Arborea Board Game Review

Not only the first game to make its way to my table in 2024 but come the end of the year I suspect Arborea might even end up being the best game to make its way to my table in 2024.

How to play:

(Please note that the images in this game come from the Kickstarter Edition which I believe includes a smattering of additional wooden components as well as additional mini expansions which can be purchased separately. The use of every conceivable colour imaginable on the main board however remains completely the same.)

Published by Alley Cat Games and designed by Dani Garcia (Barcelona), Arborea is described as “..a worker placement euro game where time, and planning ahead, is key”. They aren’t joking.

Thematically, players take on the role of a ‘Patron Spirit’ who guides villagers on pilgrimages, heals the land, builds an ecosystem and invites creatures of various types into that ecosystem. Practically (and very simplistically) speaking you shall be placing workers onto one of four tracks on the main board and depending on the type and number of workers already on that track, you will move the track a number of spaces forward. After you have moved a track, any of your workers can hop off it onto one of the paths above or below – ready on a future turn to stroll down it and claim its rewards. Maybe though you will choose to stay put and move even further down the track to jump onto an even juicier path with even juicer rewards. Take a lesser bonus now or wait it out for a bigger bonus later? Choices, choices, choices…

Those tracks aren’t just moving when you take a turn however. You should frequently be prepared for another player to also jump on the same track, chasing similar paths and rewards. Will the tracks that you move on benefit another player by pushing them further towards those sweeter rewards? Will your opponent end up pushing you further along the track? Quite often yes in both cases.

The paths that you can follow after jumping off a track generally see you:

• gaining new workers (you start with three out of a possible eight)

• gaining ‘biome cards’

• gaining resources which will then let you place your biome cards into your individual play area. (I flippantly say ‘gaining resources’ but resources are a key (and superb) feature of the game which I will talk about more later on).

• ‘inviting’ creatures of different colours and types onto the main board

• ‘attracting’ those creatures onto your own personal player board

There is then a whole other mini game taking place where a good chunk of your end game VP are going to come from:

Once you have gathered these biome cards, you’ll see that they have lots of different (and similar!) coloured squares on them. Place these cards into your play area, positioning them in a variety of ways, and then place the colourful creatures that you have gained during the game onto them. Lots to puzzle over here as certain coloured creatures particularly like certain coloured squares, everything especially likes to be near water, rocks on the other hand being quite wasteful… and so on. Most of all though you face the thorny issue of creatures not being able to be placed orthogonally adjacent. Yikes! As the game progresses, the more your ecosystem of biome cards and creatures expand and so does the tasty puzzle of how to place everything to maximum effect.

Expansions:

In the Kickstarter Edition came a few additions that I believe can be purchased separately from Alley Cat Games:

• The Midnight River: Adds an extra board to the bottom of the main board with a boat. Every time one of your workers moves along one of the main tracks in the game, you can also move your boat along this new river. At various points you can choose to sail right back to the start of the river and cash in a bonus. Perhaps though you might risk it and keep sailing further and further for better and stronger bonuses. Some watery new creatures are also now available to add into our ecosystems too which bring even more head scratching over where and how to place thing. In short The Midnight River is a new track, one with little additional rules overhead, it adds a nice extra thing to ponder here and there, I’d be unlikely to play without it given how simple it is to integrate but I wouldn’t say it’s essential. Fans of the excellent Boonlake expansion ‘Artifacts’ will be in familiar territory.

• Winds of Change: A stack of cards, each with game altering abilities - “every time you do X you now can also get Y or Z” type things. These variable changes nudge you to playing in a particular way to exploit their benefits. Initially I was disheartened to read in the rulebook that these Winds of Change card were not compatible with the solo mode but I want to give a big shout out to designer Dani Garcia for very swiftly answering my call on the BGG forums when I posed that I thought they probably could be easily made solo-able. Aa few hours later and Dani did indeed come up with a way work them into the solo mode - and I enjoyed them a lot.

….and then a few other small board overlays to mix up the different available bonuses game to game for some subtle, but nonetheless enjoyable, variability.

None of the above are essential, but if you end up enjoying Arborea as much as I am about to tell you that I did then they are certainly worth picking up.

