In my case, it’s a defence mechanism against impulse purchases 
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No, that’s the purpose you think it serves. It’s a trap!
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I keep an evergreen wishlist for friends and family to look at when buying me gifts.
Without boardgames on that, it would be just… socks… and some crafting/DIY supplies/tools.
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I’m OK with that, so long as they’re ridiculous!
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I just entered my 30s this year, and a pair of socks as gift sounds lovely.
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I had to ask for lots of socks for Christmas this year as all this time spent at home just wearing socks had ruined all my others.
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When I’m at home I mostly go barefoot. I don’t always put on shoes when I go down to check the mailbox . . .
Sadly, all the floors in my flat are laminate, so they’re very cold in the winter. My socks are taking much less of a beating now the weather is warmer.
I just had to cull my crazy sock drawer because it was overflowing. When socks are the only things that aren’t boardgames on a list you tend to get a lot of socks.
Also embrace the ridiculousness and wear them properly mismatched!
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Also speaking of games you didn’t buy. I just took a hard look at my list of ongoing Kickstarters and cancelled my pledge for Fall of the Mountain King. It’s not that I don’t want it, In the Hall of the Mountain King was really good, I just have so many coming that’s I just couldn’t justify adding another. Honestly I went a bit overboard with backing things over the last year.
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Hellboy the Board Game off Amazon and the recent expansion KS are probably the most recent I’ve fully passed on, despite wanting the game since the original KS. I love what I’ve seen of the gameplay, but I don’t care much for Mignola’s art so a lot of the aesthetics of the game didn’t click for me.
More importantly, it also seems to sit in the same space as Cthulhu Death May Die, which we have and love. While I’m far from opposed to having multiple games that have overlap, C:DMD just seems to do it better.
I’m in a weird frame of mind at the moment where I feel like I really want to buy a new game, but nothing actually grabs me. I suspect this is a symptom of boredom.
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I’m quite often in that state, usually triggered by a sale on a FOGS.
One I’m always almost buying is Battle Sheep. It’s a tough sell when my Hey, That’s my Fish is roughly 1\16 of the size.
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@Yashima - can you walk me through why a person should get Arnak over Imperium or the reverse? Recently got turned onto these.
Arnak gets a slight nudge as I think the theme will help me get it to the table and it is cheaper. But then Imperium is in stock right now, so…
What have you learned?
Disclosures: I already have Viscounts for the genre but have not played it because I have not played Paladins and feel like I’m supposed to do this in order.
What caught my eye about Arnak is actually I think it could fire Clans of Caledonia as my Gaia project lite. Bear with me… what struck me about it was the whole “here’s a dollar, go kill a guardian and find the temple” vibe. It at first feels like you can’t do anything, but then you figure out the combos and all the different ways to spend and gather resources, so you are thinking “do this, then do this, then do this to do this…” and just trying to extend your round a few more actions.
So it captured that vibe with the right length and complexity, while being much more different from GP compared to Terra Macmystica Clans.
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So I had only watched a couple of videos before making my own decision. For me both the games fall into the broader category of “Deck Building with a Map” where map = board. The first of these types of deck builders I encountered was Clank! but El Dorado also counts . Those two have actual maps.
Both Arnak and Imperium (btw over here Imperium is ~10€ cheaper on average) have less of a map but simply an accumulation of worker placement spots and tracks (4 short faction tracks in Dune, 1 dual-use longer research track in Arnak)
I am an SF fan, so if I had to choose between never watching Star Wars or never watching Indiana Jones again… I bought Dune. Personally, I find the cover of Arnak is just so busy and Dune looks cool.
So to improve the comparison, I finally did what I’ve been meaning to do for weeks now and taught myself Arnak. So now I “kind of” know both of them. One I took a few turns on TTS, the other I played twice on my table… caveat: both in multi-handed variants without true opponents.
First: For me there is no connection to Terra Mystica or Gaia Project. Neither of them has card play or worker placement. There is an actual map with hexes in both and the dominant mechanic is area control and having asymmetric factions (the leaders in Dune are a very very slight change in game play I feel, Arnak has nothing of the sort). Resources are generated from having buildings on the map and VP come from fulfilling the round goals or controlling larger areas of the map. I have never played Clans so maybe the connection you see is somewhere along that line.
