I was given the chance to have a playthrough at the upcoming “Ark Nova – lite” game, Sanctuary. Releasing at Essen this year, it seeks to shorten a game of Ark Nova a bit, but I can attest there’s still a fair bit of meat on this animal to keep it in middleweight gaming territory.  Continue to the bottom for a tiny Ark Nova (possibly for you) surprise….

Sanctuary goes for middleweight class by focusing almost exclusively on the actual zoo animals (well, their enclosures.) Everyone cycles around taking and placing zoo tiles representing animal pens or other buildings (pens come complete .)  Players start with a blank zoo player mat with hexagonal spots to place zoo tiles. Players add tiles to their board (slightly less than one per turn) trying to score points by making the best zoo possible. There are goal tiles and bonuses selected each game which can drive players towards specific strategies and can give a few passive upgrades/improvements. The game ends when a player completes every goal, completely fills their zoo map, or (very rare) the draw pile runs out of tiles.

Zoo tiles come in different flavors and may contain several different icons – making this a fairly icon-heavy game. Every tile will have a habitat (one of three colors), be a building, or be a project tile. Buildings are free to place while the others require an action. There are six different animal icons (predators, apes, reptiles, etc…) and five icons representing continents (no Antarctica and the Americas are together.) These icons obviously then interact with other tiles and features to score points and other bonuses. A tile may straight-up provide points, give points for a network of tiles, points for adjacent icons (I have a reptile house in the photo), or points for each icon appearing on the board. Tiles may also have effects when played, typically explained with (you guessed it) icons.

Each turn a player takes a tile from the center tableau. More recently revealed tiles are harder to obtain. After taking a tile, a player takes one of four different actions. These are represented by handy markers under one’s player mat. Three of the actions (green/blue/brown) focus on specific animal habitat tiles while the other (purple) one allows players to place special project tiles (tiles that give special abilities.) Players may use the green (forest), blue (water), or brown (rock) actions in order to place an animal tile into their tableau with that specific habitat. There are also building tiles, which are free to place, but often have restrictive placement requirements.

Alternatively, one can pick a green/blue/brown action and draw 2 facedown tiles from the deck. Note that the hand limit at the end of a turn is 6 tiles. The purple action allows placement of one of the special project tiles or may be used to take any tile from the face-up display (even the more recent ones – typically harder to take.) This results in a total gain of 2 tiles – the initial one and second one from any slot. The action markers can slide around and when an action is used, that marker is slid to the far left, moving the rest of them up to the right.

Why is that important? Well, each action marker has an arrow at its top. It points to a number on the player mat. That number dictates the strength of that action when chosen.  In the photo above the purple marker is pointing to a 1, while the brown marker is pointing to a 4. That means, during the selection at the start of the turn a player may only select a tile from the “1” spot (essentially no choice in the matter.) The arrows for green/blue/brown indicate the level of the animal that is able to be placed in the habitat. Thus the player above could place a 2 forest animal or a 4 rock animal. Because the markers slide back and forth, long term plans need to keep track of where tiles need to end up to execute them.

Tiles can’t just be placed willy-nilly. One’s first tiles must initially be placed by the park entrance and then future tiles need to be contiguous to previously placed tiles. Some tiles have specific requirements and must be placed: by the river on a player’s board, next to other types of animals, or with specific borders. If a tile has a white border, it needs to be placed next to open space. This is created by placing extra tiles (from one’s “hand”) upside down adjacent to the border. This is a free action but it means some animal tiles will take up more “space” in your zoo. The player mat also has some locations that grant a small bonus when filled – things like a free tile or a wildcard symbol. Fun moment: In my game, I got a “release” project tile. This could only be played on top of a specific animal type tile. It covers up the original tile, so you lose its icons and bonuses, but grants points and some wildcard icon tokens (more on those later.)

Let’s talk about bonuses. At the start of the game, five attributes (icons/symbols) are chosen for bonus scoring and placed at the top of the bonus board. These could be animal types or world regions. When a player collects enough icons of that type, they may place a bonus token on the bonus board. Each player has a bonus token for collecting 2,3,4, and 5 of a kind. Note, there are wildcard tokens that can be spent to make up for any missing tokens. However, only one bonus token can be spent for each icon, so in order to score all four bonus tokens one would need to collect sets in four of the five possible attributes. Obviously, collecting a larger set is worth more points – 5 points for a 2 icon set but 14 if you get a 5 icon set.

The last piece of the puzzle is the engine building part of the game, making each of the four possible actions more powerful. Some of the tiles available for your zoo will grant abilities like drawing an extra tile whenever the blue action is taken, etc… One key source of upgrades comes in the form of four upgrade tokens. These are awarded to a player whenever they accomplish a specific action: after placing one’s first bonus tile on the bonus board, placing two “projects” on your board, collecting four different types of animals, and connecting three tiles of the same landscape. These can be completed in any order. When one is completed, a player is allowed to flip-over any one of their action markers. Remember those arrows on the markers? Well, the back side (level 2) of the markers has the arrow pointing to the right number (not the left) which essentially means that action will be occurring at 1 strength higher all the time. At the high end, one can place a level 5 tile without needing any additional bonuses.

The first person to finish the game (however it is done) scores 10 extra points. Everyone else gets one final turn, scoring 5 points if they are also able to finish.

One last bit of news before I sign off, there were some prototype pieces for the upcoming 3D Arc Nova pieces on display. Look for a Gamefound crowdfunding for the project to pop up sometime in September.