Door 9

Deck-building and worker placement are both mechanics that a ton of games utilize. They are core building blocks of game design. However there are not many hybrid deck-building worker placement games out there. Two of the most known and beloved games that fit this description are 🌕 Dune: Imperium and 🧭 Lost Ruins of Arnak, both released in 2020 and both critically acclaimed. I do think these games basically created a new sub-genre, which I want to highlight with door 7 of our MechanXmas advent calendar. 😉

I adore worker placement games 🥰, but I think it’s even better when you have some random inputs that influence and/or limit your decisions, so you are not just free to go anywhere - be it dice workers, changing spots or rewards, or in this case: cards!
The two mechanics in these games are deeply intertwined.

🧭 In Arnak there is always a travel cost for sending a worker. You can pay for this by discarding cards that show the appropriate icons - this makes for a lot of interesting decisions, because you can’t use the effects of cards that you discard like this. And those effects are always useful, so when you use which card will always be a big question. 🧐

🌕 In Dune it’s even more prevalent. Cards show icons which correspond to certain worker placement spots. You can only go there if you play a matching card. The cards also have 2 boxes - you activate the top box if you play the card for worker placement, and you activate the bottom box if you use the card in a later phase, to purchase new cards. This fills every turn full of crunchy decisions. Your strong card that you want to save up for later might allow you to go to an important spot and give you something else.

Of course there are a lot of differences between the two games - Arnak is played over a fixed number of rounds and it’s mostly about track movement and exchanging resources for things. Dune is a race for 10 victory points with a big serving of area control.

I love them both though and I think they are some of the best euros out there. 😍 I would recommend them to everyone, who feels at least a tiny bit of affinity to euros.