There's not that many symbols. You'll learn them all pretty quickly. And none of the cards do anything particularly crazy out of the bounds of what you would expect. Like if you look at 10% of the cards, you've got a good sense of what 100% of the cards are capable of. I think we had one late game card question because there was some bad wording. But, look at Everdell. We looked up, we looked it up and we got an answer, so. Everdell, the cards have a whole bunch of language you have to parse and the cards interact with each other in really complex ways. That's why Everdell takes four hours to play. And while Board Game Geek weirdly says this game takes 30 to 120 minutes, I cannot imagine a game of this taking longer than 45 minutes. No, I get it. It's only five rounds. What are you doing? Yeah. But I like it. I like it a lot. I want to play it again like soon. And I think it has a lot of replay value because the cards are key. They are how you construct the decks, but you make such a small deck. I don't think this will fall into a hard meta under 10 to 12 plays. Like I think you could get 10 or 12 plays out of this and they would all be satisfying. Right. I think it does. Like you said, I think it has replay value. You could play this a bunch. But you could exhaust it. But it doesn't have the infinite replay value of like a T and E. Right. You can play it a bunch, but then you're going to be done with it. However, it's very obvious if there aren't expansions for this. Well, it comes with an expansion. You flip over the board and there's like the temple of the snake and everything's different. Oh, okay. So there you go. There's some replay value. But yeah, this game not only does, I guess it come with an expansion, the temple of the snake, but it is ripe for further expansion. Oh yeah. Just release a deck of, deck of weird artifacts, another sideboard you can advance on, like add a six round. Just put out different cards. Be like, all right, play with deck two instead of deck one. It's like, it's so easy to expand this game. They absolutely will. If they haven't already, I just haven't looked up whether they have already. Yep. And I think that's where you can get even more replay value from out of this. But you know, even if they never release an expansion and you do play it out, you know, whatever this game costs or whatever it costs to play on board game arena, I don't know if it's one of the free ones or one of the ones we have to free. There's a base of the way board game arena works. If people don't know is it's, it's a website that lets you play board games against people online and it works. So that's really good. But the UI is really not great, but it works. And they have a lot of top tier board games on there, you know, ranging from all sorts of different weight levels and whatnot. But if you want to start a new game, like if you want to play six nymph, you can just like play six nymph on there for free. If you want to play some games like I wanted to play, what was it called, don't stop or whatever or can't stop. It's like, well, I didn't have a premium account. So if someone else who did have a premium account started a game of can't stop, they could invite me to join it. It might just be worth it for what like me to get a premium account because, but looks like we're gonna be locked down for a while. You can start a new game of any game, but if you have a free account, you can only join games created by premium accounts or start games. If they're free games, I will warn you on this. If you play this on board game arena, it works great, but any card Scott got burned by this two different players if there's a card where you can get a resource thing or pass to get a different resource thing, you have to pass via the card. If you just click pass, you're just S. O. L. Yep. That's what happened to me. It's and that's a user interface board game arena. Nothing to do with the game itself. The card would have happened if we're playing in person. There's no way that can happen. Exactly. So I would, I don't know if I would buy this game only because like personally not saying you shouldn't buy it only because one probably takes up a lot of space. It's big. It's not a small game. Yep. I don't know when I'll be playing games in person box anytime soon. But also this is the kind of game that like the PAX tabletop library will probably have two or three copies of. And this is the kind of game. If I was at any random PAX, I would check it out at least once and play it like every PAX. Yeah. Yeah. Play it. Well, you know, play it once, put it back, right? You know, if you're a person who has board game nights still somehow and you've got it, it only goes up to four players. I think it goes one to four. Obviously one is not the same game, but it isn't the same game either. You want three or four. Yeah, you definitely want three or four, though. I think two is more the same game than other games because it is mostly a race. It is mostly a race. There isn't too much player interaction other than blocking off other people's spaces with your workers and also buying cards before other people can buy them. Other than that, there's no contention and there's no player interaction. Yeah. But you could make an agricula, right? Agricula is a game that has cards, even though it's not deck building where, you know, there was the main deck of agricula cards. The basic one didn't have any player interaction. The only interaction in agricula is blocking. They could make a player interaction expansion. Right. Agricula had the alternate deck with player interaction cards. They could easily, maybe those cards exist and we just didn't see them in our play, but they could easily print more cards that have player interaction like steal a resource from a friend or, you know, move someone else's magnifying glass backwards or steal someone's book. I don't know. You could do so much stuff with that. You know, take someone's monster. I don't know. I would also say that if you like this game, you would probably like Crown of Amara in terms of if you like this game, you're going to like Doon Imperium, which is also deck building and workplace. Well, honestly, if you like this game, you're going to like a lot of classic euros too. Yeah. And vice versa. It's basically just, you know, it's a solid euro. I don't think it's a legendary all time game. No, but it's just polished. It's just a really solid, polished euro. It's balance two of the top mechanics. The rules feel right. Like everything's elegant about it. I have no material complaints. Not broken. Yeah. And seriously, if you know the rules and your friends know the rules and they're like us, this is a 30 to 40 minute game tops. You could crank out a few of these in a row. Yep. Yep. I do worry that setup would take a while physically though. You don't have to deal out like the spaces in the monsters immediately. Oh yeah. You deal them when you land on them. So I guess it could just be. Yeah. I mean, you could deal them when you land on them or otherwise, but it doesn't matter, right? It's a difference. There's no difference. They're faced down. So who cares? Yep. But no, this is a solid game that I recommend. And it's not just because we haven't played a lot of different games lately. It's like a BB plus, you know, solid game worth playing, worth owning. If you got a lot of euro players. Yeah. You know, I feel the same urge to play it that I feel the urge to play things like Honestess Trotonica or like Tempest, like all the games I like. It's in the class of games, rooms, like games, rim likes. Yeah. The only thing, the only thing I guess that I don't, I think it's lacking it game wise is that I don't feel like there's a high, even though I sucked at it, right? It doesn't look like there's a lot of room to like for mastery, right? It's like in a, I feel like with a few more plays, I would, and just knowing all the cards and such, I feel like I could play near optimally the second time, right? I feel like there's going to be a huge luck factor and also a turn order factor. But beyond that, it's like I'm going to be playing the best that close to the best that could be playing. And there isn't like a lot of room to like figure out, you know, intricacies and small details to step up my game and get even better at it. So if you play games to cause you're seeking math, you know, strategic mastery, there's not a lot of high skill cap and not a low ceiling, right? It's like you're going to, you're going to play it out. This has been Geek Nights with Rima and Scott special. Thanks to DJ Pretzel for the opening music.