Ark: Awakening

About this board game

Ark: Awakening is a hybrid boost placement and area control board game for 1–4 players, with games lasting around 80 minutes. You awaken from cryogenic sleep inside a strange biodome and begin exploring the vast alien vessel known as the Ark.

The Ark is made up of infinitely many rooms, each the size of a city, and every game reveals a different part of it. Rooms are discovered randomly, so their types and positioning vary from play to play. Each room offers different possibilities, challenging players to adapt and make choices that best develop their strategy.

As you explore, you open and power up rooms, exploit resources needed to awaken the rest of your faction, collect alien artifacts, and investigate why your faction is aboard the Ark. The game features a deep, multi-layered engine builder alongside exploration and area control, with asymmetric factions that give each player a different experience.

• Choose an alien faction with its own distinct way to play.
• Reveal and use randomly positioned rooms across the Ark.
• Build an engine while gathering resources and alien artifacts.
• After collecting five artifact cards, draw a mission from a deck of 36 different missions.

Each player’s mission is drawn randomly, adding further variation to the puzzle of every game. The first player to complete their mission wins, rewarding efficient development and clever adaptation to the rooms revealed during exploration.

In addition to the competitive Awakening mode, Ark: Awakening includes a competitive Fallout mode, a solo mode, and a collaborative mode that can be played against another player or an automated opponent.