Four Expansion Reviews - Ark Nova, Lost Ruins of Arnak, Cascadia, Sea Salt & Paper

0:00 welcome to allies or enemies I'm Jess and I am Sean and today we are talking about expansions and we got four of them that we're going to talk about but you know what it makes a lot more sense just to introduce them one by one so let's just roll right into that so the first one we are going to talk about is Ark Nova Marine worlds and this adds a whole bunch of new marine animals as the title suggests as well as aquariums as well as it's got these new alternate action cards four of them for each of the five actions and it's got new animal markers new player markers that are shaped like animals and those are purely aesthetic but I really appreciate that they added them in they've got primates for yellow which is my favorite color and the penguins look really great and they are just meant to replace the cubes that you put out on the conservation projects and that's it it doesn't change functionally at all but it's a big change and it's an awesome change and I really like those Penguins I also like the blue fish quite a bit one of the elements that does change things are the action cards and how those work is each player gets dealt three at the very beginning and then you draft one and you pass it and you end up with two at the end that will replace your basic action cards and they just change those actions a little bit it's still the same action you get to do

1:32 there will just be a small add-on and it might be different for one side to the other side two yeah that's really interesting is that the side one and side two additions can be so different and that can really make a difference in how you use those as well like when you level up some of those cards because all of these action cards like the difference is small enough that if you're pretty new to Ark Nova it's not going to make a huge impact on how you play but if you've played this game like aund times I could really see these impacting people yeah I had an interesting one the other day where when I played an animal I could ignore one of the restrictions when it was at a higher level so it's small little change where playing an animal is still what that card does and it still is stronger higher up but that it might just affect it a little bit and so we've really liked those new action cards and I think that's the thing that everyone's really going to talk about from this expansion but I think at least equally important are the marine animals and there's 54 marine animal cards if I remember that correctly and some of those are most of those are marine animals some of those are also the sponsorship cards and the goal cards and whatnot most of those are tied into the marine animals though and it it is it's really cool having all of the the new animals as well as the aquarium but it's also impressive that they've done such a good job of adding

3:03 cards but at the same time making it easier to actually get through the deck so actually it feels like you see more cards even though there are more cards in the deck now yeah that was my worry when I heard they were going to add a bunch of cards is it meant that if you really needed to collect a certain animal icon it would then be harder to get those icons cuz more cards are added in but how it works is when the cards go out into the market row if it's a marine card then you actually discard the the like first card that's out there and because of that it Cycles through pretty quickly and a lot of the cards they've added in also give you I think a few more options to see more cards just in general yeah there's a lot of the new powers let you uh dig through the deck I think that's one of the new powers which lets you kind of flip through until you find one that has the icon that you're looking for or just letting you draw some cards off the top of the deck as well I feel like I've never looked at so many cards in a game of of Arc NOA as I have here and I know that was one of the big complaints originally was that sometimes it can feel a bit random or it can just feel like you're a bit at like the mercy of the draw and I definitely feel like they've done a good job to mitigate that a little bit with this expansion and the other thing that got added to mitigate that is the universities there is now a new one that lets you be able to choose a specific animal icon so if you're feeling really stuck despite all of that then you can still be able to get that icon that you might really need to be able to give to

4:35 a conservation project and just having different conservation projects and different endgame goals is nice as well cuz I don't feel like there was like a huge selection in the base game that it is nice to have just more of them yeah and it it adds a little bit more of all of that stuff as well as the bonus tokens so it's a whole bunch of stuff in this pretty slim box and and I think this is one we're just going to leave in all the time too yeah yeah I think so the only exception might be if we play with brand brand new players we probably wouldn't use the action card drafting because they just wouldn't know what to draft and why have the little extra bonus yeah I think that's the only thing I would take out though like I think even the marine animals I would leave in there I think um I I don't see any reason to take anything else so but yeah those ones for the first couple games that would make sense the next expansion is Cascade landmarks which adds 45 habitat tiles five starter tiles a bunch of wildlife tokens and nature tokens and a bunch of this is to make it possible to now play with five to six players it also adds scoring cards so there's three more scoring cards for each of the different types of animals and importantly it adds The Landmark scoring cards and the Beautiful Landmark tokens yes and the titular landmarks are definitely the star of the show here and how that works is at the beginning of the game you take a number of landmark

