Ark Nova is one of the best-looking games in my collection, and a lot of fun to play—if I can ever find the time and enough players. However, I’m totally rubbish at it; my one and only win came as a surprise to me.
So, I was excited to discover that its designer, Mathias Wigge, has created the less complex Sanctuary!
Like Ark Nova, Sanctuary is a competitive game based around building and managing a zoo. It retains all the theming of Ark Nova, as well as all the gorgeous art. However, it changes and simplifies the gameplay; a bit like Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition vs Terraforming Mars – the rules are less taxing, sure, but it’s not a dumbed down version of the original game, it’s a different game based around similar concepts. (I wonder if the Ark Nova universe will be extended with a dice-based game, too…)
Sanctuary is a game for 1–5 players (compared to Ark Nova’s 1–4), ages 12+ (compared to 14+). Note the ‘1’ in the numbers of players: there is a solo mode, in which you play for a certain number of turns, with some random discards occurring along the way, and see what your score is. Play time is estimated at 20 minutes per player, i.e., 40–100 minutes (compared to 90–150). As a simpler, quicker game, it will appeal to a wider range of gamers than Ark Nova.
The most immediately visible change from the ‘original’ is the disappearance of the huge central board—in Sanctuary, there’s just the central component of the Ark Nova board, a rack of cards (hexagonal tiles, to be more accurate) from which to draw when it’s your turn. Other differences are: no money—you just get stuff (if only life was like that!), which also means ‘breaks’ are not part of the game; no enclosures, more or less—you place animals directly on your player mat; and associations are gone, though conservation targets live on in a modified form and some flavour of associations appear on specific tiles.
Similarities include the turn structure of choosing a strength-limited action to perform, then shuffling the action tiles along to change their strengths, as well as flipping the action cards to make them more powerful. The available actions are different, though: place a marine animal, place a forest-living animal, place a mountain-living animal, or play a ‘project’ (roughly equivalent to sponsor or association); no enclosure building, no separate card-drawing action, and no association actions. Note that three of the actions are almost identical, and I wonder if they were split out solely to make the action card shuffling work. Tiles have placement restrictions which have to be met (e.g., adjacent to certain other tiles), and will contribute to your final score or provide immediate or on-going benefits—because the tile/card placement contributes so much to the score, picking the right location for your tiles is crucial.
The iconography is almost identical Ark Nova’s, so should be easily recognisable to anyone who’s played that; conversely, some of the graphical elements might be rather obscure to someone coming to the game fresh (similar to encountering Terraforming Mars vs the other games that stable).
Playing It
Each player’s turn starts with drawing a tile within reputation range followed by performing an action, either playing a tile from your hand or drawing further tiles. After that, depending on the current state of your zoo, you can optionally play a building tile for free, support a conservation project or upgrade an action card. So, what would have been a sequence of three turns in Ark Nova—draw card, build enclosure, place animal—could happen in one turn with Sanctuary, and you might be able to perform conservation and building steps on top. Finally, discard down to six tiles, replenish the central tile collection, and check if game end has been triggered (by, e.g., your zoo being full, or no tiles left in the deck).
After that comes scoring—which is sufficiently complex that a special pad is provided! With Ark Nova, you score as you go along; here, you have to do a GCSE maths paper at the end… These tiles score X, but if they’re beside these others, you get an additional Y; this pattern of tiles gains Z; and so on. It feels a bit like Forest Shuffle, where the gameplay is quick, but scoring is a total PITA—though there’s a clever phone app for Forest Shuffle which tots up your score from what the camera sees.
Conclusion
Do you need both Ark Nova and Sanctuary? Probably not, and you should settle for whichever hits your game complexity sweet spot. But do you want both—yes, absolutely, how can you not?!
Finally, if you’re as excited about this as I am and just can’t wait, there’s a preliminary interactive tutorial up on Dized already.
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 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts. There have also been papers in the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, which are probably somewhat less relevant and definitely less entertaining. 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.
