Lost Ruins of Arnak is a board game released in 2020 by the husband and wife team of Michal "Elwen" Štach and Michaela "Mín" Štachov. In it, players compete to travel across the eponymous uncharted island via foot, car, boat and plane, conducting archeological digs at various sites, overcoming said sites' animal guardians, collecting useful loot, tools and artifacts, and working their way up the "research track" looking to reach either the
Bird or Snake Temple. The game is notable in that it is played over only five rounds, forcing players to prioritize their limited actions among a multitude of options and quickly and efficiently collect the needed resources to advance.
Tropes unearthed amid The Lost Ruins of Arnak:
- Adventurer Archaeologist: Each player controls an entire expedition of those, exploring the unknown island, facing monstrous creatures, finding trap-riddled ruins and finding their way towards the temple ruins hidden somewhere in the jungle.
- Adventurer Outfit: All the Assistants are wearing some variant of khaki suits, tropical clothes and practical, job-related outfits.
- Anti-Hoarding: Despite being a deck-building game, Arnak has very limited drafting ability and the starting hand each turn is just five cards. This means getting a lot of cards is an excellent way to only ever play each of them once - if at all.
- Awesome, but Impractical: A whole lot of cards fall under this category, but some stand out more than others.
- The Trowel card allows a player to get a Ruby in trade a Compass. Sounds like a great trade... except in the long run, you will almost never be able to benefit from it, as Compasses are some of the most valuable resources, while spending Rubies can often be simply avoided.
- Two-thirds of all Artifacts have some super-duper ability that is in reality a very finnicky gimmick, while often also providing few points in the final count. On top of that, each Artifact when played outside of the moment of being bought, requires a Tablet to activate, which might reduce their utility to simply the Airplane travel icon, rather than whatever they are supposed to do.
- Bear Trap: A single-use card that allows the user to defeat any Guardian that wasn't taken down during the initial expedition and the field is unoccupied.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: Half of all Guardians are some giant anthropods, be they Scary Scorpions, massive beetles or other nasties.
- Bigger Stick: Revolver card. Rather than paying the resources to defeat the Guardian, you pay 1 Compass to simply shoot it dead.
- Boring, but Practical
- Dog card, which offers 1 Compass and the ability to use an unoccupied camp site. It's nothing fancy and pretty easy to block (since the camp has to be unoccupied), but it's cheap and offers enormous flexibility. It is further contrasted against a similar Lantern card, which isn't limited to unoccupied camp sites, but is more expensive and doesn't offer the free Compass.
- Pickaxe is a 1 Coin card that changes a single Compass into a Tablet and an Arrowhead, some of the most sought-after and useful resources in the game. It's one of the most useful cards in the game, while being cheap to buy and play, yet offering the equivalent of one of the better tier 1 expeditions for a fraction of the price and not needing to use one of your archaeologist tokens.
- Sturdy Boots, at least on the Snake Temple side of the board, where boot travel icons are more useful. It can be either played for 1 Compass and 2 Boot travel icons or simply used as two Car travel icons.
- Tier 1 expeditions. Sure, tier 2 gives better rewards and two Idols instead of one... but that only further highlights the mundane practicality of tier 1. Especially since few of the cards make it very easy to score tier 1 expeditions at a high discount, making it all that easier to get them going.
- Any "thunder" effect card, since they are nothing fancy, but offer instant payoff of badly needed resources and also tend to have a Pass action, too, offering even more resources when played at the end of the turn.
- Canine Companion: The Dog card. Gameplay-wise, it's a fetch hound bringing badly needed resources from camp.
- Cash Gate: The game is built on a few different layers of those
- To progress the research tracker and eventually get to the Bird or Snake Temple, your expedition must spend an enormous amount of resources, gathered via expeditions, camps and cards played. And then, once in the Temple, there are point tiles that further require specific resources (and combinations of them) to gain additional points.
- The variety of powerful, multi-use cards cost 3 or even 4 Coins or Compasses. Getting them, however, completely changes the dynamics of the game (eg. an early Aeroplane allows for sending far more expeditions than normally).
- On the Snake Temple side of the board, you need to pay with an Idol token to advance further in the temple tracker.
- Changing Gameplay Priorities: Early on, Compasses are the most valuable resource, as they fuel expeditions. But after 2-4 expeditions are sent in total, there might be no real point in sending further expeditions, especially in a two-player game, shifting the focus on climbing the tracker towards the Temple.
