How to Play Lost Ruins of Arnak

Lost Ruins of Arnak sends your expedition to an uncharted island to find artifacts, face its guardians, and piece together the story of a vanished civilization. Under the adventure sit two classic ideas: you build a deck of cards, and you send workers, here two archaeologists, to places on a shared board. Our explainers on deck building and worker placement cover the background.

This lesson follows the current English rulebook from Czech Games Edition and uses its terms. The resources you will hear about are coins, compasses, tablets, arrowheads, and jewels.

How do you set up?

1. Put the main board Bird Temple side up. The rulebook saves the Snake Temple side for later games.
2. Card row. Shuffle artifacts and items into two face-down decks. Put the Fear cards face up. Set the moon staff on round I, with 1 artifact to its left and 5 items to its right.
3. Island. Mix the idols. Each level I site gets 1 face-up idol. Each level II site gets 1 face-up and 1 face-down idol.
4. Blocking. With 4 players, skip this. With 3, flip 3 blocking tiles at random and block the two-boot space at the matching starting sites. With 2, block the two-boot space at all 5 starting sites.
5. Research track. Build one 11-point, two 6-point, and three 2-point temple tile stacks, one tile per player in each. Make a face-down Lost Temple bonus stack the same way, and put bonus tiles face up on the marked spaces.
6. Supply board. Resources, the shuffled level I and level II site tiles and guardians, and the assistants in 3 random stacks of 4, silver side up.
7. Each player takes a board, 2 archaeologists, a notebook, and a magnifying glass. Stack the glass on the notebook at the bottom of the track. Shuffle a deck of 2 Funding, 2 Exploration, and 2 Fear cards.
8. The starting player is whoever most recently traveled somewhere new. Seat 1 starts with 2 coins, seat 2 with a coin and a compass, seat 3 with 2 coins and a compass, seat 4 with a coin and 2 compasses.

How does a round work?

The game lasts 5 rounds. Each round, everyone draws up to 5 cards, then players take turns clockwise until everyone has passed. If you are the last player still in, you take several turns in a row. There is no fixed number of turns.

What can you do on your turn?

Exactly one main action:

• Dig at a site: send an archaeologist to an open space, pay its travel cost, and take the reward.
• Discover a new site, overcome a guardian, buy a card, or research (all below).
• Play a card whose effect is a main action.
• Pass.

You can also take any number of free actions, marked with a lightning bolt, before, during, or after your main action. Funding and Exploration cards are free actions that give a coin or a compass. Placing an idol, using a guardian’s boon, and most assistants are free too. A turn of only free actions is not allowed: if you have no main action left, you pass.

Travel: the rule to learn first

Each card is either spent for its travel icon or played for its effect. Never both.

The travel icons are the boot, car, ship, and plane. A plane pays for anything. Any icon pays for a boot. A car cannot pay for a ship, and a ship cannot pay for a car. You can always spend 2 coins to make a plane. Fear cards have no effect, but their boot still pays for travel.

Sites, idols, and guardians

At the start, only the 5 starting sites are open. Each has two spaces: one costs a boot, the other two boots.

To discover a site, pay compasses (3 for level I, 6 for level II), then the travel cost to the site you choose. Take its idol, or both idols, using only the face-up one’s reward. Place the top site tile there and take its reward. Then a guardian appears on it.

A guardian does nothing right away. But at the end of the round, each archaeologist coming home from a guardian’s site brings back a Fear card, no matter who woke the guardian. To overcome one, have an archaeologist on its site and pay the cost on its tile. Keep it: it is worth 5 points and gives a one-time boon.

Idols are worth 3 points each. As a free action, put one in the leftmost empty slot on your board and choose one of the five rewards printed there. Empty slots score points at the end, so each slot you fill gives up a little.

Buying cards

Items cost coins and go face down to the bottom of your deck, so you usually draw them next round. Artifacts cost compasses and go straight to your play area, and you may use the effect at once for free. Played from your hand later, an artifact’s effect costs the tablet in its corner and counts as your main action.

Research and the Lost Temple

Research moves your magnifying glass or notebook up one row along a connected path. Pay the cost printed on the bridge. The first player to reach a space takes its bonus tile, and you always get the row’s effect. Your notebook may never move above your magnifying glass.

When your glass reaches the top row, you have found the Lost Temple. Earlier arrivals score more, and you choose a bonus tile from the stack. After that, research with the glass buys temple tiles.

The end of a round

1. Bring both archaeologists home, plus 1 Fear card for each one leaving a guardian’s site.
2. Keep or discard any cards left in your hand.
3. Shuffle your play area and put it under your deck.
4. Refresh your assistants.
5. Exile the two cards beside the moon staff, move the staff right, and refill the row. The starting player marker passes left.

After round V, bring the archaeologists home, take any Fear, and score.

Scoring

Add up your research tokens by row, temple tiles, idols plus empty idol slots, guardians, and the points on your items and artifacts. Subtract 1 for each Fear card. Most points wins. Ties go to whoever reached the Lost Temple first. If no one reached it, the highest research score wins.