Ancient Knowledge: Heritage

• Designer: Remi Mathieu
• Publisher: iello
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 12+
• Time: 30 min / player 
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3WPdpym 
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Ancient Knowledge is a strategic card game in which you erect monuments and build artefacts to pass on your knowledge. Time will make your constructions ephemeral,so make the right decision and combine the many cards at your disposal, because all knowledge is doomed to disappear…

It’s up to you to find the best synergy so that you can pass down knowledge before the decline of the emblematic monuments you have constructed, monuments we still find nowadays in the four corners of the globe. From Mexican pyramids to the Sphinx of Giza, passing through the famous cities of Tiwanaku and Babylon, only the cleverest builder will shine through the ages and seize victory. In this game, your only enemy is time.

Prove to your opponents that you are the worthy representative of your Legacy! Will your monuments withstand the trial of time?

The Ancient Knowledge: Heritage expansion consists of two elements:

• 16 solo mode cards that allow you to play a campaign. You choose 1-5 objectives, placing them in the artifact slots on the player board (and thereby denying you the potential use of artifacts!), and whichever objectives you complete become powers that you can employ in future games.

• 36 new builder cards and 12 new technology cards that you can shuffle into the decks, making them 25% larger.

If you haven’t played the base game – to be honest, this isn’t the review for you (nor the game for you).  Go and read about the base game first and play it.  If you like it, come back here!

https://opinionatedgamers.com/2023/12/21/dale-yu-review-of-ancient-knowledge/

There are new cards included in the expansion, and with them come some new rules.  Certain cards can now be activated more than once.  The multiple actions are easily marked with icons telling you when each particular action is to be resolved.  If you are going to include the expansion into your games, it’s pretty easy to do – you simply shuffle all the new cards in with the old and play the game.

As you would expect, there are lots of new ideas on the cards, but they are designed well so that they still interact with the cards in the base set.  Though the deck is now diluted with the extra cards, the ability to make combos feels about the same – though now with a few more options for strategies given the ideas introduced in the new cards.

A larger change is the addition of a solo game.  The base game went down to 2-players, but there were no official solo rules.  Now, you actually have two different ways to play by yourself – a Challenge mode where you have ten different Challenges to achieve.  Alternatively, you can play the Heritage mode where you play a series of up to 15 games.  

Regardless of which solo mode you play, you will use the 15 Chest cards – each of which has two functions.  When used as an artifact, the top half of the card shows an objective that you must achieve to win the game.  When it is below your board, the bottom half shows an effect that you can use after it has been activated.

In the challenge mode, you set up the game normally, and then consult the challenge grid at the back of the expansion rulebook to see which chest cards that you use as your objective cards. These cards are placed in spaces normally reserved for your artifacts. Other cards will start under your board.

In the heritage mode, you shuffle the Chest cards into a deck and then draw five of them to start.  Choose 1 to 5 cards and place them on the spaces normally reserved for artifacts.  As you are playing the game, when you flip over a Technology tile AND you have at least 7 monuments in your past, you can choose to discard any of these objective cards (if you don’t think that you will be able to achieve them)

The solo game also uses a super hard to read technology die.  At the end of each of your turns, roll the d6 and then discard a Technology card based on the roll.  If the designated space is empty, nothing happens.  Otherwise, the rules are generally the same as the basic multiplayer game.

The solo game uses a special time card that moves through your Timeline during the game and it will go into Decline three times.  It essentially is a turn counter, and it limits the length of each solo game to 16 turns.  It starts on the lower level of space 4 on your board.  Note that it is not a monument, and it cannot be targeted.  In each decline phase, the Time card slides like all other cards. When it reaches space 1, it is rotated and placed back on space 6.  When it again reaches space 1, it gets one more trip down the line starting from space 6.  When it reaches space 1 for the third time, the game end is triggered.

At the end of the game, you win the challenge mode if you have completed all the objectives remaining on your board.  In the Heritage mode, if you achieve all the remaining objectives, you have won this game. Calculate your score, and then consult the chart to see how this affects the setup for your next game.  Take the finished objectives from the current game and place them below your board so you can use their effects in the next game. 

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Mark J: There are really two major reasons to own this very well-done expansion:

#1 – if you play with four players (which you’ll notice is not recommended by a lot of BGG users), it adds more cards to the technology piles.
#2 – (and the more important reason – at least to me) is that it offers two different solo systems to play Ancient Knowledge: a way to play one-off games and a way to play a campaign. The solo system is simple to administer and lets you marinate in the puzzle of saving the knowledge of your decaying civilization.

I’m just starting a Heritage campaign after playing 3 Challenge solo games… I’ll let you know what happens in 2025!

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! Mark Jackson
• I like it. Dale Y
• Neutral.
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3WPdpym