Lost Ruins of Arnak: Adventure Chest

My wife’s favorite game of all time is Lost Ruins of Arnak. Ever since SneauxBunny first played it at Dice Tower Con, with Tom Vasel’s 3D printed bits, crates and temple, she has always loved it. Since I like deckbuilding+ style games, this has been a mainstay in our date night gaming. What a joy to find a game that we both really, really enjoy. 

Where she and I differ on gaming is that I get a little jazzed when I hear a company is releasing new content for one of my favorite games. (I scour the internet each year at Essen to find out if anything new for Concordia is coming out.) 

SneauxBunny, on the other hand, is *never* excited about expansions, even for games she adores. Normally, she just wants to play the base game over and over. The few exceptions have been TTR, Tiletum and Akropolis, but that’s because for the most part none of them mess with the gameplay too much. 

With Arnak, I have enjoyed introducing each new content with her. The new player powers? She enjoyed those, some more than others. The new temple boards? Those were easy intros. She even tolerated going through the campaign of the Lost Ruins of Arnak: The Missing Expedition with me, although I think she wore down a little at the end. (We had a much better time with the TTR: Legacy game). 

And then along came the announcement that CGE was putting out Lost Ruins of Arnak: Twisted Paths, a new small expansion with a new double sided board, more tiles, more idols, and two small twists to the mechanics. If I told her about that part, I think she would have glided right past it. But when I told her that part of the new offering was a box to store all of our Arnak stuff in one place, she was okay with that. 

So, I was super excited when my buddy Logan texted me that the big box was in. I broke it open last night and punched out the new bits. It took about an hour and a half to get it all back into the new box, but I was impressed with the organization. The new storage box will make it much easier to set up and tear down our games, meaning that we will probably play Arnak even more. 

The question remains. Does anybody need the new Lost Ruins of Arnak: Twisted Paths? 

Does anybody need anything? 

Other than purchasing some 3D printed thematic storage crates for the resources, and a gorgeous 3D printed temple for the temple tiles (thanks Jeremy!), everything else in our Arnak collection fit into two boxes: the base box and the Missing Expedition box. Sure, we had more baggies in those boxes than the rosary peddlers in Vatican City, but it worked. 

I say it worked, but that word “worked” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The two boxes were crammed full, and not very organized. We literally had to take everything out each time just to figure out what went were. 

We’ll be making our first test run of the new stuff tonight, but in just setting up the organization in the new box, I could already see how easily game night will be. Each storage container is thoughtfully designed — there’s one box just for resources, one box for player components, two big boxes for tiles and cards, and a box for all the “campaign stuff” that we really don’t use anymore. 

I even love the way the player boards fit easily, and that there is still room for my 3D printed clock (first player marker). 

Here’s my prediction – at 7p tonight, we will set up Arnak quickly, enjoy one of the new boards, tear down quickly, and then sigh and say to each other: “We should do this more often.”

If that happens, call me a satisfied gamer. 

Until next time, laissez les bon temps rouler! 
— BJ from Board Game Gumbo