You awake from cryogenic sleep in a strange biodome that resembles your home planet. You have no memory of how and why you are there – obviously a side effect of the cryogenic sleep is a temporal loss of memory. You start exploring and find out that your biodome is just one room from infinitely many rooms on a traveling alien space ship – the Ark. Each room is the size of city and the Ark is the size of a planet. You open and power up rooms, exploit resources needed to awake the rest of your faction, collect alien artifacts and investigate the reason why your faction is at the Ark.
Ark: Awakening is a hybrid boost placement / area control game, with exploration elements. Has a deep multi-layered engine builder and asymmetric gameplay. Players start to explore the Ark and reveal randomly rooms. Each room provides different options and can be utilized differently. Players must learn to adapt on the go and make choices that best capitalize of the revealed rooms, building up their engine faster. Players also collect artifact cards and after 5 artifact cards, players can draw their mission card from a deck of 36 different mission cards. The first player that completes their mission, wins.
At game start players will choose an alien faction to play with - each faction will feel different to play.
Variance in setup and multiple player choices provides a puzzle of players to solve and build their engine as fast as they can. On each play the Ark is revealed differently – both the types of rooms and their positioning varies and players also get random mission cards.
In addition to the competitive “Awakening mode”, the game features a competitive “Fallout” mode, solo mode and collaborative mode that can be played against a player or an automated opponent.
—description from the designer
Exploration, Science Fiction · Area Majority / Influence, Solo / Solitaire Game, Variable Player Powers, Worker Placement
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