ARCTIC SCAVENGERS scouting report

Driftwood games sent me a promo copy of ARCTIC SCAVENGERS, a new card game with a post-apocalyptic theme that's been widely cited as a more thematic version of DOMINION.

The setting is sometime in the future, climate change has caused a new ice age and wiped out 90% of the population so all that's left are a bunch of ragtag tribes struggling to survive in a frozen wasteland. Pretty cool setup, interesting to see a post-apocalyptic landscape that's frozen instead of hot.

It does resemble DOMINION in that you draft cards and build a deck, but I think the similarity is a little overstated. You start with a core set of cards and you mostly spend them to either dig through a junkyard pile for tools, weapons, and medicine or to modify your tribesmen's activities. You have to use their hunt skills to get food, and then you spend food and medicine to "hire" new mercenaries and workers into your tribe. Basically, they get added to your deck and as you go along you can kind of tune your deck to suit your purposes. The goal is to have the most tribesmen in your deck at the end of the game.

There is conflict and bluffing. Whatever cards you don't spend to dig or hunt you put down as skirmish cards. At the end of the round, everybody reveals and totals up fight points, and the winner gets a card from a contested resource pile- all really good stuff like grenades and a wolfpack.

It looks pretty cool overall. It seems like it might be a little less expansive than DOMINION since there's less cards to draft, but it also has WAY more theme (surprisingly, a good bit of conceptual theme) and more aggro. 3-5 players, probably about 45-60 minutes.

Production is pretty DIY- plan cardboard box with a laserjet printed wrapper. The cards are OK, pretty thin but professionally manufactured. Decent art for a low budget release. Not sure what the retail is on it, but hopefully it's not more than $20.

Looking forward to playing it. DOMINION didn't have sniper teams.

Michael Barnes wrote:

Looking forward to playing it. DOMINION didn't have sniper teams.

Snipers are exactly what Dominion was missing. But I'm sure in Dominion Sniper Teams would allow you to discard three cards from your hand for two more actions and one more buy.

Seriously, there's not a lot of game going on in Dominion.

The good news is that the snipers actually do kill folks.

Yay!