- Clean Dub Name: Renamed to Les Ruines Perdues de Narak in France because "Arnak" sounds like "arnaque", which means "scam" — not ideal when you want to encourage players to explore the place.
- Competitive Balance: Players start with different amounts of Coins and Compasses, depending on their order of play, which balances the ability to go first vs. being able to afford more things.
- Cool, but Inefficient:
- Any card (and the Assistant) with the ability to remove cards becomes this on the Bird Temple side of the board, as there are far fewer Fear cards to clog your deck and thus trimming it down isn't as powerful or useful as it is on the Snake Temple side.
- Machete. It offers 2 Compasses and the ability to remove a card, but it also costs 4 Coins, making it hardly worth its price, even on the Snake Temple side. There is a whole variety of cheaper and more viable cards to get the job done.
- Grappling Hook. Discard one card, to draw a new card, and have the ability to remove a card from your deck. It sounds very useful, but in practical terms, it never pays off. In a similar vein, unless your deck is really thick, the Assistant offering a +1 card to draw is this, too - especially since the silver side requires to discard a card first. In a game with such a limited draw, this is a big deal.
- Any card that applies its effects only to placed archaeologist tokens or occupied ruins and camps. Especially when they scale with the number of placed archeologists. This means they come very late into play, and you might never truly benefit from them, too.
- Guiding Skull, one of the Artifacts, allows to draw the top tier 2 expedition tile, gain resources from it, then put the tile on the bottom of the pile. It costs 4 Compasses to buy the card and another Compass to activate it (and a Tablet to replay it from a hand in later turns). A tier 2 expedition costs 6 Compasses to send it, but it also provides 2 Idols (and the effect from one of the Idols, too) and also potentially a Guardian to defeat (another bonus and extra points). To make it even less efficient, despite being so expensive, the card itself is worth only 1 point.
- Cool Plane: The Aeoroplane card, depicting a red floatplane soaring in the sky. It's cool-looking while also being one of the best cards in the game by a large margin.
- Deckbuilding Game: Features a deckbuilding aspect in that you can buy cards. These cards may either be played for their effects or to pay for travel costs. Includes the complication that you only get to free-draw a handful of your cards each round, and have to spend resources to gain further draws. So while building up a large deck of tools and artifacts does give you extra points at the end of the game, if you need a specific card to advance your strategy, you're making life more difficult for yourself in the short term.
- Deck Clogger: Fear is a bad card that mostly serves to clog up your deck. It has no effect, its travel value is only a single boot (the worst of any card), and it's worth -1 point if you still have it in your deck at the end of the game. You start with two of them in your deck, and can gain more as a penalty for leaving an archeologist on a site with an undefeated Guardians on it, or sometimes even if you defeat the Guardian. Fear cards will probably be your first targets when you get the chance to exile cards.
- Digital Tabletop Game Adaptation: Both Board Game Arena and Yucata had a digital version of the game almost right at the premiere, as part of a marketing gig to make the pretty pricey game more familiar to people.
- Disc-One Nuke: If the starting Item shop contains either Aeroplane, Hot Air Baloon, Pickaxe or Map, it's an instant race for any of those items, in that exact order. They offer enormous benefits, especially when bought right at the game's start. Aeroplane in particular is a card that diminishes its value after each turn, going from all-powerful in the first turn to pretty useless by the final two turns.
- Drafting Mechanic: Players buy Items and Artifacts from a shared pool. Same goes with Assistants, but details depend on which side of the board is being played.
- Expansion Pack: The Missing Expedition expansion, adding a new gameplay mode, cards and Assistants.
- Extrinsic Go-First Rule: The game awards the starting player marker to whomever most recently traveled to a place they had never visited before.
- Father Neptune: One of your potential Assistants is a ship captain: white-bearded, wearing captain's hat and grog coat. Naturally, he offers Ship travel icons.
- First-Player Advantage Mitigation: The further behind you are in the play order, the more valuable your set of starting resources will be. This compensates for your opponents' ability to go to locations you wanted.
- Grave Robbing: Implied with one of the Assistants - a burly man with a pickaxe on his shoulder who generates Coins when used.
- Horse of a Different Color: There are both Giant Turtle and Ostrich cards, each working in similar fashion: draw a new card and gain a free travel icon (Ship from Turtle and Car from Ostrich). If used just for travel icons, they offer 2 of their type, making them particularly effective for moving around.
