Carnuta Review

Travel back in time and take part in a competition between Druids. Manipulate runes to perfect your recipes and take home the grand prize. That is what is promised to the player in Carnuta, a game for 2-4 players, where you will take the role of said Druid.

Carnuta is a set collection game where you and up to 3 other players will take on the roles of Druids at an annual ritual. You are competing to see who can make the best potions and be crowned Druid of the year. This is accomplished by getting cards from a market and then playing them by manipulating runes. Runes come in the form of nice chunky acrylic tiles; they are double sided with one side showing a sun and the other a moon. You will either flip runes or discard them for their power to play cards to set icons and points multipliers. After a player has played eleven cards the game comes to an end and you will tally your scores.

The game is fast-paced, with each player only able to do two actions on their turn, so there is little downtime between turns. On your turn you will either take new cards, play cards from hand, or refill runes. This keeps decision making time down too, most games I participated in took less than thirty minutes each. With so few player actions it is also a pretty quick game to teach and almost everyone was fully invested in the game shortly after we started

As stated above, the production value of this game is very good. Nice, linen-finished cards that have very pretty artwork on them. Thick cardboard player boards to keep track of your runes and how many cards you have played so far. The standout element, though is the acrylic rune tiles; they add a deluxe feeling to this otherwise standard game. You could play this with cardboard rune tokens, but I truly believe that the game would suffer for this.

As a player I enjoy a good theme; I believe a good game can be elevated to great with a proper theme. This game's theme is very weak at best, you are supposed to be creating potions yet all the cards depict ingredients you use in the potions. There is a disconnect of playing the card and seeing the ingredient thinking it’s supposed to be a potion. At no time did this game feel like I was actually preparing a potion, it just felt like I was playing a card to score off the set collection at the end of the game.

Gameplay is still fun, even if I think the theme does little to help the game it is still fun to play. The cards come from either a day deck or a night deck. Each deck has different ingredients and needs different runes to play, so you can’t focus on only playing cards from one deck. The cards themselves also rarely score on the set they are in, instead giving you a score for a different symbol or set of symbols. This means you have to use both decks and need a good variety of card types to get the best score. In the games I played, the scores at the end of the game were generally very close, once the winner only won by one point. 

Overall while the theme may be the weakest part of the game it does not detract from an otherwise enjoyable game. This is a fun filler game to pull out and play for 30 minutes to take a breather from heavier games.