Ark Nova Solo Review

Only One Can Manage This Zoo

Ark Nova has taken the board game world by storm. With numerous industry awards and a regular spot in various people and publications’ top 10, you need to check this game out if you want to be able to engage in the conversations about it. This is a chunky worker placement, deck building game where you are building and managing a zoo. Some of your assignments are building enclosures, introducing animals to your facilities, securing sponsorships and partnerships, and investing in conservation projects, all with the goal of having the best zoo. It’s like playing Zoo Tycoon, but on a board and 20 odd years later.

Buckle Up, This Is A Chunky Game

If you’ve never played Ark Nova, here is a run down: there is a main board, where every marker for the multiple progress tracks sit, as well as the deck and the display – a number of shared face up cards up for grabs by anyone who can afford them. There is also an Association board, which is where you send your workers to procure some highly valuable resources in the game, namely reputation, university and continent-based zoo partners, the ability to invest in available conservation projects or simple endgame points. Finally, each player has their own player mat (think of Viticulture or Scythe), where you keep your funds, unassigned workers, cards you’ve played and your actual zoo, with its enclosures, buildings and animals.

On your turn, you can take one of five possible actions: you can draw cards, build structures in your zoo, place animals in the zoo, secure a sponsorship or send one of your workers to the Association board mentioned before. The three tracks that mark your progress are Reputation, which mainly affects what cards you can draw from the display, Appeal, which makes you progressively richer, and Conservation, which grants you some very valuable one use bonuses. Conservation and appeal are end game points and their tracks run in parallel but in opposite directions. Once your marker for both of them cross each other, the game ends and you find out who won.

Solo Variants?

Ark Nova is essentially the same game solo versus multiplayer, with the obvious difference that while in a game with 2 or more people, when the end game is reached, you are tallying up points to see who won, in a solo one, you are determining whether you won or lost. And what triggers the end game changes slightly as well. As mentioned, in a group, it’s game over when your Appeal marker crosses your Conservation marker. When you’re on your own, instead you get exactly 27 actions to perform, out of the 5 possible ones. There is a tile that helps you keep track of that. The tile has 7 squares that you cover with one of your player cubes. Every time you perform an option, you move one cube to the side. When you reach number 7, you reach a Break.

Breaks are at the core of the game mechanics and they are present also in a multiplayer game. They are when you collect income and reset a few things, such as what is available at the Association board and some cards on the display. After each Break in a solo game, you move your cubes back to their starting position on the tile, except the topmost one. That means you will have one fewer action to take before the next Break, until you have none left. That’s when the game ends. If you’ve secured enough Victory Points, you win. Otherwise, your zoo failed.

Why Is Everyone And Their Pet Obsessed With Ark Nova?

There is no one answer of course, but maybe it has to do with how insanely vast the possibilities are in this game. With a deck of 212 (!!!) cards, it’s entirely possible you’ll play a handful of times without seeing the same card once. In fact, the guide even offers that as a suggestion: discard everything used in one game before you play the next one, if you want to make sure you experience the whole deck. These cards are also all unique. It would take a significant amount of time to learn the deck enough to pick favorites, and even then it would be nearly impossible to strategize based on waiting for one specific card to show up. It may never even be drawn.

On top of that, and this is something I really appreciate, this game forces you to make really difficult high-stakes decisions. You need to compromise all the time. For example, as mentioned, you can partner up with zoos that are based on continents (one for Africa, one for Asia, etc). But despite there being 5 of them in the game, you can only have a maximum of 4. The advantages of having each of them is significant, so which one to sacrifice is a tough choice. Likewise, your five possible actions can be upgraded (you can draw more cards per turn, for example, or build more than one enclosure). But there are only a maximum of 4 opportunities to upgrade a card, so no matter what you do, at least one of your actions will never reach its full potential.

When investing in a Conservation project, which grants you the highest reward in the game, Conservation points, it works this way: each Conservation project has three different costs with a corresponding number of points each grants. So, for example, you could invest in a Conservation project related to birds, which requires you to have 2, 4 or 5 birds in your zoo, and you’d score 2, 4 or 5 Conservations points respectively. Securing those 2 birds is dramatically easier than securing 5, so you may want to do it quickly to start reaping the benefits, but you can only ever invest in a Conservation project once (with rare exceptions granted by especially valuable cards in the deck), therefore going for the cheapest slot in that project means giving up the 3 extra points forever.

Final Thoughts

Playing Ark Nova solo changes practically nothing from the multiplayer version. With one crucial aspect: it reduces the play time. The box gives an average time of 90 to 250 minutes for a playthrough. That is incredibly optimistic, especially for non-experienced players. The first time I played this with 3 friends, going over the rules alone took more than 20 minutes of a rehearsed speech. And let me make this clear: the payoff is undeniable. This is a game that, if you have the time to play, you should absolutely put on the table right now. But if you have to abandon it after 3 hours of carefully curating your zoo, you will be so invested in it and the ending will feel like it’s so within reach, that it will sting.

So being able to enjoy all of the mechanics practically unchanged on a game this robust, but doing it at a feasible 1 hour playthrough is a treat. I often play solo games to learn them before I move on to playing it with friends, but with Ark Nova, that direction has been reversed. I played with friends a couple of times, but I prefer doing it at my own pace.