A Deckbuilding Look at Arctic Scavengers

Arctic ScavengersDriftwood 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). It turns out that there’s a surprising amount of innovation for something published so soon after Dominion (2008).

The Game

Arctic Scavengers is built around a menu of four options: draw, dig, hunt, and skirmish. Each player can do each action no more than once on his turn (though he often won’t do all of them). Cards used for one action can’t then be used for another.

  • Draw quite simply lets a player take additional cards from his deck into his hand.
  • 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.
  • Hunt allows a player collect food and medicine, then use it to Hire a card from several face-up piles.
  • Skirmish lets a player commit several cards to a face-down pile. 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.

After 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.

The Interesting

Super Small Deck. The original Arctic Scavengers contains just 144 cards. 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 upside of such a small card count is an equally small price — here $34.99. The downside is limited replayability — a topic I’m going to return to. 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 Good

Multiple Currencies & Random Cards. 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. However, Arctic Scavengers introduces its own interesting take on both elements.

First, 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.

Second, the multiple currencies actually include three “currencies”: Digging, Hunting (which actually includes both food and medicine — two different currencies), and Skirmishing. That may be a record for deckbuilding currency counts. 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. This variety of gameplay is even more important than the currency count, and the rest of the deckbuilding field could really learn from it. 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.

Scavenger CardMultiple use Cards. Arctic Scavengers gets away with having  three (or four) currencies by its cards being dramatically multiuse. 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. 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.

Multiple Paths to Victory. You won’t be surprised that all of this combines to offer multiple ways to win — primarily focused on the three main actions.

Equipment, Not Weapons. Games like Thunderstone (2009) and 3012 (2012) include weapons that require people to wield them. Resident Evil (2010) similarly includes ammo that requires weapons to fire it. 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. Thus you can have grenades which help Skirmishing, but also equipment to help Digging, Hunting, and the rest. It’s a nice example of looking at a game mechanic, then stepping back and figuring out how to use it more widely.

Great Interpersonal PlayThe blind bidding that’s focused on the Skirmish allows for the best interpersonal play of any deckbuilding game — with the possible exception of 3012. You have to be aware of what your opponents are buying and how many cards they’re playing into the Skirmish, and only then can you decide whether you’re going to fight with them or not. It really raises Arctic Scavengers up above the multi-player solitaire rut that so deckbuilders can so easily fall into.

The Bad

Simple. Arctic Scavengers‘ gameplay is quick, but it’s also pretty simple. There isn’t a huge amount of variety among the cards, other than different values for the three currencies. This problem is made worse by the small size of the overall card set, which means there’s not a lot of variety either. Arctic Scavengers partly resolves the problem by also including what was originally an expansion, but still it’s a relatively plain and simple game. Though great for light games, those expecting more complex fare will need to think more carefully.

Runaways Possibilities. If a player is allowed to get out ahead on Skirmish points early in the game, they can then collect great stuff from the Skirmish pile and roll over their opponents. The saboteur and sniper cards are probably meant to partially resolve this problem, as they allow multiple opponents to all gang up on one person in the Skirmish, but it still feels like a weakness in the design — both in the singular focus it suggests and in the rich-get-richer problems it can cause.

The Expansion

The (included) HQ Expansion offered up some badly needed variability to Arctic Scavengers — and it also added some interesting new options for deckbuilding play.

Leaders — Strategic Cards. In Arctic Scavengers, each player starts with refugee/VP cards which immediately get trashed. However with the HQ Expansion, each player now has a leader that gives those refugees special powers (and thus makes them more useful). Some refugees become better at hunting or digging, while others can blow up opponents. This adds a little bit of strategic differentiation to the game, and thus might force players onto different strategic paths. Penny Arcade and other games with main character cards offer similar strategic play, though many of those effects are a bigger deal than the ones in Arctic Scavengers and thus lead to more specialization.

Buildings — Timed Cards. The building cards are somewhat more unique. They’re cards that stay in play once they’re created (which is relatively rare but not unknown in deckbuilders), but they take several rounds of play to finish. Construction takes time! Thus you have to decide if a building will be useful several turns from now.

Gangs — Victory Cards. Finally, the Expansion includes gangs, which give additional victory points to players who meet certain conditions like having the most medicine in their deck. Though the idea goes all the way back to classics like Settlers of Catan (1995) with its Largest Army and Longest Road, it’s another idea that hasn’t been widely used in the deckbuilding field, and perhaps should be.

Conclusion

Arctic Scavengers has more than its share of deckbuilding innovations, especially considering how long ago it was originally designed. It’s a pity that it didn’t get wider distribution back in 2009, else the deckbuilding genre might look a lot different by now.

Released into today’s market it’s another fairly basic deckbuilder game entering a somewhat clogged field, and I’m not entirely certain it’s going to get much traction as a result. Nonetheless, if you’re looking at a simple-ish game with more tactics and more interpersonal play than most deckbuilders, this one is well worth looking at.

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