6:07 cards equal to the number of players for each of the five different kinds of habitats and so you lay all of those out and then you also have these really pretty little wooden Landmark tokens that go along with those and as you play every time you've got five of a kind of terrain in a group you can choose to take one of these Landmark cards and landmarks then you have to put the landmark on whatever the tile is that you played to make that five though you still get to play your animal somewhere else and importantly you actually begin the game with one more habitat tile as well so you start with your three plus the one so you've got four starter tiles to start out and that's important because as you put out those landmarks you can't put an animal anywhere that you put a landmark so you're going to end up with fewer habitat tiles that you can choose to to put animals on which as the game goes on and on can become a little bit tricky yeah and it can be a tough decision as to if you take that scorecard and the token or not because sometimes it will only give you like one or two points and having that space available for the animal will make you score more when we first played this we went like all in on the landmarks as soon as we got five we're like yeah we're going to place it and we realized that's not necessarily the winning strategy yeah I actually got really frustrated the first time that we played with this because because I I really targeted those landmarks and pretty quickly I

7:39 only had like two habitat tiles I could place animals on and I was discarding animals which I never do in Cascadia and so it is important to kind of pace that a little bit like it it and it's this interesting kind of push pull of because there's only two out and sometimes one of them is a lot better than the other one you do kind of want to rush to that but also you don't really want to be putting those out until kind of the last half of the game and you don't have to put them out right when you get to five you can put it out on your sixth or your seventh or your eighth tile as well and that can be quite helpful because there are times when I place a tile and I know that I really won't end up putting an animal there anyway it's like oh I can only have a group of three bears and this one is going to be a fourth bear it's useless so it is nice to have the option of I still want to put this towel to expand this territory and now at least I can get some points out of something else as well but it certainly does restrict you a lot too so usually it's it's like that sort of situation is where you really want to play this but you don't notice that you don't really realize that for your first couple of games so right at first I was like this just makes this game way way heavier this like there's the decision space has gotten so much tighter now and I don't know if I like that but as we've got to like our third or fourth game of this I've started to realize oh actually these are kind of these are sometimes things not all the times things and then

9:10 it feels like actually this can increase your your space if you if you use it in the right way yeah and the other thing that felt like it increased complexity is now some of the new habitat tiles have three habitats on them and so that can be a bonus sometimes particularly because a lot of the new scoring cards tie into animals being on certain types of habitats so having three increases the chances that they'll be on that but it cuts it off as well and so when we had we're playing with like mainly the new tiles we were getting really frustrated at cutting off our main territory but you weren't supposed to do that you're supposed to mix them in with the regular ones yeah we played one game with only the new stuff just like let's just see the new stuff don't do that it's it really it becomes such a tight difficult game with only the new stuff it is really meant to be watered down with the stuff from the original and just add little bits here and there but it is interesting how those three how the three habitat tiles I thought oh boy I'm going to build these huge groups and I did not think about those are always end pieces those are always closers they're never connectors but like I alluded to before those can be really great for the new Wildlife scoring car is because some of the ones that got introduced now have to do with the animal being on certain types of tiles which is interesting because the other ones do feel a bit repetitive pretty quickly and so I think this does bring some fresh cards to it to just to mix it

10:41 up a little bit yeah the first ones it felt like for some of them it was like four of the five were basically the same thing and I think in this expansion basically all three of each of them bring something a little bit different so those are a welcome addition too but for this one is this one that you're going to want to play with all the time is this one that you would put in game one with new players no I don't think I would play it with new players and I'm not sure I would include it all the time when I play it as well like we love Cascadia at spoiler alert for our top 100 list we had it really really high and I like the Simplicity and the like quick decisions and this increases the complexity a little bit that I don't feel like you need to have it but now we've played it a few times and we realize like you don't have to grab the landmarks and it doesn't have to be as difficult of a decision as we were making it seem I do like having the option yeah this is the sort of thing like we're I don't know 30 games into playing Cascadia or something and I feel like that's about the right time to introduce this but even still it's probably something we're going to use like 50% of the time I think the only exception would be is if you're using the extra tiles to play with five or six players in which case you would use this expansion right away the next one is the smallest one of the bunch but it adds quite a bit and that is sea salt and

12:11 paper extra salt and this adds five different kinds of cards there's a lobster that plays with crabs and let you draw four cards and keep one there is a card that gives you one point for each of the crabs that you have there's a card that is a starfish and when you play two cards and that card it gives you two extra points but you don't get to use the power of the other cards there's also a seahorse that counts as part of any kind of set and finally there's a jellyfish and if you play that with a swimmer the next player can only draw one card from the top of the deck and they can't do anything else on their next turn and all of this stuff changes the game in these kind of like subtle but interesting ways yeah cuz the game already is all about about the sets and the mix of cards that you're seeing that all present in differently depending on the game and so those cards really change it up and I think the biggest thing is a lot of those cards have to do with the crabs so I think three of those have to do with making the crabs a bit stronger you know you can now be able to play it with a lobster instead and and all of those options increase the strength of the crabs which which is great yeah cuz the crabs were really the weakest part the crabs were like the throwaway card now they're not necessarily they're still one of kind of the weaker cards but with the lobster and especially with the starfish cuz the starfish playing with the crabs is excellent because you can live without that crab power an awful lot of the time

