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With such a limited stock of cards powering its
dynamic gameplay, Lehmann says that ensuring
every Res Arcana card could be helpful for a player
- avoiding the chance of drawing something that
doesn’t work with the rest of your hand or deck – was
a signicant challenge.
“What if a player draws a card that isn’t synergistic
with their other cards?” he highlights as one of the
biggest design hurdles. “Players can discard any
artefact from hand for either one gold or any two
other essences. is sets up the core tension of which
artefacts to build and which to spend. A player who
tries to build all their artefacts will lose. ey will be
too slow to claim monuments or places of power from
the centre.”
e limitation of eight cards also meant that some
players could end up without a certain vital power
in their entire deck at all – making it impossible for
them to perform key actions such as producing gold,
drawing extra cards or resetting used cards once their
power had been used. (In which case they’re turned
sideways, like tapping in Magic.)
“Here, the solution was to add magic items that
provide these powers or extra essences,” Lehmann
reveals. “Each player always has one magic item,
selected during setup and swapped for a dierent
one each round when a player passes. is ensures
some access to these powers and introduces another
interactive element – besides competing for particular
monuments or places of power, managing game
tempo, racing to 10 victory points and inicting life
loss via dragons.”
details. “Res Arcana has more racing elements: players
vie to claim places of power and monuments from the
centre. ese are the primary source of victory points.”
While Race fans are sure to see echoes of
Lehmann’s card game in Res Arcana, the designer
suggests that despite featuring little more than
cards and tokens his latest design owes a lot to more
elaborate tabletop setups, too.
“Res Arcana, with its essences, magic items and
places of power, is somewhere in-between a ‘pure’
card game and a board game,” he suggests. “At its
heart, it is a card game. Card games can provide
an incredible amount of variety and extensibility
compared to most board games. e places of power
are two-sided for 210 dierent setups, but that pales
compared to the variety from the artefacts deck. And,
with a card game, you can easily expand it by adding
more cards...”
PLAY YOUR CARDS RIGHT
Res Arcana’s central loop of playing cards to activate
abilities to gain resources and points to play cards
is a simple one to grasp, but it’s given Lehmann’s
trademark strategy and tension by the combos
possible as you build up your engine. You might be
discarding cards to gain gold one turn, forcing an
opponent to lose resources another – or even giving
a rival a small boost in order to advance your own
standing. All the while, players’ mages can get the
opportunity to transform elements with the right
cards, converting and adapting their pool of essences
Players compete to as needed to pull ahead of the competition.
acquire places of power
and monuments from the
middle of the table