Sanctuary

Ark Nova is an outstanding board game, but it can be long and with many things to do, it can be daunting for new players. Sanctuary is a follow-up game to Ark Nova that aims to streamline the same experience into a shorter, more welcoming game. While at Gen Con, Capstone Games gave me the opportunity to demo Sanctuary. Will it maintain the spirit and mechanics we know and love from Ark Nova? Let’s find out.

Sanctuary replaces the card play of Ark Nova for a tile placement game.

My favourite aspect of Ark Nova is the action selection puzzle, finding the best order of operations to power up the actions you need to take. Sanctuary uses a similar mechanism to dictate which tiles you can select from on your turn and the strength of your action.

To start a turn, you must select a tile from the display. With my white tile range arrow pointing at 4, the first 4 tiles are available. Then you must choose an action to perform. Only the tile for the action performed is moved to the leftmost spot.

There are animal, project, and building tiles. Some tiles score fixed points, others will have variable scoring. The Ornithologist project tile will score 1 point for every bird anywhere in the zoo. Tiles with a hex pattern behind the scoring criteria want the specified icons in a connected network. The Outback Area building tile scores 2 points for every Australia icon connected to the tile, including tiles connected through other tiles with the same icon. Whereas, the Primate House (below) only scores for primate icons on tiles directly connected to it.

Tiles are placed starting from the zoo entrance and then must connect to previous tiles or the entrance. The action tile specifies which habitat type and animal level that can be played. Some tiles have additional requirements to be next to a river or adjacent to open areas (as marked on tile edges). Previously placed and printed open areas on the board can be used, but otherwise an additional tile from your hand needs to be played face-down.

After taking an action, players can optionally play a building tile, complete a conservation objective, and upgrade action tiles.

Buildings are very important in Sanctuary, as regardless of which action players choose, they can always play a building tile on their turn. In addition to their special effects, they give you habitat and animal class icons necessary for conservation objectives and upgrade requirements.

With 3 Asia icons in my zoo, I can support a conservation objective from the 5 randomly selected at the start of the game. My 3x token is placed under the matching objective and scores 7 points.

Now that I have a conservation marker on the board, one upgrade condition is met and I can upgrade a tile of my choice. This improves the action and shifts the strength arrow right to point one higher.

The game continues until any player has filled their zoo, supported 4 conservation objectives, or the tile supply is empty. All players then take one more turn before final scoring.

While I only played half a game at Gen Con, I was very impressed with Sanctuary. It kept aspects of Ark Nova that I love and presented an interesting tile placement puzzle. The actions in the game are simplified enough that the game can move quickly, and be played with friends who don’t enjoy heavy games, but still offers some good strategic depth. I can’t wait to play this one again.