Seduced by the artwork... again!

What is the first thing that attracts you to a new game? When buying games we are most often intrigued by unique themes or interesting mechanics used. I have to confess, with 🕯️Res Arcana it was the art and illustrations that attracted me most. 🙊 The whole package looks phenomenal! 🤩

You play as Wizards and Alchemists, collecting magical essences and crafting artifacts in order to build monuments, conjure mythical creatures and conquer places and power, and ultimately be victorious! 🏆

In a game you choose a mage and draft 8 artifact cards. You can play these artifact cards on your turn by paying their resource cost, to use them afterwards in different ways to collect even more resources and steer yourself towards victory. Each round you can choose a magical item that helps you as well - ☝️ after passing you have to change it to a different one though.

The primary way to get victory points is by claiming Places of Power which are expensive albeit powerful tiles. 🧐 These usually have you place resources on them so they generate points, but you need to have a specific engine to do that effectively. Some of your artifact cards are worth points too. Monuments also give a fair amount of victory points and some ability that aids you. These cost gold which is a more premium resource. At the end of each round you check if anyone reached 10 victory points - if yes, then the game immediately ends.

💬 The game is pretty fast; you could be done in 4-5 rounds or 30 minutes. The unusual thing is that you only draft 8 cards at the beginning and have to form your strategy around those. No more random draws after that. While pure resource conversion or contract fulfillment can sometimes feel dull, I’ve enjoyed playing this more than similar games. 🙃 It’s pretty snappy and though you might keep reusing the same cards every turn, you can feel pretty smart if you build a nice engine and do some cool combos. I think the replayability should be also good thanks to the card draft, the different mages you can get and the double sided Places of Powers. I think the shortness of the game is its strength. 💪