Investigating the Owl Temple

Even though our list of to-be-played games is quite long, we took some time before vacation to just enjoy an old favorite: Lost Ruins of Arnak. With the new Adventure Chest just arriving (and still making its way to many others), it felt like the perfect chance to try out the new Owl Temple! 🦉

While the Spider Temple’s 🕷️ board has foreboding dark blue hues, and the altars with the dark tablets hit players with lots of point penalties, the Owl Temple 🦉 on the other side is a lot different. Beautiful and bright vistas are depicted on the board, offering you a bunch of bonus points and bonus actions. ✌️

Instead of the standard temple tiles, you use special ones from the expansion. As you advance up the Owl Temple’s track, you get opportunities to collect these, and any time you have a pair of them, you can connect them like puzzle pieces 🧩 - they then act as an additional slot for using idol powers. To make use of them, more idols 🗿 are placed on sites during setup.

Here is a twist: there are also some secret paths with extra rewards on the track! You can reach them with your magnifying glass 🔍, and “lock them in”.  If you do so, it stays there for the rest of the game, and your new Lantern 🏮 token comes into play on the bottom of the track. (Which triggers different rewards as it advances on the track!)

This time we played with the Baroness (Reni’s favorite character because of how easily she gets new cards) vs the Mystic, who utilizes fear cards in a unique play style. Kristóf’s strategy turned out to be quite successful, leaving the Baroness in the dust.

Since we’re on the topic of the Adventure Chest, let’s talk storage. Maybe you could do a better layout by 3D printing, but as far as ready-made vacuum-formed trays go, this is very nice. 👍 There are multiple individual, quite functional trays that you can take out and use during the game, making setup and teardown a lot easier. My only issue with the trays is that they are the black, they would look much better with some color! I am definitely happy not having to use 20 ziploc baggies though. 😅 Also, the box is definitely huge, hard to fit on standard shelves.