I played my first game of Lost Ruins of Arnak tonight (solo).
Above someone said it doesn’t really replace Clank!.. But I did get a very similar feeling in just atmosphere and design. Yes, Clank! Doesn’t have worker placement, but something just felt similar to me as I was playing.
It is a nice medium weight game, and I personally didn’t find it too fiddly. Did work the brain a bit as you tried to optimize main actions. The theme was fun as well!
The solo AI was great because it was dead simple to run. It did a decent job clogging up worker spots, and also kept items and artifacts moving through the supply. It definitely wasn’t challenging, but more of a roadblock. (I did play on 0 for my first game, so that is also a part of it).
My only complaint was that you don’t cycle the deck enough in only a 5 round game. I went with a ‘buy a ton of items’ strategy, and by round 4 any fear card penalties were meaningless because they were so diluted into my deck.
I may have also misplayed a rule on the solo AI, where I passed them for the round after their deck ran out. For the final round I probably ran 20 (maybe more) main actions to the AIs 10. I had so many items, including a variety of +1 card actions and currency swaps that I was able to both fly up the research track and buy high value items/artifacts to drive up my score at the end. I will need to double check some rules.
All that being said, I thought it was super fun and look forward to playing w the expansion.