REVIEW: Find the treasure in LOST RUINS OF ARNAK and its first expansion, EXPEDITION LEADERS

Going on an adventure with friends to explore the unknown, find treasure, and fight monsters can be a lot of fun even if it’s just in a board game. Lost Ruins of Arnak gives you that sense of adventure in a complex yet rewarding worker placement board game. On top of that, the Expedition Leaders expansion adds a perfect level of asymmetry to make each game that much more unique, challenging, and rewarding. It also adds a bunch of new artifacts, creatures, and other things for even more replayability. Overall, these two together offer an extremely strong gaming experience that can be played many, many times.

Let’s focus on the basic version of Lost Ruins of Arnak first. It’s an exploration game that involves juggling some resources and building a deck that allows you to take more impactful actions turn after turn. You’ll collect artifacts and items, using them to take stronger turns by actually placing your workers. These workers/explorers find new areas, fight monsters, and gather resources. Without going into too much detail, there are a lot of different mechanics in the game, to say the least, but they are well interconnected and are easy to get to grips with after the first few turns of the game. The basic version of Lost Ruins of Arnak is a strong worker placement game that has a wonderful amount of variety to keep players very interested.

The expansion, Expedition Leaders, adds another layer of complexity to the game that truly makes it more fun, strategic, and intelligent. This expansion also adds a number of new monsters, temples to explore, artifacts, assistants, monsters and more. However, the most important part of this expansion is the asymmetric leaders. Each player will receive a leader who will provide them with unique cards to play, mechanics and strategies. These, combined with the large variety of other things, make the game surprisingly fresh every time you play it. The only complaint is that it would be nice if there were a few more leaders to choose from and some of them get a little too complicated for their own good. Beyond that, this expansion is a perfect addition to the base game and is almost a must-have to get the full Lost Ruins of Arnak experience.

If you like worker placement games and want something moderately complex that has a lot of replayability, then this is an easy recommendation. While the rules and mechanics can get a little overwhelming at times (especially some of the expansion’s leaders), it’s worth picking up and playing multiple times if you have players willing to invest the energy to appreciate and learn the complex strategies.