Res Arcana Review

Res Arcana, Tom Lehmann's newest design, might just be his...

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Rate and Review Res Arcana

I must have to play this to see the appeal because despite all the praise I'm just not feeling it. It looks like yet another soulless conversion game. Having to make your 8 cards work is neat and I guess it's innovative, but not every innovation is exciting. Reading this just made me want to play 51st State more.

That said I don't think I've disliked a Lehmann game. It's probably at least fine. If it's as successful as folks are saying it is I'm sure I'll get a chance to try it soonish.

I'd make some effort to give it a try. Despite my stated reluctance, I tried it yesterday and found it pretty interesting. There is that "puzzling time" where you sit there hemming and hawing over what direction to turn in, but the forced interaction between players in terms of competing for monuments, places, magic items, and even who's going to pass first makes it far more of a game between people than Race for the Galaxy ever was. I only played one 2-player game and we went with the suggested "first game" stuff to try to get a feel for how the system is supposed to work. My opponent played the Duellist and I played the Transmuter.

My initial impression is that the Duellist has a pretty significant edge; just for the ability to gain gold every turn. Granted, that's with the suggested starting cards, so perhaps he doesn't have a way to gain elan every turn to get that gold. But with that economic edge, my opponent bought two monuments to my zero and also had another random edge: a dragon. Said dragon didn't impact me very much, since I had multiple ways of avoiding its fire breath, but that combined with good essence-generating cards like Tree of Life made winning with the Dragon's Lair a foregone conclusion.

I think the game works with 2 players, but that random draw means that one of them might be aced out pretty easily. It will doubtlessly be different with more players and it can't be more emphasized that this was only one game. Still, I'm definitely interested to try again.

If this were 10 years ago, it feels like Res Arcana would be one of those games that gets super popular, and everyone buys, and almost everyone likes (or at least tolerates) but in this era of shorter attention spans & minis-laden Kickstarters, it sadly ends up being another blip on the radar that gets steamrolled in the Cult Of The New stampede. It has all of the hallmarks of a "professional game" the sorts of which used to be easy to find & pick out & champion, but now is sadly lacking.

Although it does play notably better with 2 or 3 instead of 4.

This game is fantastic. It's a superb engine-builder. The rules are simple and clean. Once you learn the Euroglyphics, it's straightforward to play. This game has a ton of replayability.

You guys singlehandedly put this on my radar. Thanks.

There's just so much replay in that one box. It's pretty great. I really appreciate how you have to decide which cards you will play into your tableau and which will be fodder for essences. It's so simple and yet so smart at the same time. I like it much better than Race. I think it's more elegant. Race may be better for more players, though.

Just played my first game. Fuuuuuuuuuucccck is it good.

Josh Look wrote: Just played my first game. Fuuuuuuuuuucccck is it good.

We told you.
Always take our word for it.

My first play was really underwhelming. We went with the suggested "first time" setup(3 prescribed cards, 5 randoms, particular side of the PoPs). It felt like a JASE cube converter. None of the excitement of Race in figuring out what other people are doing and how I can craft my strategy to best mitigate or take advantage of that. Just boring "how do I optimize my cube production" decisions and glance at other people's cube supplies to see what Places of Powers they are probably going for. I'd give it another shot since I have a better feel for the flow now and it's pretty short, so I guess that makes it the best cube converter ever since most I would never play again.

I'll give this a shot if it comes out around my table, but I'm real skeptical when people say a game is better at being Race for the Galaxy than Race for the Galaxy.

The core of "pay for your plays with other possible plays," is the real interesting part in RFTG, and does it better than San Juan or perhaps even good old Summoner Wars.

This is one of those cases where I already own RftG, so... no thanks! Tap's off. But I'm glad this is incrementally better for anyone else who doesn't own the former.