The most colorful game we own

🌺 Arborea has been on our radar for a while, and recently playing some of Dani Garcia’s other games made us even more interested in giving it a go. Arborea has an interesting worker placement mechanic reminiscent of Tzolk’in: the more time workers spend out on the board, the more beneficial the rewards will be. Player interaction is much more pronounced than in usual euros, due to these worker tracks and shared resources. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.. 👉Let’s start from the beginning! 

In the game players are Spirits 🌬️, trying to heal and grow the landscape around them, after it was mostly destroyed by a cataclysmic event. You guide your villagers on pilgrimages to regenerate biomes, form new ecosystems and summon back the creatures that have run away. Your player board shows your village 🛖, where Young, Elder and Veteran villagers reside. They are the workers you will be using throughout the game.

The first thing you notice on the main board when you start playing are the pilgrimage tracks for workers with branching paths above and below them. 🧐 These are are the core of the game ☝️ - at the end of each turn, if a player has workers on a track, it will progress towards the center of the board, also bringing with it rival workers. When a track moves you can choose to jump off with a worker, so you can later lead it through its path, activating actions and bonuses. The paths closer to the center have more and better rewards.

There are 3 main things you are doing with these villagers:
💧 Generating resources, which give you victory points if you don’t use them up in the same turn. However these resources can be spent by anyone!
🦌 Summoning and inviting Creatures to you, as they are a big part of scoring.
🏞️ Collecting and completing Ecosystem cards that you can patch together to make space for Creatures, maximizing their special scoring conditions.

Starting out it can be hard to grasp what you need do, but as rounds go by you start setting up more and more meaningful combos. There are many nuances you have to learn - and many I want to describe, so stay tuned for another post on the game! 🙃