Note: The Missing Expedition is the two player co-op expansion for the competitive base game, Lost Ruins of Arnak. While I’ve played a two games of Lost Ruins of Arnak, I’m mostly going to be going to be focusing on my experience with missing expedition. That said, the co-op expansion sits on top of the base game, so the game mechanics are pretty much the same.
At the end of Lost Ruins of Arnak, I was feeling a sort of intense “Hmmm”-ness. Not good, not bad, just “Hmm”. It wasn’t because the game is boring, but because the campaign was one of extreme highs and lows, and for various reasons I’ll get into, it ended on a low.
Lost Ruins of Arnak is made up of a bunch of different design elements, but isn’t really defined by any of them. It’s like those little fancy cheeseboards. There are deckbuilding elements, but given that you only draw 5 hands from your deck, and one is the starting hand, it’s hard to call it a deck builder. It’s got worker placement, but you only place 2 workers each round, and there are only 5 rounds.
The general structure of Missing Expedition is as follows: Like base Arnak, the game is played over 5 rounds. On each round, players draw a hand of five cards from their deck, then take turns performing primary actions, with the solo-mode opponent taking actions to lock off options from the players as well. Once a player can’t take anymore actions, they’re forced to pass, and can take no more turns. Once all players are out, the round ends, things are reset, and the next round starts. In addition, on a given turn, players can take any numbers of fast actions.
The actions fairly standard Euro sorts of things. Place a worker. Buy more card for your deck. Spend resources to advance down a progression track. Buy a different type of card. Play a card.
Like I said: Cheeseboard.
So now lets talk about the individual games a bit.
The Campaign
The Missing Expedition is six games long. Now, it doesn’t do the scaffolding campaign or legacy thing, where new mechanics are slowly introduced between games to build player familiarity. Instead, each game is more like a mod-pack, that sits on top of the base game, and adds even more mechanics and game behavior.
And while this does a lot of things, one thing it does do is make setup pretty slow. Arnak has a lot of pieces, cards and deck to be sorted, and setup was about 20-30 minutes each time we played.
I like the word Modpack to describe the co-op expansion, because Missing Expedition feels like a game for people who already a played a ton of Arnak, and wanted more, as opposed to a comfy tutorialized version where you don’t have the urge to shank your friends after they take the cards you wanted to buy.
For example, we ended game 1 with -12 points, and that game took four hours to play. It was not what I would call a energizing experience. But we got better! Game 2 ended with only -0.5 points.
Games 3-5 ended up going much better, giving us a fair amount of confidence going into game 6.
It was also game 6 that we realized we had been doing the games unlocks completely wrong, and should have unlocked much more then we actually did.
Game 6
Game 6 was the lowest of the lows for the experience. There are a lot of reasons for this. One is that is very hard. Another was that the story conclusion was a little bit lackluster.
Remember when I mentioned how each scenario works differently? And it’s all specific rules each time?
We misread one of the rules, and as a result played the last third or so of that scenario completely incorrectly.
I don’t have a good way to describe the experience of realizing the last four hours of what was supposed to be a climatic experience was, in fact, just kind of a mistake/waste of time. Now, we could replay it, but this is supposed to be a campaign game. If you know what’s coming, for me there’s not much point.
So. It ended on a low.
Conclusion
The Missing Expedition feels like an expansion made for people who already love Arnak. Like, really love Arnak and have played it a bunch. I think Arnak is fine, and so most of the fun for me was hanging out with a friend and trying to find ways to game the systems.
It also (and I should note my friend disagrees on this, so it’s purely a matter of taste) didn’t quite deliver on the narrative to the extent I was hoping? None of the mysteries brought up are really solved, and most of the story is just… fine. Not funny or super engaging, just present to remind you that it’s there.
We also really struggled with the rulebook at times, which led to the game 6 fiasco. I’m more then open the fact that my dumb ass can’t read rule books. But I was playing with someone who designs board games, and even he was having trouble. I don’t think The Missing Expedition does a great job managing the different game modes.
If you like complex co-op Euro games or loved Arnak and wanted more weird Arnak, The Lost Expedition might be right up your alley. But for me, I’m going to disappear into the forest.