That's What Jenni Said

Christopher: Guest reviewer here! I’m Jenni’s husband, Chris. It fell to me to review The Shipwreck Arcana: Stars Below mini-expansion for two reasons. First, I was the impetus for getting the game originally . Second, Jenni thought the base game was just ok, while I thought it was a really good and beautiful cooperative logic puzzle. Her original review is here ; if you have not played the base game you’ll want to pause here, read the original review, and return to this page as I will be using game terms and concepts with the assumption they are familiar to you. So, what does the mini-expansion contain? At first glance, it might seem relatively small with just five Arcana cards, but since the base game has 20 Arcana cards, that’s a 25% increase, which isn’t small at all. Each Arcana card in the base game has beautiful artwork, very much like an alternative universe deck of Tarot cards. The five new cards in this expansion maintain that style of artwork, so if you were a fan, you’ll b...

We hosted a lot of small gatherings in December and they presented the perfect opportunity to bring some games to the table that we hadn’t yet played. The Shipwreck Arcana was one of these games. My husband Christopher talked me into acquiring it, promising it would be something I’d enjoy. I was skeptical because he described it as a logical/mathematical pattern building puzzle game (BoardGameGeek.com classifies it in the Math category among others) and I don’t tend to enjoy those as much as other types of games. We played several games, usually with the full count of five players. The first thing I noticed when I unboxed the game was how pretty the Arcana cards are. The artwork is is unique in style and reminds me a bit of a tarot deck. It’s a pleasure to lay out the cards for display on the table. Components include the Hours card, the Arcana cards, fate tokens, score and doom trackers, number line tokens, and a velvet grab bag. All of the components are sturdy enough to hold up to...