Ark Nova

Welcome to Replayable, where we go into depth on our favorite tabletop games that keep us coming back again and again. I'm the start player, Todd, and today I'm joined by David and Paul. For our 21st episode, we'll be planning our own zoos in Ark Nova. It was designed by Matthias Wigge and released in 2021 by Feuerland Spiele. Are you guys ready to muck stalls? Those tigers aren't going to clean up after themselves. Right. Yeah, let's do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel.

Wow. In Ark Nova, players design modern, scientifically managed zoos. Specialists and unique buildings will help you in achieving this goal. Carefully manage your five actions, allowing some to become more powerful before using them. Acquire the best animals, increase your reputation, and perform conservation projects to earn the highest score. This game at the time of this recording is the number four game on Board Game Geek, and it's really popular.

Do we want to talk about just how much play this game is getting? Yes. It's extremely popular, so much so before we started recording, I was talking about how shocked I am this game isn't even two years old. I feel like Ark Nova has been a part of our lives, a part of the board game world for five years or more now. I was shocked to see it wasn't released in the United States until April of 2022. Wow. Yeah, it was my most played game last year. Wow. Well, not just yours.

So actually, I pulled some stats. First of all, I looked at it has 56,000 unique owners logged in Board Game Geek, and I didn't compare that to other games. I'm sure a lot more people own Catan and Ticket to Ride, but that sounds like a pretty big number to me. It has a quarter of a million logged plays. Wow. 150,000 of them were just last year, which I guess makes sense if it's only less than two years old, but 150,000 plays logged last year.

And then I looked in a little bit deeper and just, well, I pulled November of 2023 as just a random sample, 5,136 unique players, and they're logging an average of 2.8 plays per month. And I'm sure that includes Board Game Arena stats. I can't imagine these people are playing that much. I think a lot of people on Board Game Arena don't even log their games because Board Game Arena issued a social post this month that said Ark Nova was their number one played game in 2023.

And that's considering that it takes 10 times as long as a game like Can't Stop. Right. So there's a quarter million plays that are logged on Board Game Geek. I mean, what percentage of people log their plays? Is it 50%? Is it 25%? I mean, there's got to be a factor on, does that mean there's a million plays in the last year and a half of this game? I started using an app called BG Stats back in 2022. Great app.

And at the end of the year, they had like a Twitter post where they said, oh, these are the most played games of the year by our users. Oh, I missed that. Ark Nova was number one most logged game on BG Stats of 2022, the year it came out. So I was like, okay, I got to get this game. And then it became my top one. So let's talk about this. So please, what is it about this game? I mean, it's an engine builder that has hundreds of unique cards. And this has been done a couple of times before.

I'm sure we're going to talk about games that it reminds us about. Or Dave, is you like to call them big deck energy games? What is it about this game that works so well? It's highly variable. I mean, no two games are the same. One because of the huge deck of cards, but two, everybody has their own zoom app. Everybody randomly shuffles their action cards and then chooses different action cards to flip. It just gives you a very different game every time. Yeah. And the big deck of unique cards.

We were chatting about this a little bit before earlier in the day on where did this come from? You know, did this start with GMT games? Did it come with Race for the Galaxy? Did it as a major mechanism, although it's not a mechanic listed in Board Game Geek, which I'm surprised because that to me is a defining feature of a game like this or Terraforming Mars or Wingspan. Yeah, there we go. Like those in particular, that's what links those together is that large deck of unique cards.

There's a mechanic called card driven battles, right? I think that's... Yeah, like a card driven war game or like Grand Prix or Thunder Alley. Those are card driven games. Right. So as far as I'm concerned, you mentioned the two big ones that preceded Ark Nova that in my mind, I grouped them together, right? I feel like this style of game was originally fostered by Terraforming Mars.

The first time that I saw a game that felt like it was driven by all of these different unique cards and at the same time had three different tracks and just the inner weaving of how you needed to play things to bring that game to a conclusion. It felt like Terraforming Mars and then Wingspan, that game just ends in five rounds.