With that out of the way, let me try to compare what I know from Dune: Imperium and Lost Ruins of Arnak now. What do they have in common:
- a random market of cards that you buy from
- a small number of workers that get send to worker spots by playing a card with a matching location icon (more different/restrictive icons in Dune) and paying some resources (sometimes) and then generating some resources/effects
- both games feature the usual deck building tropes: drawing more cards, removing cards from deck, generating resources to buy more cards…
What is different:
- worker spots in Dune are the same in every game, in Arnak everything beyond the starting sites is discovered
- VP: Arnak as VP salad from cards, idols and research… in Dune there is a race to 10 VP which are gained from conflict and alliances with factions.
- in Arnak you can theoretically have a huge number of actions in a round if you have the resources, not all main actions require a worker and cards can also be played for minor actions
- in Dune you are limited to your workers (2-3) and after that get one final “reveal” action which gives you the resources to buy cards (and more)
- At the end of a round in Dune there is a fight with all the troops you sent to the fight area and that is a major source of VP.
- in Arnak you should not neglect the Research track as it gives you valuable resources and Assistants that give you more resources, the Alliances you can have with the Dune factions can influence how powerful certain cards are for you.
- Dune cards have suits (the different factions) that can be used for combo-ing,
- Arnak has 2 types if cards: items and artifacts and their availability is slowly shifting over the rounds. Artifacts are powerful but expensive and are bought with a different resource.
Overall, I would say Arnak has more resource management (5 different resources, Dune has 3–if you count troops and Intrigue cards it is also 5 though) and the worker spots aren’t quite as unique as they are in Dune. In Arnak you can probably just go get some different resources if a spot you want is taken. In Dune, if that spot with the Fremen that lets you send 2 troops to the fight area for one water and gives you more influence with the Fremen is taken… you may be in trouble.
Also from taking a few turns it feels it is easier to get more cards in Arnak. Cards in Dune are much tighter because you get 5 a turn and you need 2 for your workers and drawing more is hard and you want to have as many cards as possible for your reveal…
Arnak plays over a fixed 5 rounds, Dune has up to 12 I think but it ends as soon as someone has 10 VP…
I think Dune can be more punishing, if you can’t get your game off the ground and build a deck that “works for you”. In Arnak it feels like there will always be some worker spots you can go to and get some resources that you can do something with. Sure Dune also has a few “Verlegenheitsaktion” spots that you can just milk for resources cheaply but you may not have a choice to even go there because of how the cards limit your possible actions.
I feel like the interplay between worker placement and deck is tighter in Dune. If you buy a card of the Bene Gesserit suit, it is unlikely you can use it to go to any of the other factions. If you buy a Fremen card, it is most likely only letting you send your worker to Dune or the Fremen track. Your deck needs to specialize a bit while keeping your options open. The cards are a good thematic fit with their factions. Fremen lets you fight better, Bene Gesserit provides you with more cards and Intrigue, Imperium makes you rich… I have not seen all that many cards from Arnak but a lot of those are more generic: generate a resource, draw a card… if you see a certain character card appear in Dune and you can’t get it there may be a similar one but nobody is quite like Thufir or Chani.
Theme wise Arnak is certainly more family friendly. If the Dune setting isn’t something you crave…
From what little I’ve seen, I am not surprised both these games shot into the Top 100 on BGG quickly and last time I checked were on adjacent spots. Neither is really complicated to explain and worker placement and deck building are two extremely popular mechanics.
I love deck building and I think both of these have a lot to offer. I really want to play Arnak now but personally I want to play Dune more.
PS: I see you clarified your GP/TM connection. Yes, I guess Arnak has that “forever” turn thing going. Which may be something some players enjoy but we had a single game of TM where my partner passed early in the round and then watched for 45 minutes as the rest of us did their turns. It kind of soured me on this style a bit. Dune doesn’t have this at all. On the other hand it means that every decisions in Dune is a bit more momentous because there are fewer of them in a given round.
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Oh, and re: Viscounts.
I didn’t even think of Viscounts as mostly a deck builder. You will not even necessarily have the resources to buy a card each turn. In Viscounts I would think of the cards more as part of your tableau. You only get 1 new card into your tableau every turn. This is very different from most deck builders. And you have like a single worker moving around a rondel. This seems like the distillation down to the fewest possible game elements to still have both mechanisms present.
I have played all 3 WK games and while they all have some similarities in art and theme and with the “do you go with the criminal or virtuous” thing they have going they are really very different games and I think there is no reason to play them in a particular order (I haven’t even managed to look at Tome Saga).
