Game night started out with a game about birds. Of course I’m talking about Piepmatz by Lookout Games! A card game with birds, food, and eggs. What else could it be? Play a bird to one of the perches at a feeder. If the total value of birds that are waiting for that perch exceeds the value of the bird on the perch (the card closest to the feeder), then that bird flies to your collection. It turned out to be much more thoughtful than we anticipated. David fought through a scurry of squirrels and won.
We moved on to the main event of the evening: Lost Ruins of Arnak with the Expedition Leaders expansion. This was our first time playing with this expansion which adds leaders with asymmetric abilities, alternative research tracks, and new item cards and artifacts. I played as “The Falconer:” a leader with an eagle that flies out to retrieve things. It’s basically a research track on her player board.
The unique powers provide a blueprint on how to play the game. The eagle specifically helped with exploration and defeating guardians. That meant I needed a lot of compass tokens. I purchased cards and recruited assistants to create an engine that was very efficient at generating tokens. I ended up defeating six guardians and collecting eight idols. It was the first time that a guardian strategy won the game!
The extra content added time to our decision making, and the game took over three and a half hours. We will need to get the playing time down to less than two hours if it is going to become a staple.
