Ark Nova ★★ | Review
Like many fans of Terraforming Mars, I was eager to play Ark Nova. Building a zoo through cards and unique projects seemed fun, and it indeed was! Featuring a great selection mechanism, a board to build in and a massive deck, it has all the elements for a game I would like. Sadly, a lack of development and a misguided sense of balance forced me to lower my expectations.
CHOOSE AN ANIMAL
Ark Nova is, by all intent and purposes, a card game played on a board. We are given a bit of cash, a handful of chits and left to build a zoo piece by piece. Each card represents a different animal, specialist or method of scoring and it’s our job to put them together for profit. While the scoring has a few tricks, it’s pretty much a race. Whoever gets the most points, faster, wins.
The most basic way to get those points is to show animals to the public. They have a “ticket value”, which doubles as both income and victory points. But, in order to put them into play, we first need to build an enclosure. On our board, we can raise fences from one to five hexes in size. Each animal requires a different amount of space. Some even need to be next to water or rocky terrain, as well.
Like in many euro games, some spaces of the board have placement bonuses. If we build over them, we might get extra cards, a boost to our reputation or cash. Most importantly, we may also build special structures that host several animals at once, like aviaries. Other structures, like pavilion and kiosks, can be used to boost our income, but their presence is minor.
However, the strength of each action isn’t static. Rather, their power varies by when they are taken. In our player board, they are placed in order from one, the weakest, to five, the strongest. For example, at its lowest strength, Animals is useless. It doesn’t allow us to play any and is best left to recover. However, at the maximum of five, it lets us place two different animals in their enclosures, saving us an entire action.
The trick is that, whenever we use an action, it goes back to the first spot in the queue. This not only prevents us from repeating it with any sort of efficiency; it also pushes all others up, making them better. Trying to make the most out of them, while juggling the cards in our hand and the needs of our zoo is what makes Ark Nova interesting and fun.
And yet, for all it brings to the table, it’s emblematic of the game’s flaws. To make sure there were more than two useful actions, the cards were divided into three different types. If we don’t draw the right one, we are out of luck. The action will get stuck, all others will suffer, and you might lose the turn trying to fix it. It’s the first sign that Ark Nova might not live up to its promise.
BACKWARDS DESIGN
Despite being the shining example of contemporary board games, some of the design choices of Ark Nova can only be described as backwards. That is, parts of it work in ways that are strange, counterproductive or just indicative of a lack of playtesting. Ark Nova comes across as if it were rushed into release.
The most serious issue with the design is how tickets double as both income and victory points. By nature, this bakes a hard economic snowball right into it. While money is tight early on, it becomes largely limitless later on. An income of just five coins per turn is supposed to be enough to start. However, by the midgame, we’ll get up to thirty, which is six times larger.
As you can imagine, cards don’t get six times more expensive as time goes on. If they did, it would be impossible to play them on the first turn. We also don’t get six times the cards or six times the building capacity, creating a bottleneck. Ultimately, this means that our success will be determined, to a large degree, by how well we did at the start and whether we draw the right cards at the right time. This is most noticiable with animal cards.
Small animals demand fewer fences, are cheaper to play and have less requirements than larger ones. To compensate, we could expect their pay out to be lower. But there’s not enough of a difference between both to make up for the extra work in actions, space and money. Even then, why bother when you can cram up to five different birds in the same aviary? Bypassing costs is a powerful mechanic in the vast majority of games and Ark Nova is no exception.
Consider one last example. If we run out of money during a round, we can use the Sponsors card to get some. However, not only is this extremely inefficient, doing so brings the round end closer. Hence, we don’t get to enjoy our money for long before everyone gets an income phase. In the end, it siphons actions away from losing players while the winners keep on playing animals.
Above all, Ark Nova is one of those games where our decisions barely affect our opponents but we still have to wait for their turn. There are attack cards, but they are overpriced, weak and needlessly complex. I would have preferred if they had been left out and turns made simultaneous. At the very least, that might have prevented the designer from giving more turns to the first player and then trying to fix it afterwards.