13:43 so you regularly see two crabs and a starfish and now that's worth three points right out of the gate but also the seahorse has really helped it's all it's helped the octopuses which were already so strong but it also really helps the sailors which there are so few of the penguins which there are so few of and the seashells which I always thought were kind of like the weaker cousin of the octopi and this now gives you obviously one more to build that set and you can only use it for one type of set so if you do use it with an anchor I think that's the best bang for your buck but it is nice to have it as an option to flush out any set that you're currently working towards and I like the jellyfish as well cuz it is nice that it's reduces the attacks a little bit more and so you still get punished if the person plays the jellyfish swimmer combo because you can only take off the top but that feels less punishing than them taking one of your random cards yeah it and it's interesting too because we we seem to now have like a prence of sharks all the time and we don't necessarily want those sharks all the time cuz before it was like if a shark came out we were basically taking it but now there's like a decent chance that we've played our swim with the jellyfish and now these sharks are just kind of like clogging up the deck so we've had times where there's two sharks in the discard pile and that would have never happened before no it it certainly wouldn't have we like doing our attacks and taking those cars from each other

15:14 and I think one of the things it does dampen is being able to have a mermaid win because there are more cars so the likelihood of being able to get for mermaids is even less but it is meant to be like this unicorn moment that happens we've play t ofes You' managed it once so I think decreasing the odds of something that's already very unlikely is is all right yeah and and I've had my mermaid win so I feel like Czech I've already done it I feel uh great about it but this is It's I'm sure you can tell from us talking about it we play this an enormous amount we play this game a lot lot lot we've got I don't know how like 40ish 50ish plays of this game under our belts uh so we really notice these new cards but I think I think you could put these in right out of the gate too because I think they do such a good job of kind of balancing what were some slight weaknesses in the original game like I feel like if they were to release this game with these new cards right now um that they wouldn't save this for an expansion this is kind of like a little bit of almost a patch yeah I I would agree and now that we have them mixed in where we won't take them out we'll play with them new players we'll play with them when we play with them all of the time I don't like that I haven't won since we've introduced I really like that about it so we'll see if I can finally get a win out maybe then I'll take them out to see if that was the issue but they do a really good job of balancing everything the last expansion

16:45 we want to talk about is the newest expansion for the Lost ruins of arnac and that's the missing Expedition it has a whole bunch of stuff that you can just mix right in with the base game so a whole bunch of cards it also has a double-sided research board it has two new leaders and importantly it has a whole campaign that you can introduce to play through cooperatively yeah and that is definitely the biggest part here and we love that when there's an expansion that really changes the base game and you don't see it that often we saw it with like um the rise of Fenris with Sye with oron but this one I kind of put on that same level where it takes the game and it's just this completely different way to play the game and the expansion or the campaign works both solo and cooperatively yeah and because we play at two CU you can only play two when you play the campaign it works really well and I really like it we haven't finished it yet but the weekend that we got it we played three games basically back to back going through it it's really interesting playing it cooperatively and it gives you specific goals to work towards so I found that it pushed you to play the game in slightly different ways so sometimes it be really trying to go up the research track but add in extra barriers to make that part even harder other times it would be having to defeat a whole bunch of

18:16 Guardians other times it might be having to explore a lot of sites and even just like leave Guardians and it got me playing the game in a way that I hadn't before cuz I would often just kind of like go up the research track and then make sure I had a few Guardians and explored a few sites this is really pushing me to try it try to play it differently yeah cuz each one of the scenarios has just these totally different setups and and you're right it's it's kind of a mix of like hurdles it's got something that's really working against you and like you have to do as well as it's got a few goals and if you complete those goals you get extra cards you get to keep cards that you can use in the next game as well and then after that that game I believe you like you mix them into the deck too so then those become available cards for your party moving forward and and all of that stuff I think works really well so it's like it it's not really like a legacy campaign or anything but it definitely builds a little bit yeah and it is it is a challenge I mean we've managed to win so far but it really felt like we were like squeaking those wins by and you do have to play cooperatively and I think that's a huge bonus cuz lost ruins is just such a tight game that to take a really tight game and make it Cooperative keeps it super interesting because that you are able to work together in terms of communicating about who will go where and who will try and complete certain things but also they have these pigeons so you can send something to to the other player which

