Sanctuary is the latest game from designer Mathias Wigge, creator of Ark Nova. Both games are competitive zoo builders with gorgeous artwork and theming, but are otherwise quite different—more on that in the comparisons section later on.
This is a game for 1–5 players, ages 12 and up, with an estimated playing time of 20 minutes per player, i.e., 20–100 minutes, in which you populate a zoo with hexagonal animal and building tiles, as well as somewhat metaphor-breaking project tiles representing, say, experts in particular types of animal or partnerships with other zoos.
Playing It
First, if you want a feel for the game in action, as interactive tutorial exists on Dized.
Note that this is a very short summary of gameplay; see the full How to Play article elsewhere on the blog for more details.
Everyone gets their own zoo map, four action cards and a handful of various markers. There’s a central board which displays six tiles, with a draw stack at one end and a discard pile at the other.
The tiles themselves are huuuge—chunky and close to 3 inches across the diagonal, which means the game really is a table hog. While some tiles do have quite a lot of content, I think they could easily have been shrunk in size by a quarter or third, meaning the game wouldn’t occupy quite so much table space.
Three of the action cards provide the ability to place an animal (in three different habitats: forest, rocks or water) on the board, and the fourth a project. Each time you use a card, it shifts to the leftmost slot at the edge of the board, pushing the others to the right—this matters because the strength of the card depends on which slot it occupies. For example, if you want to place an animal card marked with a ‘cost’ of 3, the appropriate action card must be in a slot indicating strength 3 or higher. If you can’t use any of your action cards in this way because you don’t have viable tiles in your hand, they have a secondary function letting you draw more tiles.
Each player’s turn starts with drawing a tile within reputation range (defined by which slot the project action card occupies), followed by performing an action, i.e., either playing a tile from your rack or drawing further tiles. Besides the strength requirement, tiles may have other placement constraints: e.g., must be placed by the river, or must be adjacent to two forest tiles. Where you choose to place a tile depends on more than just those constraints; some tiles’ scores are affected by their neighbours, so a certain amount of planning is necessary to maximise scoring. Additionally, tiles sometimes have effects—bonus operations—either immediate (such as, place another tile) or ongoing (e.g., every time you place an Africa tile, take another Africa tile from the display).
After that, depending on the current state of your zoo, you can optionally play a building tile, support a conservation objective or upgrade an action card. Finally, discard down to six tiles, refill the central tile display, and check if game end has been triggered (e.g., your zoo map is full, or there are no tiles left in the draw stack).
At the end of the game, tot up the scores on all the tiles on the board (some of which may be dependent on other tiles), and add the values from conservation awards, along with those from a smattering of tokens picked up during play. The winner is the person with the highest score.
Sanctuary offers a solo mode, in which randomly turning over 18 numbered tokens causes tiles to be removed from the display, as if by an opponent—probably as minimal an automa as you can get. Given how little interaction there is between players, this does make the solo gameplay very similar to a that of a multiplayer game. A publisher download offers more difficult challenges.
Comparisons
The obvious game to compare this to is Ark Nova (it’s even written on the box—‘Sanctuary: An Ark Nova Game’). There are a lot of similarities in the artwork and iconography, and many of the concepts are the same, but that’s about it. Sanctuary is a much, much simpler game, and considerably quicker to play. For example, placing an animal in Ark Nova might require three distinct turns—draw card, build enclosure, place animal; you also need to have enough money for those steps, and fingers crossed that the relevant action cards are sufficiently high strength at the right times so that you can perform each action. However, even if the action cards aren’t in exactly the right place, you can spend X-tokens to boost them, but X-tokens aren’t easy to come by. In Sanctuary, this all happens in a single turn: take a tile followed by place a tile, no enclosure needed and no money involved; and you have the option of playing a building after all that (akin to taking a distinct turn to play an Ark Nova special enclosure sponsor card), as well as potentially gaining a conservation award (again, a turn-consuming Ark Nova action). Little wonder Sanctuary games are shorter!
On the topic of conservation awards, the Sanctuary mechanism is eviscerated compared to Ark Nova’s: in the latter, there’s competition between players for conservation projects, but in Sanctuary, multiple players can gain the same awards. There isn’t a lot of interaction between players in Ark Nova, but there’s even less in Sanctuary (I’ve not checked every tile, but I don’t think there are any at all that reference what’s happening in other players’ maps).
As someone who’s played a fair amount of Ark Nova, an aspect of Sanctuary I currently find frustrating is the lack of X-tokens. (It is still early days with the game, and I might change my mind.) The luck of the Ark Nova card draw might mean you sometimes can’t do precisely what you want, but an X-token can boost action powers. In Sanctuary, you’re stuck if the tiles aren’t coming out in your favour (especially after you’ve played a project, resulting in having a low reputation to draw tiles from), and all you can do is use the draw tiles actions in order to nudge the action card you want up the queue. Having said that, the Sanctuary hand is up to six tiles, compared to Ark Nova’s three between breaks, so there is a bit more leeway for holding on to ‘good’ tiles. (Incidentally, I’m contemplating experimenting with a mechanism where players can spend conservation or pouch tokens, or perhaps trading in two tiles, to perform X-token-like boosts, to see if that’s better or worse than playing the game as intended.)
Another (mis?)feature this game shares with its older cousin is the odd split of the rules into a ‘rule book’ and a ‘glossary,’ where the latter isn’t really a glossary, but a hodgepodge of useful information—this means tracking down that one icon you can’t quite remember requires flicking through both booklets, but fortunately they’re quite small. A single, comprehensive list of all icons would be helpful, and I’m sure one will appear soon on BoardGameGeek.
I suspect that experienced Ark Nova players might be disappointed with Sanctuary, which leads me to what might be a more apt comparison…
Wingspan, along with the nectar mechanism from Oceania to add a little more heft, feels like an incredibly similar game. I find the games play at similar speeds and have the same thinkiness, swapping Wingspan’s engine running for Sanctuary’s tile effects and placement considerations. Apart from Wingpsan’s ‘pink powers,’ there’s about the same amount of interaction between players in both games, i.e., you share the draw deck and that’s pretty much it. In both cases, too, scoring is not something to think about during the game, just do a GCSE maths exam at the end.
Another game that struck me as similar is Forest Shuffle. There’s a stream of cards players pick from (the clearing), and complex rules for placing the cards—not so much in terms of restrictions but more about interesting interactions between cards when scoring which guide card choice and placement (e.g., score for multiple species of butterfly in your tableau, or dormice score only on trees which also have bats). There are a few cards with immediate and ongoing bonus effects, and the final scoring is the same sort of tangly arithmetic. The solo mode (to be found in the Exploration expansion is pretty close, too: randomly drawn cards affect the clearing like another player would. Oh, and it’s nature-based too. The tableau is simpler and more flexible, for sure, but I feel that a similar amount of mental gymnastics is required to play the game.
Final Words
Sanctuary is definitely not a simplified Ark Nova, though it could well appeal to people who like the idea of the latter but find it too heavy-going.
I think people who like the -span games or puzzly games like Forest Shuffle would find Sanctuary an enjoyable play.
To conclude, this is a pretty and fun game, and the worst thing I can say about Sanctuary is that my game group likes it so much that I’m going to find it difficult to get Ark Nova on the table now!
About the Author:
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
