Lost Ruins of Arnak: Expedition Leaders Expansion Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review the Expedition Leaders expansion for the Lost Ruins of Arnak from Czech Games Edition. This expansion not only adds more variety to be used in the base game, but also more variety for the rest of the components.

Lost Ruins of Arnak was one of my favorite games from 2020 and I wasn’t alone in that thinking. It went on to win the Game of the Year for our Board Game Quest awards. If you haven’t played it yet, you can check out my review of the core game here. Spoiler alert: it’s awesome.

Since then, it has graced my tabletop quite a few times. While not perfect, I never really thought it needed an expansion. But Czech Games Edition decided to make one anyway dubbed Lots Ruins of Arnak: Expedition Leaders. After giving it some plays, we’ve got the low down for you.

First the basics. The expansion comes with more items, artifacts, assistants, idols, guardians, and expedition sites. So huzzah for more variety! It also comes with two new research tracks that overlay the mainboard. This increases the number of tracks you can choose from in the game to four.

But the real star of the show here are the 6 leaders. Every game, each player gets to choose a leader to use that gives them some unique powers and a special starting deck (to replace the symmetrical one from the core game). The different leaders are:

Captain: His main thing is he gets three archaeologists to use.Falconer: Has a pet bird that can go fetch you items or use expedition sitesBaroness: She earns free money each round and can take item cards she buys directly into her handProfessor: He like artifacts and has special income he can use each round to buy and play artifact cards. Also has his own private reserve of artifact cards to buy.Explorer: Has only