It’s time for the annual ceremony that brings together druids from distant lands to compete and find who will reign supreme. Eight secret ingredients have been selected, and it’s up to you to combine them carefully and assemble your potion better and faster than everyone else. Let’s see which druid will win!
Carnuta is a 2-4 player game designed by Yohan Goh, Hope S Hwang, and Gary Kim. It is illustrated by Davide Tosello and published by Repo and Asmodee Games. It plays in approx 30 mins.
Overview:
Carnuta is a card-driven tableau-building game in which players take on the role of druids competing to create the most valuable potions. Each player builds their own personal play area by collecting ingredient cards and managing a set of double-sided Sun and Moon runes. Throughout the game players select ingredients that interact with one another trying to get the best combos and score the most points at the end!
Gameplay:
The central feature of Carnuta is each player’s collection of cards they play, the ingredient cards they collect and pay for through the game with double sided runes. As ingredients are added, they start to form a tableau whose scoring depends on the relationships between the collected cards. Some give you points based on the card themselves and others look for combos of certain cards.
The economy in this game is the Sun and Moon rune system. Players use double-sided runes as currency flipping, collecting, or discarding them as part of their actions. The position of these runes influences how ingredients can be added by paying for them and how efficiently players can optimize their tableau. The runes can be used and re-used if you flip them or need to be re-acquired if discarded.
Gameplay revolves around selecting ingredient cards that work together while managing the available runes you have or can gain on your turn. As more ingredients are added to the player board, the arrangement becomes increasingly important because scoring is determined by how effectively the collected ingredients interact.
As you gain more ingredient cards you can unlock spaces for extra runes on your board and gain two additional ingredients to be used in the tableau. The game ends when a player collects and plays their 12 card, then all players play equal turns. Once scores are added up, the player with the most points wins!
Impressions
I love the style and theme of this game. The art is fun and the way it plays is very smooth with any player count. Using the runes to gain ingredients is such a fun economy and one I haven’t seen done this smooth with a two-sided token. I like set collection games and this one is smooth and ready to track easily. You can also see what your opponents are going for through the game so it is easy to plan ahead.
It’s not a difficult game, the teach is easy to follow and get playing quickly. Younger players could play this one well also, there is no reading involved and it’s all symbols and numbers making it easy to understand for younger players. Inexperienced or newer players would like this one also as it is easy to play and understand.
This is definitely one that I will be bringing to game nights locally, it fits in a 30 min time slot and will play with a variety of players well. The runes alone will catch player’s eyes-I can see this being very popular with our local players. Everyone in our family enjoyed it as well, making it a great double-dip game for us!
Overall this one I would highly recommend and will be keeping in my personal game collection for the foreseeable future. So grab your favorite Druids, get ready to collect some ingredients and see who will reign supreme!
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