Ancient Knowledge and Heritage Expansion Review
boardgamequest.comIt’s pretty rare when a game introduces a new mechanism into a tried and true format. Think about a tableau builder. You place cards into a tableau, you get the benefits of the card, maybe as a one-time benefit, maybe as an ongoing effect or an end-game score. But sometimes a game shakes the paradigm up.
What if the cards in your tableau moved over time and their benefit changed as they moved? What if the primary costs to play the cards are also negative points at the end of the game? But what if the more negative points you acquire, the stronger your actions get? That game sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it?
That’s Ancient Knowledge, designed by Rémi Mathieu with art by Pierre Ples, Adrien Rives, and Emilien Rotival, and published in the USA by IELLO. And now Monsieur Mathieu and team have offered up a new expansion, called Ancient Knowledge: Heritage that provides new effects and new ways to play.
In some respects, Ancient Knowledge is a bog-standard tableau builder with mechanisms that any gamer will recognize. On your turn, you get two actions and you choose from a menu of five possible options, four of which are just what you’d expect, involving drawing fresh cards, playing cards into your tableau, etc. The fifth action lets you remove negative point markers. So far, ho hum.
Where Ancient Knowledge subverts the standard conception of a tableau builder is what makes it stand out. Players have a multi-positional tableau where they can place different types of cards. While some types of cards stay in place, your primary cards, which the game calls “Monuments” go into a spot on your tableau called the “Timeline.” As you place Monuments into your Timeline, you add knowledge tokens (from the supply) to the cards, which is where things get interesting. At the end of each turn, all of the cards in your Timeline shift to the left, and as they hit the end of the progression, they “Fall into Decline” – which makes them eligible for end-game points but also serves as the
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