Solo Headlines:

There is always a worry in games that have a higher level of interaction that the solo mode might become quite cumbersome and ‘flowcharty’. Arborea manages however to keep things extremely simple but nails the feeling that you are playing against an intelligent opponent.

Our solo opponent, Feronia, has a very small deck of cards – flip one over during her turns and it will show you which two of the four main tracks on the board she wants to place one of her workers. Very straightforward and simple. She then moves along the tracks as a human player would and anytime she reaches a certain point she jumps off and heads down that path just as a human player would. Generally speaking if she gets small incidental bonuses that a human player might have to muddle through, she just gets VP instead. If she wants to collect a card from the shared display, or take a creature from the main board then a quick glance at the solo card that you drew at the start of her turn tells you what card to grab and or what creature she favours. No need to intricately decide how or where her creatures are placed on specific cards – she just scores points for the number of cards and creatures that she has at the end of the game.

Quick and straightforward turns – but turns that see the main board changing frequently, creatures that you had your eye on being taken, cards that you were hoping to snaffle getting snaffled etc. Crucially though she is jumping onto tracks that you might already be on and giving you a few pushes that you may not have anticipated, or teasing you to hop onto one of the same tracks as her knowing that you might as well hitch a ride. Feronia is constantly making you pivot, constantly changing things up, constantly interacting – but with minimal upkeep. Bravo.

Feronia isn’t the type of opponent that will necessarily alter her strategic focus game to game – so don’t be expecting something similar to say Great Western Trail 2nd Edition and its solo mode which sees ‘Sam’ adopt a ‘cattle’ strategy one game and then a ‘building’ strategy the next. However, what Feronia does seem to do is exploit tactical opportunities. Bonus available on one of the tracks you say? She’s taking it. Resources available? She’s hoovering them up. Another one of her workers already on the same track as her? She’s jumping one of them off knowing that the other wont be far behind. It all adds to that overall feeling that you are playing not just against the game but against another intelligent, albeit artificial, opponent.

While there is a tiny bit more to it than how I am about to explain now, Feronia has 7 levels of difficulty to compete against which work broadly speaking as ‘multiply her final score by x2, x3, x4…’ and so on. Lots of scope therefore to find your perfect competitive sweet spot. However, similarly to another of Dani’s excellent games – Barcelona - there are a lot of points available here. Maybe not as many as Barcelona which often seems like it is rewarding for you even just thinking about doing something let alone actually making a move - but Arborea still sees VP in the hundreds rather than the tens. As a consequence, you might be spending a your first few games trying to find that difficulty sweet spot before settling on something that is just right for you. But you 100% will have fun searching for it that I can assure you.

One thing perhaps to note – and it’s a very small point - but I confess to enjoying both Beat Your Own Score (BYOS) solo modes as well as games with simple automas. Even with those games with artificial solo opponents I still enjoy keeping one eye on my own scores game to game: “next time I will try to get a few more points and try to beat by own personal best”. There is something inherently satisfying about being even just 1VP better than the last time I played. This however relies on a game having a fixed number of turns. Here in Arborea the length, and therefore the available VP, can vary as the endgame timer is triggered each time a creature is ‘invited’ onto the main board. You are incentivised to invite creatures and it sure is another nice use of ‘time’ as a mechanism to try and prolong or push the end of the game by inviting or not inviting creatures - but it does just mean that in one game I might score 250VP and the next game play an even better game but a shorter one and only score 200VP. This doesn’t make this an unenjoyable solo mode – quite the opposite in fact. I adored exploring this sandbox world full of pivots and interactivity and seeing such a vibrant and spritely solo opponent making the board come alive. Its just worth noting for those BYOS players that might be anticipating a game that lets them compete not just against an opponent but also against themselves. Feronia will have to be challenge enough for you here!

….and all of that right in my 60- 75 minute sweet-spot.

Excellent.

