Board game review of Arborea: Munter bunter

At the beginning of 2023, Alley Cat Games brought the colorful Eurogame into crowdfunding KickstarterMore than 4.000 backers contributed to the successful financing of the game. Just in time for GAME in Essen Skellig Games is now releasing the German version of this sophisticated connoisseur game. We tested it in advance.

Anyone who thought that the adjective colorful after Bitoku could not be increased any further, is expected to Arborea proved wrong. Here the entire color palette was tipped onto the game board and generously distributed. Of course, this doesn't necessarily give you a good overview, but it could still be a good game.

Workers venture out on hikes

In essence, Arborea a worker placement game. We send our villagers on a journey. The longer we allow them to do this, the more and rarer resources they can bring back. To avoid wasting anything, all resources end up on a common market that everyone can use.

At the start of your turn, you can choose whether to send a villager on a journey or move one of the travel tracks forward one step. If you spend spirit points, you can perform two actions in any combination. Regardless of the reason the travel tracks move, all those who have villagers on that track can decide to jump off and go to the starting point of a path.

The villagers waiting at these starting points can be activated in the second step of your turn. They activate every symbol they pass along the path. This allows you to collect resources, attract or invite monsters, offer gifts, collect spirit points or manage your own villagers.
All those who are not village elders return to the personal reserve after the hike and must be motivated again before the next hike.

Another action that villagers can activate is drawing new ecosystem cards. There are three slots available for these above the personal tableau. They show different combinations of biomes (resources) that are needed to fulfill these cards. This can be done in the third step of the turn. The cards are initially placed next to your own tableau.

In the fourth step, all migration tracks with your own villagers are moved forward. The biomes are also adjusted. If you have generated biomes on your turn and not used them all, you move the lower half of the biome marker up to the upper half and receive the points you pass through.

Now the next person can start their turn. You can now place the completed ecosystem cards in your own ecosystem and house attracted monsters there. These monsters give you points at the end of the game in a variety of ways. They usually want a specific biome around them.

salad for (point) dessert

Every time monsters are attracted, the sun marker moves one step forward. When it reaches the end of the track, the game ends. Once the current turn is over, everyone has two more turns.

In addition to the points you received during the game, especially for biomes produced, you now get a whole range of other points for almost everything. You lose points for monsters that you have attracted but were unable to place in your own ecosystem. You win or lose points depending on the position of the spirit marker. What is also important are victory point conditions (seasons), which are scored at the end of the game. These are different every game. To do this, you calculate a base value from the respective condition and multiply this by the multiplier achieved for that season.

Finally, each type of monster is scored separately. Every monster that is adjacent to at least one water field doubles its score. As (almost) always, the person with the most points wins.

Information about Arborea

Number of people: 1 to 5 people Age: from 14 years Playing time: 90 to 120 minutes Difficulty: expert game Long-term motivation: good Mechanics: Worker placement, shared resources, tile placement Game idea: Dani Garcia Illustrations: Javier González Cava, Nicolas Gendron Publisher: Alley Cat Games, German edition: Skellig Games Official Website: Arborea Year of publication: 2024 Language: German Cost: 50 Euro

Conclusion

The first thing that comes to mind Arborea What really catches your eye is the completely overloaded look. The overview of the game board suffers greatly as a result, and not just in the first game. Many icons are printed so small that, depending on where you are sitting, you really have trouble recognizing them. Even though it is really nice to look at and contributes to the overall aesthetics together with the otherwise very high-quality material, less would definitely have been more here.

The rule book, on the other hand, is quite clear. The basic phases of a turn are well presented. The real complexity comes from the sheer abundance of possibilities that you have in the game. Unfortunately, there is no game aid that everyone could lay out in front of them.

In the first game, the game will feel quite cumbersome. It is difficult to estimate where to get the most points and how to deal with the shared resources. This improves in later games.
What an argument for Arborea could be the possibility to play with up to five people. In my opinion, this option is not really appealing. Even four people is too many for my taste, as the running of the paths and the somewhat limited ability to plan your own moves in advance result in a very high downtime. If you can only use villagers on your own turn and not activate any, it really takes a while before you can do a "real" action again. The game is ideal with three people or in solo mode.

The most interesting game mechanics are the shared resources. You can accumulate a decent amount of points if you don't use up all the resources you have produced. Worker placement or managing your own workers is challenging, but it doesn't feel that different from other games in which you have to manage your own workers well. All the other mechanisms with the final victory point conditions, ecosystem puzzles, collecting monsters and building multipliers don't really come together, although Arborea when it comes to point salads, it is still within a good average.

In the long run, the game offers many opportunities to try out new strategies. If you like the game, you won't get bored quickly.

My personal highlight is the solo mode. For a relatively complex game like Arborea It is wonderfully easy to control and offers a finely adjustable difficulty that should be suitable for every level of knowledge of the game.
For the bot's actions, you simply draw a card from the solo card deck and carry out the individual action steps. Due to the number of workers that the bot places, the solo game feels more like a three-person game than a two-person game. Only a little predictability in the bot's action cards would make it even better.

Overall is Arborea A very solid, upscale connoisseur game that perhaps focuses a little too much on the visuals. Mechanically, there is still a little room for improvement in one or two places. Nevertheless, I would recommend it to anyone who likes Eurogames with a very varied points salad.

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