I’m not even going to beat around the bush; Lost Ruins of Arnak and its expansions are one of my favorite game experiences. The folks over at Czech Games Edition are back with a second expansion, The Missing Expedition, and the results could not have been better. The new expansion adds two new expedition leaders, new items, idols, and assistants, but most of all, a brand new solo and cooperative campaign experience.

Lost Ruins of Arnak is a deckbuilding, worker placement, and resource management game released in 2020. The overview of the base game and how it plays can be found in GamingTrend’s review here. In 2021, the Expedition Leaders expansion, reviewed here, added asymmetric players to the game, and added new life to an already amazing game. The Missing Expedition expands on both of these components and adds a fresh gameplay experience.

The New Stuff

Before getting into the campaign, let’s look at the basic additions to the set. As in the last expansion, new guardians, idol tokens, and cards are added to increase the variety of options that could pop up throughout the game. The game also comes with new level one and level two site tiles that use the campaign’s encounter cards, but those will be explained in more detail later. Two new temple overlays are also included. The Waterfall Temple has players climbing through pools of water and includes hidden sites, shortcuts, and moveable cataract tiles that could potentially block another player’s trip up the research track. The Tree Temple has idol rooms that allow players to place unused idols on empty spaces to gain rewards. Both temples have levels where players can purchase temple tiles for end game points before reaching the top of the research track.

New Leaders

The previous expansion included six new asymmetric characters to replace the basic characters. This expansion includes two new characters to play and two more characters that players can build out of base game components. While these two characters don’t have any special abilities, they start with some fun item cards for the base deck.

The Mechanic

The first of the new playable characters is the mechanic. The mechanic utilizes their special machine to get items and travel icons in the game. Throughout the game, the mechanic adds gold upgrade tiles to their machine by choosing from a supply of tiles. The mechanic uses silver and gold actions to turn their wheel and take their bonuses. A silver action allows players to choose one of the two bonuses shown to the right of their board. The gold action, if a gold token is present, allows the player to activate the gold action or take both silver actions. If no gold token is present, a gold action works like a silver action. At the beginning of round three, the mechanic gains their trusty assistant, Rusty, with opportunities to gain two other assistants like other players. As the machine actions are fast actions, they can come in handy if you can manipulate your wheel to get a needed resource or gaining a free travel icon so you don’t have to discard a card when moving.

The Journalist

The second, and my favorite, new leader is the Journalist. Each potential dig site on the board is a chance for the Journalist to write about and gains a newspaper token at the beginning of the game. When visiting a site, the Journalist can spend an extra matching travel icon to “write an article” and collect the article token. These articles are stored until they are ready to publish. When published, articles will cover up bonuses on the two randomized newspaper tiles. Players must fill a row on top before working their way down to the bottom of each of two newspaper tiles. If players fill a row, they unlock a new blue idol slot. Players also have some articles in reserve that they can write, by playing one of their starting cards. Another fun ability the Journalist has comes when researching, in that his notebook can travel up to one row above his magnifying glass. I mean, what journalist doesn’t write something before researching it?

The Campaign

The included campaign is where this expansion really shines. The campaign for The Missing Expedition was built upon an earlier campaign, released as a print and play and through a web based app, called The Search for Dr. Kutil. That campaign used the solo mode and cards included in the base game and game solo players a fun spin on the base mechanics. The Missing Expedition comes with new components and mechanics and builds off of the new content introduced in the Expedition Leaders expansion.

The campaign spans six scenarios and has a solo player, or two players cooperatively, trying to find a missing expedition led by none other than Professor Kutil. A rival player is trying to thwart your progress by using the solo mode introduced in the base game. Through different scenarios, achievements, and game elements, a narrative unfolds through different readings in the Campaign Book.  Each scenario provides instructions on how to set up the game board and often includes slight changes to the core mechanics of the game. Each scenario also has a win condition different from being the player with the most points at the end of the five rounds, although gaining points still matters. Scenarios also have achievements that players can get that will add new item and artifact cards to the campaign and special bonuses for players as they track their progress through the story. In these scenarios players may have to find specific treasures, defeat stacks of guardians, or keep their rival from advancing too far. The campaign will scale each scenario based on the player count.

Each scenario provides different ways of interacting with the expansion’s new encounter cards. Each encounter card helps provide life to the narrative and gives players a choice between an instant or delayed bonus. Instant bonuses are taken right away, while delayed bonuses can be stored until ready to use, and can be used by either player when playing coop. When used, encounter cards are stored under the campaign card, creating a tableau of special symbols. At the end of a scenario, these symbols are marked off using a campaign guide. After crossing off certain symbols, players are prompted to read a special narrative and add a card to the bottom of their decks at the start of the next scenario. Also marked on the campaign sheet are the scores from each scenario. Players will calculate their score and their rival’s score in the typical fashion and then subtract the rival score from the player score to get their final scenario number. At the end of the campaign, players will combine all of their scores and reference their progress on the symbol tracks to get their narrative ending.

Components and Production

The components blended seamlessly with the original core set. The only differences I noticed were from the wear and tear on the earlier tokens and tiles from earlier sets.The artwork on the new temple overlay blends in with the artwork on the main board as well. The artwork continues to be inviting and adventurous. The biggest struggle I have with this game is the storage, or lack thereof. Rather than lots of individual baggies, I invested in a 3rd party storage organizer for the game, so unfortunately there will be no room to store this in the box. I bet there would be room if it was only bags and cardboard to store everything from all three games into the main box, but it would still be a big mess.

Gameplay

The new expedition leaders are a great addition to the group introduced in Expedition Leaders. This mechanic gives players some easy ways to draw more cards and gain travel icons, giving them a great engine when gaining effective cards in their deck. The Journalist gives some fun combo opportunities when saving up articles and their extra idol slots give them incentive to explore new sites and get to previously discovered sites to gain new articles.

The campaign is really something special. As someone who played through the original version of the campaign, I thought it was good, but was still lacking something. The designers did a fantastic job of taking that concept and expanding it. Playing cooperatively with my wife was one of the best tabletop experiences I’ve had in a long time. When playing cooperatively, players can send their partner resources if they have an active carrier pigeon token during their turn. The challenges get harder and you really have to see how each player can solve the puzzle of the scenario. The sheer amount of variability in the set up of each scenario and the fact that you have 8 different expedition leaders you can take through each scenario makes the replayability factor high. We also only got one of the potential endings and missed out on a few achievements in the scenarios so it will be fun to revisit the campaign with different combinations of leaders and see how we can tackle each scenario.

Another Editor at GamingTrend, Chris Hinkes, took on the campaign solo. He stated that the solo sessions felt fast and became much more of an efficiency game. Planning ahead and seeing what the AI opponent might do, helped optimize gameplay. Another observation with the solo playthrough was almost never gaining relics. Many of the objectives steered him in a path that limited exploring, where most relics are gained. The co-op campaign allowed for a mixed strategy and more flexibility with two characters in play. We both agreed that the new expedition leaders seemed the most balanced for the new campaign. The expedition leaders from the first expansion can be a little too focused on one strategy, making specific scenarios much harder to complete and gain achievements.

Another great feature included in the game are ways to incorporate the campaign elements into an individual game of Arnak. A variety of site tiles give the bonus of taking a random encounter card from a scenario to give players the immediate or delayed bonuses. The new item and artifact cards can easily be shuffled into the decks as well and the two new temples give a fun challenge for any game.

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