Ark Nova, a long, complex and richly strategic game of zoo-building and conservation, took board gaming by storm after its release in 2021. When a game gets that popular, while having big barriers to new players, a simplified spin-off is almost guaranteed – and now we have Sanctuary from the same designer. It has the same widely appealing theme and keeps some of the innovative mechanisms of its parent, but how much of its strategic clout can it retain?
What’s in the Box
Sanctuary comes in a big box with considerable heft. When you slide the lid off the reason becomes clear: it contains sheet after sheet of large, punch out, cardboard hexes. Like Ark Nova, these are all illustrated with photos of animals, zoo staff, or pertinent buildings and landscapes. Photo-art in the obviously artificial medium of board gaming can look odd but here it works well, re-enforcing the feeling that you’re building something real and tangible.
Most of the hexes are peppered with confusing icons which initially appear very mysterious but, once you’ve internalized the game rules, you’ll appreciate having all the information on the game state front and center. The game thoughtfully includes a plastic rack for each player to hold their “hand” of hex tiles during play.
Aside from the hex tiles there’s a bunch of other cardboard to pop out, not only tokens but also action “cards” for each player, which are made of thick cardboard rather than playing-card stock. There are two central boards, one for tracking objectives and another for holding the market of tiles which requires a little assembly, as the edges fold in and stick down to keep the tiles in place. Finally, there’s a two-sided hex map for each player to build their zoo on. Unlike the parent game, everyone here uses the same map during play, one side of the board or the other.
Rules and How It Plays
You can get some sense of how much more simple Sanctuary is than Ark Nova simply by comparing rulebooks, which otherwise have similar layouts and fonts. Ark Nova weighs in at 20 pages: Sanctuary a modest eight, with plenty of examples. It jettisons the bigger game’s separation of animals and enclosures, making everything a single tile that you lay onto the hex board representing your zoo.
One thing it keeps, however, is the notion of action card strength. You have four different actions arranged beneath your zoo board in a ranking from weakest to strongest. When you use one, it operates at a “level” equal to its current position in the queue. Then it moves into the weakest slot and the other cards all slide up one rank. All the actions allow you to place tiles into your zoo: three of them are for animals of different habitats while the fourth is for “projects”, which include things like specialist researchers, conservation efforts and the like. All the matching tiles have a strength requirement and the action card you use to lay it must be at that level or higher.
Many tiles have additional requirements. The most common is for arrows on the tile edge to line up with empty spaces: you start with a couple in your zoo map but you can add more by playing tiles from your hand face-down. Others need to be adjacent to tiles already in your zoo that carry certain icons. All have at least one icon representing an animal type, a habitat or a continent. Most tiles improve the appeal of your zoo, which is essentially your victory point tally. For many that’s a fixed value, while others depend on how many of a particular icon you have adjacent to that tile or on your map as a whole.
You can get bonus appeal by satisfying conservation objectives. Five are drawn randomly for each game, matching particular animal type and continent icons. To claim one you must simply have the matching number of icons in your zoo; the more icons, the more points. You can also spend conservation markers, in place of a missing icon, making these tokens very powerful. They can be obtained by getting matching male and female animal tiles of the same species next to each other on your map, or from certain project tiles.
These are the parameters of the puzzle that Sanctuary lays before you, fiendishly pulling you in multiple directions at once.
These are the parameters of the puzzle that Sanctuary lays before you, fiendishly pulling you in multiple directions at once. Many tiles reward you for specializing in particular icons. Conservation bonuses, meanwhile, reward you for diversity. Your challenge is to try and decide how, given the limitation of what tiles you pick up and the actions at your disposal, you’re going to balance this problem to eke out the highest score.
To complicate matters, each level of conservation bonus can only be claimed once. So if you claim one with two bird icons, say, and then get more birds in your zoo later, you can’t then go back and claim the bigger-scoring four- or five-icon rewards via birds later on. You need to have four or five of a different animal type or make up the difference with those precious conservation tokens. The whole thing is a mess of competing priorities that can make the game surprisingly tense for what is essentially an un-interactive game where you’re focused on building out your own map.
Because you’re being asked to do so many different things at once, how you pick up and hold tiles is very important. At the start of your turn you have to take one tile from the six in the display. However, you can only take that tile from the queue position up to the current level of your projects action card, making this one particularly important. After that you take an “official” action which involves either using a card to play tiles or you can take more tiles. Animal actions used this way give you two random tiles, while the projects action lets you take one tile of your choice from the display.
Again, given that the game is essentially a race, this results in surprising tension. Play ends when someone either fills their map or collects all five conservation bonuses, both of which are reliant on playing tiles. So missing a turn to take more tiles feels like you’re falling behind. But it’s always so tempting! There are often hexes available that you desperately want because their icons fit with the conservation objectives, or others in your zoo, or even male-female animal pairs but the more you collect them in hope of making combos, the further you risk getting behind in the race for points. The fact you can only hold six tiles at once adds a delightfully frustrating element to these decisions.
Your action order is the final plank in the game’s puzzle. Often, you’ll want to play a given tile and you won’t have the requisite action at a high enough level. So you have to muddle through potentially laying and taking less interesting tiles to get where you want to be. Forward planning your action chains to get cards to the required levels becomes a hallmark of experience when you’re selecting tiles from the display, muddied by the desire to keep projects high to maximize your choices. Cards can also be levelled up to get higher action levels by fulfilling four different criteria, such as claiming your first spot on the conservation track. As is typical for the game’s circular approach to strategy, fulfilling these is yet another competing priority to juggle.
There are times when all the different things going on become an active problem for the game, however. The need for tiles to support each other, and particularly the reward for animal gender pairs, can be frustratingly hard to fulfill if the tiles you want are simply not in the display when it’s your turn. As such, it works better at lower player counts: with five, especially, it feels overlong. The mechanisms also feel very abstract, especially compared to Ark Nova which at least presents an illusion of running a real zoo.
Once the game is finished, everyone has to tally up their points, which is an annoyingly time-consuming process. With the score offered by many tiles being dependent on many other tiles it takes a while to tot them up, and it’s very easy to make errors in what is often quite a tight game. While everyone is raring to know who won, the time and effort it takes to chalk up the scores has the unfortunate effect of deflating whatever excitement has built up during play, leading to the final result arriving as a bit of an anticlimax.
Where to Buy
Get it at AmazonGet it at Capstone GamesGet it at Game Nerdz
