tabletopgaming.co.uk 19F
ire up your engines: there’s a new
Tom Lehmann game in town.
e Race for the Galaxy designer’s
latest challenge of e cient cardplay
and high-speed engine-building
is Res Arcana, a card game set
a universe away from his sci-
magnum opus in a fantasy world of
magic and alchemy.
Players are mages able to control and transform
the ve magical essences that govern their world:
life, death, elan (that’s the fancy term for “vitality and
energy”), ‘calm’ and the valuable element of gold,
which is given a particularly special status in the game
and can be used to purchase and play certain cards.
“It draws upon medieval alchemy, classical
antiquity and fantasy to create a rich setting, which
encompasses the philosopher’s stone, an athanor, the
ring of Midas, the Great Pyramids, a dancing sword
and several dragons,” Lehmann says of the world. “ e
essences, mages, artefacts and artwork all combine to
suggest a dynamic world of alchemy and magic, which
reinforces the central mechanic of transformation.”
Although a competitive card game set in a fantasy
universe dominated by a handful of key elements
might put some players in mind of Magic: e
Gathering’s mana-driven battles, Lehmann is quick to
dismiss the association.
“With Magic: e Gathering, the comparison is
super cial: both are card games with fantasy settings
and have ve resource types,” he retorts. “Beyond this,
they’re really di erent games.”
Part of what makes Res Arcana di erent is the
limited selection of cards that players have at their
disposal. Very speci cally, each person has a deck of
just eight di erent cards in their individual store for
that particular match, drawn randomly from rest of thegame’s entire library of 40 cards, plus a unique mage
card that they choose from two options during setup.
Players begin the game with only three cards in their
hand, adding one from their slim stack at the end of
each round – of which there are between four and six.
Lehmann says that minimising the number of
cards that players could choose from played a major
role in the creation of Res Arcana.
“I had two goals: rst, to create a card game with
very small personal decks, enabling experienced
players to quickly draft them – two di erent draft
variants are provided – and, second, to create a non-
standard fantasy setting,” he reveals.
“Eight-card decks lend themselves nicely to
drafting for three or four players: everyone draws four
cards, chooses one and passes the others clockwise,
until everyone has four cards. en, do the same
again, counter-clockwise. You’re done; everyone has
a deck and you can begin play.”
ough in Res Arcana players’ decks remain
largely xed throughout the length of an entire
match, Lehmann says that handing di erent
selections of cards to players and encouraging
them to discover the ways their individual handful
can be combined was partially inspired by the
evolving card pools of deckbuilders.
“ e big [card game] innovation in the last decade
was deckbuilding games, starting with Dominion,” he
says. “I think they have made players more aware and
accepting of games with personal decks. Personal
decks used to be mostly in collectible card games, but
we’re now seeing them in very disparate games, such
as e Quest for El Dorado or Gloomhaven.”
While it might seem that such a small pool of cards
would lead to players becoming tired of seeing the
same options pop up, Lehmann insists that eight is the
perfect number to encourage players to turn theirI had two goals:
fi rst, to create
a card game with
very small personal
decks and, second, to
create a non-standard
fantasy setting.