19:48 can really help get them out of a pinch yeah and you you're not going to Alpha game this like I dare you to try an alpha game this cuz you just have too much to think about already in front of like on your own board to even dream of thinking about the other players board so you really do have to work together and I think one of the great things about this too is Jess has won this game like 90% of the time over me she's really good at nailing that resource track so I'm just happy to win now and have her on my team yeah I would you say that you prefer playing The Cooperative version to the competitive version yeah yeah I definitely I I I like winning this sometimes but no I really like the co-op version I think it feels like that's almost how the game's built like it doesn't feel like you're playing this in like a weird way that's against the system it feels like oh yeah this is perfect this is like perfectly comfortable playing it like this you are playing with almost a bot player because there is somebody that is introduced that you're competing against so if you don't like playing with a bot player this Cooperative experience does have that we haven't found that to be a problem it's really straightforward in terms of what they do but it is worth mentioning in case you don't like the little extra upkeep yeah and it's it's a pretty minimal upkeep like I would compare it to like Dune Imperium when you play that at two players and you've got that really minimal bot this is pretty much exactly the same thing as that is um but it it does fill up the spaces and it get it gets in the way a

21:18 lot actually the bot is really a pain in the butt but it's not a pain in the butt to run it's just a pain in the butt in like the way that they want it to be there's also the other stuff to talk about too so the two new Expedition leaders what do you think about those I really like the mechanic so the mechanic is interesting because it has these like gears that you're able to fill put in stuff to get extra bonuses and you're able to unlock a third assistant which is a monkey so the mechanic has definitely stood out for me more so than the journalist I think the journalist is interesting he's all about exploring sites to be able to like collect the journal tokens and be able to use those to get bonuses and I managed to like I think fill like a whole article and get a lot from it it just felt really difficult because you have to spend a movement to be able to collect it that and something again that's so tight to spend that to get that later reward felt tough yeah cuz we played with these two first competitively before we began the campaign and then when we started the campaign we were like maybe let's leave the journalist at home and let's use some of the older ones because we wanted to do well on the campaign and work well together um so yeah I would definitely agree that that one feels a little bit weaker but I like that these ones have just more to them like there's just there's more stuff first of all which I don't know I sometimes I like um and

22:49 there's there's kind of like a little bit more creative mechanics in there I think it's just a matter of how do you use them and we have not figured that out with the jour journalist whereas the mechanic felt just immediately interesting and that gear turns too all the time so there's like a lot of planning that goes with that as well yeah no definitely yeah so I think they are an interesting addition so if you're already tired of the older ones uh it is nice to have these newer ones that you can definitely mix in and the other addition too for playing the base game is the research track and so one of those is a waterfall one so it adds these waterfall tokens that add a bit more of a barrier to getting up the research track yeah and I I love having another research track CU there's only two in the base game so it is really nice having that but I would say if you are not going to play this cooperatively I don't know that I would recommend this like I don't know if there's enough stuff that I would add to add in and I don't know that the Expedition leaders are strong enough that you necessarily need them to replace the first chunk so if you are only looking to add just add the stuff for playing normally I don't know but I would strongly recommend playing the co-op anyway the co-op's fantastic and if if you're interested in the co-op and the campaign go for it yeah it really blew us away we were excited about it when we had heard about this campaign and we like I said we played it three times back to back we really love it

24:22 even though it is one that we can definitely easily go back and play through I've almost like put a pause on it cuz I don't want to rush through the story I'm just liking this Cooperative experience and these each chapter feeling so different that I want it to still be exciting each time we start a new chapter yeah for it to be like an event when we I think we've only got one or two chapters left in it but yeah I feel the same like we we want it to be this big event for each one that we do and that is it that is four new expansions for four of our absolute favorite games these are all top 20 games FR us and I'm going to put you on the spot a little bit what well actually quite a bit uh what order would you put these in ooh I think they are all really good I if I had to rank it I would put missing Expedition first cuz I really like the Cooperative campaign and for us that has just worked so well I would probably put extra salt second because we play sea salt and paper so much it lives in our backpack so having those few extra cards and balancing it has really helped Marine world's third I think it's a great expansion and I really like the action cards and the marine animals and I think if we have played it like 50 times it might have been my favorite expansion and then Cascadia landmarks I still think is a good expansion it did take us a few games to warm up to it but I think the

25:52 little extra complexity is something that means we'll only play it like 50% of the time yeah and I I basically agree with that the these top three are almost tied for me like they're almost exactly equal I think they're I almost want to say sea salt and paper number one but then also Ark Nova like I love I love the tokens I love the new cards it has felt so much fun going through the cards faster even though there's more cards all three of those absolutely fantastic and then Cascadia it's really like what sort of player are you right like if you're someone who likes Cascadia but just wishes there was a bit more ump to it you're going to love this this is like exactly that we don't always want that so yeah I agree the only reason that I put this just a smidge below these other three is that it's probably not an every time expansion it's like a 50% of the time expansion but I'm still I'm glad that we've got the option and thank you so much for watching please let us know in the comments if you've played any of these expansions or what some of your favorite expansions that came out this year were and as usual please like subscribe and hopefully we'll see you next time for another game