It’s a nice example of looking at a game mechanic, then stepping back and figuring out how to use it more widely. Thus you can have grenades which help Skirmishing, but also equipment to help Digging, Hunting, and the rest. Arctic Scavengers generalizes this mechanic beyond combat to instead introduce equipment that can modify any sort of action - while still requiring a wielder to hold it. Resident Evil (2010) similarly includes ammo that requires weapons to fire it. You won’t be surprised that all of this combines to offer multiple ways to win - primarily focused on the three main actions.Įquipment, Not Weapons. Games like Thunderstone(2009) and 3012 (2012) include weapons that require people to wield them. An individual card might be better at one thing than the other (e.g., the Scavenger can do everything, but is best at hunting), but that still gives players tactical options for different things to do on their turn - something that’s missing from many deckbuilder games. Most cards allow players to do at least two different things (e.g., dig or skirmish) while others allow players to engage in all four activities.
Arctic Scavengers gets away with having three (or four) currencies by its cards being dramatically multiuse. It’s the sort of dramatic differentiation of mechanics that should be appearing in more deckbuilding games heck, just having one of those wide variations (the random draw or the blind bid) would have been a great innovation. This variety of gameplay is even more important than the currency count, and the rest of the deckbuilding field could really learn from it.
Unlike Ascension or Penny Arcade (2011), the currencies in Arctic Scavengers work in dramatically different ways, with digging resulting in random draws, hunting in open purchases, and skirmishing in blind bidding auctions. That may be a record for deckbuilding currency counts. Second, the multiple currencies actually include three “currencies”: Digging, Hunting (which actually includes both food and medicine - two different currencies), and Skirmishing. However, Arctic Scavengers introduces its own interesting take on both elements.įirst, the random cards (which appear in Contest Resource and Junkyard decks) are hidden, so that only the active player gets to see them in the case of the Junkyard deck, the active player may get to look through several cards before picking one, so there’s some control of the randomness. These are both a bit staid nowadays because they appeared in the mass-market with Ascension (2010) - one of the first deckbuilders out of the gate after Dominion. Fortunately, the RIo Grande edition of Arctic Scavengers gets partially past that problem with a HQ Expansion that also ships with the base game. The downside is limited replayability - a topic I’m going to return to. The upside of such a small card count is an equally small price - here $34.99. There are very few deckbuilding games that have been built to that scale - and the ones that have been, like Pergamemnon (2011), haven’t been entirely successful. The original Arctic Scavengers contains just 144 cards.
#Scavengers player count full
At the end of a full round of play, everyone compares the Skirmish values of their face-down cards, and the winner gets the top card in the Contested Resources pile, which is either something great or something worth a lot of victory points.Īfter 16 rounds of play (timed by the Contested Resources deck), the player with the most victory points (which come from people in the deck, who you might have purchased via Hiring or won with Skirmishes) wins. Skirmish lets a player commit several cards to a face-down pile.Hunt allows a player collect food and medicine, then use it to Hire a card from several face-up piles.Dig lets a player look at cards from the junkyard pile - which has some good stuff (most of it equipment) and some trash - and keep up to one of them.Draw quite simply lets a player take additional cards from his deck into his hand.Cards used for one action can’t then be used for another.
Each player can do each action no more than once on his turn (though he often won’t do all of them). It turns out that there’s a surprising amount of innovation for something published so soon after Dominion (2008).Īrctic Scavengers is built around a menu of four options: draw, dig, hunt, and skirmish. Driftwood Games first released Arctic Scavengers (2009) in a limited edition back toward the start of the deckbuilding era, but it just hit the mass market recently with its rerelease from Rio Grande Games (2013).
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