General Ramblings:

Let’s firstly get the elephant in the room out of the way: The colourful main board. There are those amongst us dear reader that are going to either adore seeing every colour imaginable and others who may well recoil in horror clutching at their eyes as a migraine descends. Personally I like it – and I offer a reassurance to people that might be looking and thinking “everything looks so confusing because of all of the colours exploding everywhere” as in reality the different areas of the board are genuinely quite intuitive to pick out. However, I do feel that the board itself could have been slightly bigger. Some of the iconography on the board and on tokens feel very small and at times difficult to see properly. Anyone with poor eyesight – bring your spectacles and a magnifying glass to the table! Arborea is by no stretch of the imagination a ‘table hog’ and I think could have benefitted here from bigger iconography / a bigger board.

There are three elements of Arborea that I think are particularly good:

• I’m a big fan of the passing of time as a mechanism in games (Barrage, Corrosion, Tzolk'in), and of the need to get timings just right. The core mechanism here of moving along tracks and needing to decide how quickly or slowly to jump on and off sings to me. Seeing that other players have jumped onto a track and having to decide whether to ride on their coat tails, or indeed whether to jump off on a track so that they cant ride your slipstream, brings some nice decision making throughout. There is even the consideration to make about whether you are going to spam a particular track with your own workers so it moves a whole heap quicker that it would if you spread out your workers on each of the four tracks: you might get lots of different rewards of spreading out as a result but you might be gathering them at a snail’s pace! Different workers also move the track in different increments – even more to have to think about! Each track periodically might also see a bonus reveal itself for anyone that might want to jump on and claim it – do I change my original plan or do I listen to the siren song of the bonus? Do I jump on a track where I might have previously made a donation of a gift which is going to make using that track even sweeter? There is a whole heap more to consider in this part of the game than simply ‘jump on a track, move the track and the longer you stay on the better the bonuses get’. I will say though that the first couple of turns in the game feel a little uneventful as you lay out your workers and the movement gradually whirrs into action. But whirr into action it certainly does!

• Next up is the fact that any resources that are gained by a player on their turn go in to a shared pool for all players to use. This bring about some wonderful dilemmas. Any resources that I gain but don’t use during my turn will earn me some lovely VP but those same resources then remain for the next player to take advantage of. Aaaarrrggh. Should I get resources at all? Should I get them and just claim their VP? Should I use them all up on this turn if I can and forgo any VP just so the next player can’t use them? This part of the game is brilliant. I have played many other Euro games that have a shared marketplace but Arborea is the first game I have played where all of the resources are pooled and shared by all players. More please.

• It feels like there are two very distinct and enjoyable games going on in Arborea. Yes, there is placing workers, zipping along tracks, luring creatures on to the board and then attracting those creatures into your personal ecosystem – but the actual process of choosing how and where to place those creatures in your ecosystem feels like a full tilelaying-esque mini game of itself. In the multiplayer game this portion of your game can be done during your opponent’s turn which nicely tackles any issues with downtime. In the solo game you are left to work through this excellent spatial puzzle at your own leisure. What cards have you gained for your ecosystem and what coloured squares do they have? How can you twist and turn them so that similar (or different!) colours connect? Where will you place specific coloured creatures? Do other different colour creatures offer bonuses if they are in the same line as other creatures? What a great puzzle and what a great backwards and forwards between this element and the rest of the broader game.

While there is certainly some decent strategic direction on offer (each game coming with variable objectives to try and work towards) I definitely see Arborea as a more tactical experience. Everything feels fluid, everything feels like it is moving and shifting and changing - including most of your plans during any given turn. As a result, each game feels fresh and exploratory, pulling you into different places and opportunities. It’s a different feel to my usual ‘lets see how well I can meet my strategic objectives over precisely 16 turns’ Euro tastes and my collection is all the better for having it.

At a Glance:

A fresh, fluid sandbox of a game where the mechanisms are just as colourful and vibrant as the components themselves. Constant movement brings about constant opportunity which will appeal to fans of tactical games. Arborea makes excellent use of time as a mechanism, has excellent and innovative sharing of resources between players, features an excellent separate mini puzzle of tile laying and creature playing, has an excellent solo mode. Have I used the word excellent enough? Put the next game from Dani Garcia in my hands… and quickly.

Final Score:

9 out 10 (Reviewed after 11 plays)