YMMV / Lost Ruins of Arnak

• Awesome Art: The artworks of the board and tokens put on it are lavishly detailed, being one of the main selling points of the game - it simply looks fantastic.
• Low-Tier Letdown: A great deal of 4 Coins/Compasses cards are pretty bad or highly situational, making them simply not worth their price when bought directly without any discount (or gained for free from the research tracker on the Snake Temple side of the board). A 4 Compass Artifact that requires the 5th Compass to reveal a tier 2 expedition tile^note which costs 6 Compasses to send a regular expedition there, which will also get 2 Idol tokens (6 points) and a chance to defeat the Guardian (another 5 points and the Guardian's bonus), none of which the Artifact will provide, and then also requiring a Tablet to re-use it, anyone? It is further compounded by how random the decks can get, making those cards even worse the later they show up.
• Game-Breaker:
  • A combination of an early Aeroplane and Guardian's Occarine is powerful enough that people tend to simply fold their game when facing the combo, as there is just no real way to work against it. It offers very cheap expeditions combined with maximum flexibility due to the ability to remove and reposition archaeologist tokens from the main board.
  • Stone Key Artifact card returns a spent Idol token back to the player. Not only does this restore any points lost by playing Idols, it also allows to farm more resources - in a game build on resource management. It's also surprisingly cheap for something so strong.
• High-Tier Scrappy: The game has pretty serious balancing issues, making few cards stand out hard.
  • Aeroplane card, if it shows up in the first two turns. It's pretty much a race between players (especially in a two-player game) to get it, because it skews the game so hard in favour of whoever owns it that it can single-handedly decide the game.
  • Guardian's Ocarina is by far the most powerful Arrifact that breaks the game on just too many levels. When played, it sends a placed archaeologist back to the player's hand - which is already very powerful (there are cards that relocate the placed token to specific locations - this one allows the player to move it freely). But if this wasn't enough, it changes any travel icon played into Plane, so the movement is truly unlimited. In a game where there are in total 10 placements of an archaeologist token, even adding one is powerful, while it is possible to play this card up to 5 times, including playing the same expedition twice.
  • The tier 2 expedition that grants 1 Fear card and 2 of Tablets and Arrowheads. It's great if you get it, but it can very quickly devolve the game into whoever goes first just sitting on that tile and pumping the resources, as there is almost never a situation where that particular expedition isn't the most valuable of them all, making the game both predictable and offering a massive edge to whoever manages to get that tile and, in the following turn, being the first player.

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