THE FINISHING TOUCH
With every match, I become aware of one more issue with Ark Nova. None are game-breaking. They are all niggles which could be improved with little effort. And yet, they pile up. Little by little, they take away the enjoyment of choosing the right card or trying out new strategies. Why invest in monkeys, I found myself pondering, when I might never draw another?
In many ways Ark Nova deepens some of the flaws of Terraforming Mars. It’s longer, more complex and more prone to stalling. The chief complaint I had about its predecessor was that most of the action took place, not on the shared board, but on the cards on your hand. And yet, Ark Nova goes further and makes all boards personal, doing away with most of the humanity of the design.
It’s possible to enjoy Ark Nova whether one map is better than the rest or if koalas aren’t actually bears. But I can’t, in good conscience, recommend a game that trips over itself so often. There’s a point in which my appreciation for polish takes over and I must draw a line somewhere. I enjoy it, undeniably, but I never get to do so without this or that issue obscuring my view.
Like Terraforming Mars, Ark Nova could improve with expansions. But it’s already bloated with more content than it could ever need to. Rather, what it truly needs, is less. Less mechanics, fewer cards, to shed its weakest elements and drop them to the cutting floor. It needs polish, editing, development, getting rid of what didn’t work and strengthening what did.
| ARK NOVA (2021) | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| DESIGN | Mathias Wigge | ART | Steffen Bieker Loïc Billiau Dennis Lohausen et, al. |
| PUBLISHER | Feuerland Spiele Maldito Games | LENGTH | 120 minutes |
| NUMBER OF PLAYERS | 1-4 (Best with 2-3) | SCORE | ★★ |
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As far as I’m concerned your review is right on the money. Exactly my impression of the game.
Thank you Sagrilarus. It seems quite a few of us feel that way, a few others have told me the same thing!
I’d strongly disagree about many of your points. It’s incredibly rare I have a hand of cards I cannot do things with (Around two hundred plays, only twice have I felt that I could not get synergies going).
While the balance of Appeal Vs Conservation is critical, I will generally focus more on conservation and sponsorship, depending on cards. I will almost never play aviary or reptile house, and my zoos are generally littered with kiosks and pavilions.
Friends I play with will often go with more if a build strategy than me; some will go more continents Vs universities, others the other way.
The game has versatility, depth, and huge amounts of polish.
It’s a card game with a big deck. That could mean, a la Terraforming Mars, that you can get substantial cards that are useless to you. The genius and polish of Ark Nova is that the game is about seeing opportunities in the cards you can see; and there almost always will be opportunities.
If one plays the game in hope of seeing monkies, dissapointment can follow. But setting up so that, if monkies appear you can take advantage, us often viable.
As players we interact strongly, and aggressively. Forcing breaks at the moment that disadvantages your opponent, snatching the cards they want, pressuring the race to the endpoint, are all about interaction, and are core to playing the game well.
I find the monkey and snake cards sensible and effective little catch-ups, and useful microaggressions. I accept that venom and constriction can cause some confusion the first few times you play, but they are fairly straightforward thereafter.
I totally agree with your assessment. Like you I disagree with the reviewer. We love Ark Nova
Totally feel the same way. The OP failed to call out that at its heart ArkNova is a race. You accept that and the rest of it makes more sense.
The most interesting part is the action selection puzzle. What a great game.
Note that I did call it a race on the first paragraph after the intro “While the scoring has a few tricks, it’s pretty much a race. Whoever gets the most points, faster, wins.”
Good review – it sums up my feelings on ARK NOVA as well. I agree that the game can be prone to stalling. Unlike Terraforming Mars, not only is your hand size limited ( VERY limited evem after you upgrade your Action card ) but you can’t even sell useless cards for money .
You can discard cards for money. But unlike TM where you can just get rid of them with no effort (or use it to get the last say in a turn) you have to set it up. Stick a Tortoise with Sunbathing in your reptile house and cash in those excess cards.
That’s the beauty, in my opinion, of the game. Most of the time things don’t work out as planned and you have to be able to adapt. Tonight I had to steer from a reptile heavy strategy to a small animal zoo because of the conservation projects that showed up. My score would be a lot lower had I stuck to my reptiles instead of deviating when the opportunity arose.