- Order of publishing is: Architects, Paladins, Viscounts
- Order of complexity, starting low: Architects, Viscounts, Paladins
Architects is probably the best of the bunch simply because it takes a mechanism and gives it a fun twist while staying accessible. Paladins and Viscounts are both far more complex and I have trouble convincing people to play either. Personally I like Viscounts a little better because of how the different pieces of it come together as a whole (and yes the deck building element, slight as it may be). Paladins is a great puzzle that drives me nuts with its error-prone solo mode. If I were to recommend a single game to give it a try it’d be Architects. If you already like Architects you may not necessarily like either of the other two, they are very different games.
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I’m glad I did!
If this is what you’re looking for, I think you’ll be plenty happy with what Arnak has to offer. It is positively tantalizing in this respect, and the 5 round arc has a beautiful crescendo to it as a result. It’s enhanced even further when you have closely matched opponents, as the score race can be incredibly tight; there’s usually one key move or moment my partner and I can point to that cost/won us a given game, and that’s pretty thrilling.
One thing I wanted to expand upon a bit was @yashima’s comment about the game being a bit of a point salad. One curiosity with Arnak (which very much IS a point salad Euro) is that it doesn’t have a score track—it’s all tallied at the end of the game. This is probably a minor thing overall, but I can’t think of any games that play like this and eschew a score track(s). I find this adds a layer of tension to the race, and also subtly enforces the importance of keeping an eye on your opponents’ actions (and resulting opportunities). [EDIT: To be sure, you can mostly math out the points on the table, if you were that kind of player, but that’s not especially necessary.]
It’s a small thing, but an important one here, I think. Arnak is a bit weird in that you’ll certainly want to specialize in one or two of the (5 or so) main pursuits, but you’re always going to be doing quite a bit of everything. Which means everyone is doing everything, which means those seemingly little decision points/deviations can have a big impact. Notably, however, the game doesn’t feel overly tight, just the competition.
I don’t want this to run too long, as I know the key goal here was to get a comparison of Dune Imperium vs. Arnak (for which I have no input), but once I read your assessment of Arnak’s juiciest bit, I wanted to chime in and let you know you’ve got a pretty good nose!
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Huge thanks for walking me through what you learned!
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My convoluted takeaway is that I can buy Dune Imperium as a replacement for Arctic Scavengers, which never quite took off for me. Interactive Deckbuilder with a skirmish and a play-for-value-or-hold-for-fighting decision. I don’t think I ever played AS with the “right group” but then, if a game is that sensitive to group then its place on my shelf is wobbly anyway
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Yeah, sorry for my odd comparisons. It seems the global community has huddled around “mechanics” to categorize games, which is nice because it is objective and easy. But I get bothered by questions like “which should I buy, Dominion or Arctic Scavengers?” just because they share mechanics. Dominion vs. Istanbul is a much more interesting question to me, despite the mechanical divide. I could write an essay on the rubric I’ve come up with, and this may actually be the first community vaguely interested in listening to it?
But yeah, Arnak and Gaia Project ended up overlapping. Tzolkin and Great Western Trail, oddly. Dominion and Istanbul. Hanabi and The Crew.
That leaves the Arnak question. It seems at times like these I just end up buying both and assume I’ll eventually sell one. Thankfully, in this case I can solo both and accelerate the process. Or… anyone want to try out Clans on BGA?
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OK OK, and before I get moderated for explicitly purchasing a game on the games I DIDN’T buy thread…
Yokohama.
I think it all started with a misconception; I saw it on BGA and thought it was something else (I don’t even recall what now). Then I looked into it and saw it was actually Istanbul covered with beefy muscle and that sounded good. Then someone locally was selling it for $40 even though it is out of print. It all felt serendipitous and magical.
Then I got in one game on BGA before actually pulling the trigger. It was fun. Fine. I liked it. I don’t need it. Fundamentally, I thought the cleaner design of Istanbul does better on the pleasure to effort ratio. And it was good but not good or different enough to violate my (admittedly faltering) “stop buying games” initiative.
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After some clarification I get it.
We all see games in our own subjective ways.
Mechanisms give us a common terminology that allows for comparison but they will never easily let us explain the totality of what a game means to us. Why does one deck builder scratch a certain game itch and another does not?
I have made up my own categories of games as well… we probably all make some connections that are quite personal because we enjoy one particular aspect. For me the most important part of TM is that in placing buildings on the map you reveal new income. This is replicated for me in the boards of Spirit Island and a major reason why I love SI as much as I do.
Also: I would be interested in learning and playing Clans of Caledonia on BGA.
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