Tabletop_Gaming__Issue_27__February_2019

tabletopgaming.co.uk 21

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