As with all things in life, different people have different opinions and Ark Nova is no except. I join with the thousands of people who have helped propel Ark Nova to the top 5 level of games of all time. It is a great game, almost a work of art in it’s creation and design balance.
Obviously it won’t be for everyone. But to say it suffers from lack of playtesting? I think the OP is not only wrong but is being insulting. Having found numerous ways to accrue the points needed, I can see there has been extensive work put into balancing all aspects of the game.
I hope that a large percentage of responses are in disagreement with the OP and that he will consider reevaluating his thoughts and perhaps concede that more people like than dislike Ark Nova.
At the very least, show appreciation for this amazing game. Even if it’s not perfectly to your liking. No game can perfectly satisfy everyone. Your personal taste in gaming may lie elsewhere, but that doesn’t make Ark Nova a flawed game.
I do not have to show appreciation for Ark Nova or any other game. And that’s neither wrong, nor insulting, but the most basic aspect of criticism. How popular it is, how much you like or how many people voted for it on Boardgamegeek has no bearing, neither in my arguments nor on the quality of the game itself. A popularity list in an American website is not a gospel everyone must abide to.
And while Ark Nova fans have certainly been open with their opinions, to the point of personal attacks, that doesn’t make them the majority. Most of my readership appreciate honest criticism, whether they agree or disagree with it, and value having a variety of voices in gaming. Regardless, I do not have a habit of bending my opinion to conform others, no matter how “unpopular” they might be. Rather, I do my job which is to provide my own, open opinion. And in Ark Nova‘s case, I think it’s a flawed game.
I don’t know much about Ark Nova and I’m not interested in defending it, so please don’t take this as a gotcha; I’m just curious:
You probably like Terraforming Mars more than I do, though I too think it’s a good game. It also has victory points that double as income. From an armchair game design perspective, this looks like an obviously bad idea that lets a player with an early lead snowball to victory. What does TM do to make it work anyway, and why does Ark Nova fail?
It’s not a gotcha at all! In fact, it’s a very good question. Like you say, coupling income and victory points is not the best idea. It does lead to problems and Terrafoming Mars is no exception. However, there are a few factors that make the snowball less of a problem in Terraforming Mars than Ark Nova.
The first is that not all sources of income double as victory points and vice versa. Only your Terraforming Rating counts as both and, often, you’ll get income and points independently of it. Most economic cards won’t contribute to your points total or do so inefficiently, so the coupling isn’t as severe. The coupling is much stronger in Ark Nova, as even conservation gets permanent economic benefits like upgraded cards or special benefits every income round.
The second is that the snowball is much smaller and takes longer to get going. You start at 20 points and you may end the game with less than 50. Doubling your income is already noticiable, but you only do so over the course of a whole game. In Ark Nova, however, you do so almost inmediately. Your first animal will likely double your starting income. You may even end the first round tripling it. That’s a far higher rate of snowballing.
The third is that the initial rate of income in Terraforming Mars is far more viable. You can play most cards with 20 income and, while it’s not great, it’s enough to play. In Ark Nova, your initial income is extremely low and remains low even after raising it a couple of times. So if you don’t do that or you stumble, you are not going to be able to compete.
Lastly, Terraforming Mars is more balanced. Cards are more versatile, better priced and don’t require you to build enclosures before putting them into play. Still, it may surprise you to know that, as much as I like it, I would only rate the base game the base game 3 stars, only one more than Ark Nova. So the difference isn’t as large as it may seem!
I only just played my first game of Ark Nova (2-player), but I find myself agreeing with much of your review. However, I do wish you’d share more of your thoughts on what I saw as the biggest issue with the game: that you lose if you don’t choose the upgrade card option on the conservation track 2 spot and instead choose the worker.
Has anyone encountered any reason one would take the worker? It seems a clearly wrong choice to make and I hate when a game forces my hand especially early on in a game that took all day to play. If you don’t upgrade, you potentially lose out on a bunch of stuff and end up in a deadlock not being able to sell cards as in TM and not being able to do anything with those workers. It seems like they should have at least one more upgrade chance somehow and just have a rule you can’t upgrade more than four if that’s important.