- Human Pack Mule: One of the Assistants is a big guy with an even bigger crate. He allows one to draw a new card, but without an upgrade, one must first discard something from their hand.
- Literal Wild Card: Any travel icon can be paid for using a higher travel icon. This means that the plane, the highest icon, can pay for any travel symbol.
- Living Statue: Possibly. It's hard to tell if two of the Guardians are intended to be just statues that have to be summited as physical obstacles, or an animated things defending the place.
- Luck-Based Mission: Both decks of cards, the Guardians and the ruins they sit on are completely randomised during game set-up. There are also random bonus tiles on the research tracker and the order of Assistants to draw from. Oh, and the idols and the bonus they provide when picked. All of this can completely change how the specific game plays out due to different options at players disposal, making the specific game easier or harder (or even making it downright impossible to reach the Temple) depending on purely random elements.
- Magikarp Power: Bow And Arrow and Brush are cards that offer scaling bonuses depending on the number of - respectively - defeated Guardian tokens or Idols owned by the player. Getting one extra Compass isn't all that great, but three is pretty powerful.
- Master of All: Pocket Knife card. It's a card with four different options (1 Coin, 1 Compass, 1 Tablet, remove 1 card), with players having to pick two of them. On top of that, it offers 1 Ship and Car travel icon. The enormous utility of this card can't be overstated.
- Metagame: A lot depends on how many players are in play and how they value both expeditions and climbing the research tracker, requiring to adjust your own play to their steps. On top of that, the side of the board completely changes the value of half of the cards in the deck, and knowing that is pre-requested to not end up with the wrong tools for the job.
- Money Is Not Power: Zig-Zagged. The exact moment varies depending on the board side and how the game has played out so far, but there is a clear point after which Coins stop being useful, as there will be either no point in buying new cards (other than extra points at the end of the game) or simply nothing worthwhile left in the game to buy at all. Coins don't count towards the final score, so there's no point hoarding, either. On the other hand, having a stable source of Coins early on is extremely useful, while certain effects require paying Coins to get results.
- Not Completely Useless: Fear cards. There are many effects that require discarding a card, making them prime targets for that role - especially when the discarded card can be then instantly removed from the game. At the very worst, the Fear card can be used to place your archaeologist token in a camp site.
- Not the Intended Use: Any card can be used for its travel icon. Including the single-use cards, without using them up.
- Refining Resources: The upgrade resource icon, which comes from certain Artifacts, one of the Assistants and bonus tiles. With it, Tablets can be turned into Arrowheads and Arrowheads into Rubies.
- Resources Management Gameplay: You have to collect and spend Tablets, Compasses, Rubies, Coins and Arrowheads.
- Revolvers Are Just Better: The only firearm in the game is a revolver. It's perfectly capable of killing any given Guardian, which ranges from Big Creepy-Crawlies to Kaiju.
- Roc Birds: One of the Guardians is styled into one of those - a giant bird of prey.
- Scoring Points: How the game is resolved. There are few major sources of points, which allow players to win the game even without reaching the temple (even when other players managed to do not only that, but also buy scoring tiles from the temple), since the cards in the deck, Idols and defeated Guardians all contribute to the final score, too.
- Shipwreck Start: The premise behind Snake Temple side of the board: your expedition started with crash-landing on the island. Not only is the board itself significantly harder to highlight the less than fortunate start, but the second Assistant draw is about finding a shipwreck survivor, rather than selecting them from the common pool, greatly limiting Assistants choice, (there is only a pool of randomly selected characters stacked on the research tracker).
- Shout-Out: The card image for Steamboat is obviously The African Queen.
- Thieving Magpie: The Parrot card. For discarding any card from your hand, you get a Ruby back.
- Tomboy and Girly Girl: The female Assistants range from a girly nurse, feminine researchers and traders, to badass Ace Pilot and Wrench Wench with warpaint stripes on her cheeks.
- Treasure Map: The Map card.
- Two-Fisted Tales: It's a 2020 board game styled after pulp adventure and using the interwar period for its setting and general aesthetics.
- Unstable Equilibrium: The game can be very quickly decided when one of the players gets ahead by turn 2 due to the right combination of opening cards, expedition outcome and bonuses from the temple tracker. The other players will have a very hard time catching up.
- Wild Wilderness: The setting of the game is a remote, mysterious, untamed island, full of ancient ruins and monstrous creatures guarding them.
