![]() ![]() I had a couple of turns where I played the Association action, then added either a Partner Zoo or a Partner University to my player board. It’s a mechanism lifted wholesale from Civilization: A New Dawn, and one that’s good to see get more use in the hobby.īut those actions trigger many other things. Then, the chosen card moves to the left-hand side of the line and the next player takes their turn. ![]() So, if your Cards card is below the 4 strength slot, you can draw and potentially discard a certain number of cards. ![]() That number is the strength of the action when you play that card. ![]() Each turn, a player has the choice of 5 different actions: drawing cards, building structures in your park, playing Sponsor cards, playing Association actions, and playing cards from your hand.Įach action is represented by a card that sits below your player board, aligned with a number running from 1-5. In Ark Nova, you’ve got tracks, you’ve got end-game scoring cards that are public, you’ve got end-game scoring cards that are private, you’ve got cards you can play from your hand to add more mid- and end-game scoring cards, you’ve got bonuses tied to 2 of the 3 tracks on the board, and you’ve got an income track aligned with your score, almost exactly like the Terraform Rating system used in Terraforming Mars.Ĭombos live EVERYWHERE in Ark Nova, and this is my favorite part of the experience. Remember how Terraforming Mars had tracks? The best thing about those tracks was that 3 of them (Temperature, Oxygen, Oceans) were shared by players, dictating the trigger of the end of the game. In other words, if you thought Terraforming Mars was complex, steer clear of Ark Nova, because I haven’t even mentioned all the various game mechanics going on yet! You’re building out a tableau of cards while working as a business to settle Mars open a new zoo, while playing cards from your hand to set up one-time bonuses, ongoing scoring bonuses when meeting certain conditions on the board, and end-game scoring multipliers.Īrk Nova adds another layer, though: your player board is a zoo, and you’ll be adding hexagonal cardboard pieces to represent enclosures, kiosks, reptile houses, and other locations. Now that I’ve completed my first play, I do agree that Ark Nova shares at least some of the DNA of Terraforming Mars, itself an all-time classic released in 2016. He was right, on both fronts: it was time to play Ark Nova, and it is the most hyped game I can think of since I joined Meeple Mountain, outpacing games like Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile because it’s been #1 on BGG’s “The Hotness” scale for weeks. “Oh ****, today might be Ark Nova time! The most hyped game of the century!” I have a healthy sense of “trust, but verify” here at the Bell gaming compound, so when my boy Fil texted me to see if I wanted to come out to play some games, he couldn’t hide his excitement. On BoardGameGeek, Ark Nova is already the 133rd-highest ranked game of all time as of the time of this writing-and it only started shipping to Capstone’s US buyers in February. It feels like Ark Nova, published in the US by Capstone Games, is almost incessantly compared to Terraforming Mars and has come away from almost all of the reviews I have consumed completely unscathed. Lots of my peers in the tabletop media and content creation space have had the chance to play Ark Nova in recent months. ![]()
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