Res Arcana Review – Eight Cards and a Loo Break

I’ve been digging through my way-too-extensive backlog lately, pulling out games I probably should have reviewed ages ago. One of those is Res Arcana from Tom Lehmann. He’s behind some genuinely great games. I’ve already covered Jump Drive on the site, while Roll for the Galaxy has seen plenty of table time, even if I still haven’t written it up.

Tom’s games are usually engine-builders, and some of the best going around. Res Arcana is another engine-building game but strips it right back. With just eight cards in your deck, you’re expected to build a tight, efficient engine that can win the game in a handful of turns.

It’s a bold pitch, and for the most part, it delivers.

How to Play

It’s a bit of a missed opportunity that Res Arcana is packed with great fantasy artwork but has one of the blandest fantasy setups we’ve seen since Ethnos. You’re an alchemical mage competing to control ancient monuments and Places of Power, which mostly just exist to hand out victory points. And that’s about all the flavour you get.

You’ll gather essences and magic items to play artefacts, which generate more essences, which help you claim bigger point-scoring cards.

Standard engine-builder stuff.

Where it starts to show its own identity is in the setup. You’re given just eight cards, plus a choice between two mage cards, keeping one to give your deck a bit of flavour. That’s your entire deck for the game. No refilling, no digging through a massive stack later on. In fact, you’ll be lucky to even cycle through all eight before the game ends.

To start, you draw three cards and draft a magic item from a small central pool. These items give you an extra action each round or a way to squeeze out more resources, and they’re more important than they first appear.

Each round begins with players collecting essences from their cards. From there, turns are simple. Take one action at a time, looping around the table until everyone decides to pass. Once you pass, you’re done for the round, which makes it a good time to duck off to the loo while everyone else finishes up.

On your turn, you can:

• Play an artefact by paying its cost
• Claim a monument or Place of Power from the centre, again by paying its cost
• Discard a card for one gold or two of any other essence
• Use a power on any readied component, whether that’s an artefact, item, monument, or Place of Power
• Pass, drawing one card and swapping your magic item. If you’re the first to pass, you also pick up a bonus point for that round

After everyone passes, check if anyone has reached 10 points. If so, the game ends immediately. If not, reset and go again.

Small Deck, Big Swings

Res Arcana is simultaneously a fantastic, quick-firing engine builder that I can’t get enough of, and a slow, punishing slog that I never want to play again. Which version you get comes down almost entirely to player count.

At two players, it’s incredible. It feels like some of Tom Lehmann’s best work. The way your tiny deck comes together in different ways, with actions chaining into each other, is deeply satisfying.

A big part of that is how the engine ramps up. You might scrape together one or two essences in the opening round, but by the end you’re pulling in ten or more. It’s a huge sense of progression for such a small game.

But it’s not just about gathering resources. What really makes Res Arcana is the way your cards interact. The synergies aren’t always obvious at first glance, and it feels like you have to hammer and tong your engine into shape before it properly works. So when it finally comes together and starts spitting out 10 resources a turn, it feels properly earned.

There are also plenty of paths to victory. You might focus on grabbing Places of Power for big points or strong ongoing effects, pivot to monuments for cheaper builds and extra abilities, or lean on point-generating cards already in your deck. Every game feels like a different puzzle to solve, which is an absolute marvel when you remember you only have eight cards.

And there’s the surprising amount of variability feeding into that puzzle. Between the random artefacts, monuments, Places of Power, and item selection, you’re constantly adapting to a new mix of tools. It’s the kind of game that gets your brain ticking even before you’ve taken your first turn.

The magic items deserve a special mention here. They’re a clever way to patch up any weaknesses in your engine and give you an out when all hope is lost. In one game I had an engine that could only produce water essence, which should have been a disaster. Instead, a well-timed Transmutation item let me convert that water into what I actually needed and saved me from a sure-fire loss.

That all said, it definitely has Lehmann’s fingerprints all over it. The iconography can be pretty dense, especially for new players, and it’s not always immediately obvious what a card is doing. To its credit, though, it’s noticeably easier to grasp than Jump Drive or Race for the Galaxy. Even so, there’s still a bit of a learning curve before everything properly clicks.

Where it Falls Apart

So that’s the two-player game. At four players, it’s almost the complete opposite.

Between players double-checking what their cards do, parsing the symbols, and trying to map out their turns, the pace slows to a crawl. It’s painful, but also understandable given how dense the iconography is and just how many options players have to consider each turn.

What really pushes it over the edge, though, is the dragons.

Dragons are a special type of card that let you attack other players, forcing them to discard resources or, if they don’t have the required resource, double the cost of those losses in other essences. They add a nice bit of back-and-forth in a two-player game, where you’d be unfortunate to see more than two in your rival’s play area.

At four players, it’s a different story. More players means more dragons, but no extra tools to deal with them. Even with cards that offer protection or soften the blow, it can quickly spiral.

In one game, it got completely out of hand. Constant dragon attacks meant nobody had the resources to actually build anything. The game ground to a halt, dragging an already slow experience out even further. It was miserable, especially because I’d been so excited to show everyone this great game, only for the whole thing to fall flat.

Safe to say, I’m not in a rush to repeat that experience.

This makes Res Arcana a tricky one to rate. Most of my plays have been at two players, and at that count it’s brilliant. Fast, clever, and really satisfying to mull over and puzzle through. But those few four-player games have been rough enough to make me seriously question whether it deserves a permanent spot on my shelf.