Res Arcana Review

Sometimes the name on the box is enough to convince you to check a game out. I certainly would have passed Res Arcana by were it not for Mr Lehman’s name adorning its pretty cover. See, Tom Lehman is rather well regarded in the field of smart card games as all racers for the galaxy will know. But rather than the tactical combo building of that beloved title, Res Arcana focusses things down to 8 simple cards and your own feelings of inadequacy.

Players: 2-4
Time: 20-60 mins
Designer: Thomas Lehmann
Artist: Julien Delval
Publisher: Rebel, Sand Castle Games

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Goodness, it really is a pretty production. Just look at those cards.

Dragons! Creatures! Fancy cutlery! Essential household items for any budding alchemists/mages. It’s all a bit thematically up in the air in this fantasy-renaissance-esque setting which is ultimately little more than a vehicle for some card-driven resource swapping. Not that the theming is entirely set dressing. The Windup Man winds up as you add resources to him then acts to duplicate those resources, exhausting himself in the process. Dragons have a habit of attacking people, the Hawk lets you scout your deck. It’s full of nice little touches.

But then it decides it has to call fire Elan and water Calm because… because. And I sigh and shake my head and move on with my life.

You, as these alche-mages, have a slither of a deck of artefacts to your name, presumably passed down to you by some long lost relatives or perhaps collected from local car boot sales. With these and a small pool of starting resources you will pursue glory. Which comes in the form of seals. No, not the aquatic kind, the wax kind. There are two main sources of seals.

Buying Monuments. These fine structures require considerable amounts of Res Arcana’s hardest to come by resource, gold. You might not even have a means of producing gold in your deck. Although that is not necessarily a problem as anyone can borrow a communal item, or discard a card to get pretty much whatever resource they need, it’s just less sustainable.

Places of Power. These awesome tiles are the real points focus, each requiring comprehensive piles of resources to buy and the right set up to effectively run, generating even more points. They really are the centrepieces of the experience, both tangibly and mechanically. However, this focus can come at a price.

Res Arcana is a game that wants you to plan your entire game. You are given your deck and told to look through it before the game begins. To search for the combos and opportunities. To figure out how this random set of cards might function together to turn your measly set of tokens into a bountiful supply. It’s an intriguing approach! One that might have been doomed to determination by card deal in the hands of a lesser designer but the careful mix of abilities seems resilient to the worst extremes of luck.

It is Res Arcana’s unique selling point. In contrast to Dominion this puzzle is yours and yours alone. But the game isn’t decided here. The deck gets shuffled, you draw a hand of 3 cards, and now you must get that plan working as best you can. Your main tool here is the discard to gain resources, giving you the push to afford the artefacts you have determined as key to your strategy. The communal item tiles, although you’ll only get one each round, give you the opportunity to do that one thing you’re most desperately short of. But you’ll need to pass at the right time to get the item you want.

This solitaire puzzle is very nice but as soon as you mix in other players you start to run into problems. The obvious one is interaction. You have the race for Places of Power and to a lesser extent Monuments. However, you will tend to have a good idea about which place you are building towards, and either someone else gets it first, a devastating outcome to your plan that is potentially impractical to recover from, or you do get it, in which case, no sense of interaction. Strangely, the number of Places of Power used each game does not vary with player count. At 4 the options feel too tight while at 2 this element of the game feels far more open.

There are attack cards of the fire-breathing variety which target all players and force them to discard a life resource, or any two others. I like that this gives a special importance to life. I appreciate that everyone is targeted. I don’t like that they haven’t had much if any effect on my games. The relatively high cost, low reward of dragons makes them a tough sell – they are only slowing others down, not helping your engine (unless you get the dragon place of power) – and the preponderance of ignore damage abilities neuters what they can do.

The result is a game with clear run away leader issues. I have not had a game where it hasn’t been obvious who is going to win at least a round or two before they finally push over the line. This isn’t Splendor, where big point swings can occur with a single action, or Dominion where there is always the chance your deck will coordinate in time to pick up the last points you need. Here, once something is down on the table it is going to stay there driving the owner forward. There is nothing that might slow a player down once they draw ahead.

This is especially painful in the 4 player game which drags on a little too long. There’s just not enough to think about between turns due to the round structure: take a single action on your turn, keep taking turns in order until everyone passes. You might recognise this from much larger and more complicated games like Clans of Caledonia or Cthulhu Wars where you need the time. But you don’t have the depth of options to think through here.

Both of these issues are ones that will be lessened when a group of experienced players play together. More often races will be tight and turns can rattle round smoothly. But there’s nothing here that gets me excited enough to reach that level. The theme is a little too generic, the goal a little too arbitrary.

I normally don’t mind “multiplayer solitaire” too much but it bothered me here. For instance, I still love Dominion, in many ways a very similar game (spot your strategy early, implement, see who comes out on top). I think the turn structure of Res Arcana neuters the excitement that could have been generated. The amazing points in Dominion are where you dump down card after card in a big flurry of abilities. You don’t get to experience that in Res Arcana because any big moment or combo is broken out over many separate turns. I trigger one card and have to sit and wait before I can pour the output into triggering the next card. A process made even slower by certain abilities holding those resources from you until the next round. Sometimes, delayed gratification is no gratification at all.

Res Arcana is a clever game. But it’s one that will take some consistent effort on a group level to really appreciate. It has not proved to be worth that effort for me.

Rating: Res Ar-can’t-a

Our copy of Res Arcana was provided for review by Asmodee UK. You can get a copy for £34.99 RRP from your local hobby store.