Definitely disappointed after my first play.
It’s hard to say what’s better in the “Upgrade vs worker” debate. While it seems like the upgrade is the best option at first glance, I’m told some expert players go straight for extra workers so they can get on more conservation projects. In the end, the biggest limitation in the game is sponsorship actions. If you can get extra cubes in scoring cards and hence more bonuses, you’ll have a big advantage. So I can’t really say!
We just played Ark Nova for the first time last night with some friends who raved about it. I thought it was a super annoying game- my husband and I talked about it the whole way home, and one problem is that it requires so much bookkeeping from the player. Games like Tyrants of the Underdark and Scythe guide the player through their actions, while Ark Nova requires the player to move their card to the one spot (an interesting mechanism but clunky in implementation), do the actual action, pay a cost, take tickets, take special actions on the card which may require doing all these steps over, checking their other cards for special bonuses- it’s just not at all intuitive or thematic, and drains any fun out of the game. Thanks for your review, I came home and googled “Ark Nova sucks” to see if I was the only one who disliked it.
It’s a strange set of criticisms for sure. You mention economic snowball with the appeal yet it’s far less egregious than with TfM (a game I also love) where TM also doubles as points and income. Also the combos and synergies are way less and much harder to put together than TfM where engine based metas will be absolutely nuts, there is also no excessive action chaining in AN. Also stalling? What are you on about, there is hardly any scope for action stalling like a blue card type TfM tableau, the AN never explode in the same way and since the point scoring is quite constrained there’s really no motivation to stall. It’s not like you can rack up huge income and then lash out on loads of points right at the end, there’s far fewer points and actions to play them (e.g. conservations). Finally unlike in TfM there is none of that god awful dragged out engine meta if you’re the one player trying to terraform rush and keep the gens number small. At least here as it’s a race you essentially have your own game end timer that you don’t need help from the other players.
I don’t think the games feel very similar, this is much less interaction with no shared map and way, way less scope for building engines or even effective rushing, it’s a much more constrained, steady “find a way to make the cards you get work and keep an eye on some scoring objectives”. I think I prefer the style of game that AN is with 2P and TfM at 3P but I’ve played TfM > 150 times F2F 2P and AN < 10 so maybe it’s a freshness thing (plus my wife in TfM has gone more and more engine whereas I am TR rush hodgepodge style, mainly because I think engine strats and stalling ruin TfM for me and am in fact convinced this is why so many players give up on it and focus on the length. 2P TfM should end in 10+/-1 gens and take about 90 mins. I think AN might be similar but maybe could be quicker once familiar).
I think it’s fair to say you have way more access to the deck in TfM and therefore there are clear metas and strategies, and obvious card sets that work together whereas it feels here that you are much more limited to what you get and thus have to cobble together something there’s no scope even with early cards to “look for” a specific strategy the way you can even from the starting hand in TfM
Hey, Erik, thanks for the review. The only thing I didn’t catch is what is your scale?
Is it 2 stars out of 5? Out of 10? Out of 3?
Is there a place this is written that I missed?
Hoping you have a great day!
My rating is out of five, though, rsrely, a game might not get any stars. It’s no wonder you couldn’t find my scoring guide, it’s barely linked anywhere.You can read it here: Erik Twice’s Score system
When I have the time, I’ll see if I can make it more visible. Thanks for checking it out!
Thanks for the link! Looking forward to read more of your material.
You flatter me! I hope you enjoy it! 🙂
While not exactly looking for a negative Ark Nova review, or a review at all, I stumbled upon this while looking for a card list for the first expansion; Marine World.
Regardless of that, this piqued my interest and I wanted to read up on what Erik Twice (the reviewer) had to say about it.
Personally I love Ark Nova, I think it is one of the most interesting and deep games I’ve played. At first I had some issue finding nicer and more articulated arguments other than “get good” type of responses. This is certainly not my intention, you are well within your rights to have a differing opinion and you can certainly like or dislike a game while mastering it or being a complete novice.
