Ark Nova is an extremely well-designed game that elegantly combines several different game mechanisms and successfully straddles the line between being complex and being just complicated. The zookeeping theme stresses the importance of balancing research and conservation with commercial appeal, and the game has the potential to be a great gateway game à la Settlers of Catan or Pandemic...except that it's saddled with a somewhat high price tag and an overwritten, poorly organized rule book, making the game a little difficult to learn for all but the most experienced tabletop gamers. But it's an excellent game otherwise, well worth it if you can make it through your first few games.
The core mechanism is relatively straightforward. You have a row of 5 cards in front of you, each occupying a space numbered one through 5 and representing an action you can take in the game: build structures such as animal enclosures or kiosks, play animal cards from your hand, use worker placement to claim partnerships with zoos and universities or contribute to conservation efforts, play sponsor cards for immediate or ongoing benefits, or draw cards from the deck. The position of the action card in the row determines how effective it is, and once you've used an action it moves back to the "1" position, causing all the other action cards to move up one spot. Right away you have a wealth of meaningful, strategic choices to make: do you take the lesser action now, or wait until its card has moved and you'll get more out of it? If you need an action to move up in the row, you need to play the actions that are in front of it, even if they don't benefit you right now. The interplay of the different actions and positions is fascinating.
Along the way, certain actions will cause a charming little coffee cup marker to move along what is called the break track. When it gets to the end, an end of round reset occurs, where players retrieve their spent workers, gain income from their zoo's appeal value, refill their hands of cards, and reset the row of available cards to draw. A key part of the game is the attempt to control when this happens, or at the very least to position yourself so that you're ready to take advantage when it does.
The point of building enclosures, placing animals, supporting conservation efforts, and soliciting sponsors is, of course, to earn the victory points you need to win the game. Players need to make progress along three tracks: appeal, conservation, and reputation. Appeal represents how exciting your zoo is, and determines how much money you get to spend (mainly on building structures for your zoo). Conservation measures how much your efforts are supporting animal preservation; moving along this track gives you access to bonuses such as extra workers and better versions of your action cards. Reputation shows your standing in the scientific community, with more gameplay benefits and also access to a wider range of animal cards. Creating synergy with what animals and structures you place, how you lay out your zoo, what partnerships you go after and what conservation projects you support will gain you points on the various tracks, but there's a catch...
The conservation and appeal points are on the opposite ends of a single track, and the trick to getting a good score is to make sure your conservation keeps up with your appeal. The game ends once a player's markers pass each other (meaning that their conservation and appeal values are roughly equal). After this point, all the other players get one final turn, a mad scramble to finish whatever they are trying to do to maximize their scores, and if they find that they've spent too much game time on increasing their appeal and not enough on conservation, they risk ending up with a low (possibly even a negative) score.
It seems like a lot, and as I mentioned, the rule book doesn't explain it very well, but it really is a smooth system of interlocking game mechanisms, and once you've played a few times everything does kind of lock into place. The best thing to keep in mind while playing is that while it looks like an engine-building game, where you're trying to get just the right combination of elements into play, it's actually a race to see who can get their conservation value to pass their appeal value first. So it's best not to focus on waiting for that perfect card, but rather to just do the best you can with what you have in front of you at the moment.
Rating: 4 (out of 5) A really good game that stops just short of being a great one.