Comparing Ark Nova to Terraforming Mars, I come to a different conclusion. While it also is relatively complex and card driven, I believe it is slightly more of an imbalanced and luck based game, especially after a certain mastery level of the game is acquired.
Ark Nova has some level of imbalance and luck, but this isn’t anywhere near TF where there are single cards that can completely break the game if played early, (AI Central or Advanced Alloys are good examples) or mechanics (like the Jupiter symbols) that are way better than others at scoring points. On the flipside: there are no truly bad cards in Ark Nova, there are easy to use good cards, harder to use good cards and situational cards.
Also, I found Ark Nova to be a much quicker game, if you have experienced players. While TM has turns with tons of players fiddling around with their activated blue cards and no real progression to the game, almost every player turn in Ark Nova slowly builds towards the end. In our most common play setup, a 3 player game, we often need no more than 1hr45m to complete a game, including pre-game setup, which is quite a bit for AN.
TM games can last most of our playgroups slightly over 2hrs, but I’ve had 2 player games where it drags on for 4-5 hours, which are not enjoyable. TM is too light a game to invest so many hours in and playing optimally doesn’t always mean doing actions that progress the game.
I do not agree with your point that playing smaller animals is always better, there are some banger animals that have a powerful ability (the Elephants or the Eagles come to mind) that can give you a better endgame, they all require you to upgrade your Animal action card and in most cases this is always worth it. I think other than that, the set is relatively balanced and playing animals situationally because of goals, synergy or simply because it is efficient to do so is more of a thing than simply trying to be cheap.
Ark Nova is a game of optimizing your turns, especially if you start to play online against really strong opponents you start to notice certain trends. No game rarely, if ever, is going longer than 5 breaks and most players aggressively try to eliminate their bottlenecks and deny other players important cards. It is not the most fun way to play the game, as playing it casually among friends is a much better time, where you can try certain strategies and not be severely punished by other people spotting it and taking your cards from you.
That said, I can point to 2 weaker points of the game:
1. There is definitely a ‘runaway leader’ issue with AN. Some early games can be really strong and especially going quickly along the conservation track and sniping all the best rewards that are first come – first served can allow a player to ride that early game all the way to an early finish. The only comeback mechanism that is actively fighting this is the attack cards and while I certainly think they are not weak, they are also not capable of setting back a player so much as to alleviate this runaway problem.
2. The game often ends too early, before the players can all finish their strategy. We have had many games where some players, that had a bit of a rough start were still in the early to mid game, while the one that had a blazing start already ended the game. Losing the game is one thing, but not being able to play out your strategy or finish your plans is probably the worst possible feeling.
If skill levels are close and relative card luck also is, this will not happen often, but it makes the game less suited for newer players, unless you severely handicap the more experienced players or use the overpowered beginner’s maps for the new players. (or both)
Lastly, I want to point out that the Ark Nova – Marine World expansion (and to a lesser extent, the map pack) has a few important gamechanging additions, that fix a few of the issues that the reviewer mentioned. There is a new type of University added, that gives a symbol of an animal type and reveals card from the deck until you reveal that card, which you may then take as well. This allows for the mentioned ‘Primate’ strategy or any animal based engine you want to build. They also fixed some of the weaker goals, added quite a few new ones and fixed a few imbalances in the deck with some extra cards of a certain type.
The other main thing added was aquatic animals, that you keep in a new enclosure (an aquarium),they have new abilities, one of them being a stacking reef ability, that triggers all reef abilities of all your animals when you play them. The game feels more balanced and diverse than before and I wouldn’t recommend playing the game without the expansion if you have the option.
Thanks for the detailed review. Even though I do not agree with all of the points, I can understand even games that are extremely popular and considered excellent by many, can’t satisfy everyone’s gaming itch. I would suggest buying this game mainly, if you enjoy deep, forward thinking strategy, like the theme of building a zoo and can handle having the occasional failed game, where none of it comes together.
No, thanks to you for your great response! The goal here is not to settle in stone what’s the correct view of Ark Nova, but to discuss it critically, so I appreciate you sharing your thoughts!