I feel like they're birds of a feather and Ark Nova is the next extension of that idea that took those same principles and then added an additional layer of complexity on top of it. In this case, it was the idea of that you're building out your map and that there was a space management component to it. Right. And all these games are highly variable.

I think at least for me, Ark Nova might be the most mentally taxing because of the action sequencing you have to do with your cards constantly sliding to the right as you take actions. Right. But the designer, I think, does a great job of keeping all of your decisions very short term. So even though it's highly mentally taxing, my wife who always says games shouldn't be like work still loves to play it. My wife says the same thing. So then how important is that action efficiency?

You mentioned that the cards are sliding to the right. How important do you think it is to wait until an action's at a stronger level before utilizing it? Well, everyone's going to have the same number of actions in a game, plus or minus one, depending on who ends it. Right. So to me, it's extremely important to get maximum value out of every card. That's why I always try to flip or upgrade one as soon as possible. Okay. That's interesting. How about you, Dave?

When did it make a specific action? Well, that action mechanism, to me, that's the backbone of the game. That's what drives how you're going to manage your turns. But just that idea of managing that puzzle and then action efficiency, of course. If you only need to build one animal and you don't have to wait for your animals to get all the way up to five or something like that, it's nice when you can do that and let your other ones improve.

And that's the power of those Xs and how those Xs are so important so you can get your association card up to three or four and then throw in an X or two and use it at power five. So managing that is what makes for some great plays and makes for some changes in tempo. I think Paul already said the game's about tempo in a lot of ways and managing your actions is what really helps that along. Right.

But it's not the most important thing because, at least for me, contesting the best cards that are on the display or being the first to claim a conservation or get that partnership that everybody wants can be more important, especially in the early game. Or take that university that they want. Damn you, Todd! Yeah, if you have animals that require science to put into play, then universities are going to be what you want to get right away. You mentioned getting that conservation project.

What are your thoughts about when to go for it? How long do you wait before deciding that you've got to pull the trigger and get it now before someone jumps in ahead of you? Well let me go first here because I think Paul has a lot more experience with the game so I'm going to say something and he'll either affirm me or shoot me down or get to one of my favorite parts of the podcast is when Paul says I disagree.

But my thinking on this is I start every game looking for which one of those starting conservation projects can I hit for the lowest amount, you know, two birds or two reptiles or whatever it is that I can get right away so I can immediately get some conservation points, which gets me up into the rewards for conservation points, gets me to pull one of those tiles off the track early and also pulls one of the cubes off my board, which is going to give me an

income when we're doing our coffee breaks. So when I start the game, that's usually one of the first things I'm trying to do is which one of those can I hit early before anybody else? Interesting, okay. Yeah, I mostly agree. The first bonus tokens at five conservation points I think, which is not easy to get to early unless you have like a release project where you release an animal to the wilds.

My goal is also to get an early conservation project and that's because I want to flip a card as soon as possible to just make that action that I do for the rest of the game better. And I think getting a second association worker is hugely important.

Like if you think of all the other, this isn't a worker placement game, but if you think of all the worker placement games, getting more workers in the beginning is paramount and I think it's true in Ark Nova that you really want a second worker because if you've played a few times and you know, the first couple of breaks, sometimes your association climbs up to strength four or five and you're like, I don't have a worker. What am I going to do with it? Yeah. Right.

So you're looking forward to flipping a card soon. I'm a bit torn about which way we go with this because there's the, what's your favorite card to flip first, but you're going to have four opportunities to flip cards through the course of the game. So I think perhaps a more interesting question is what's your least favorite card to flip? Well, you're going to have up to four opportunities. You don't have to take them all. You don't have to. You don't always get them all.

And because it's a race, sometimes you don't get all four. That's right. Yeah. The last time we played, I was grinding my teeth because I really wanted to flip a fourth, but I didn't want to take the time to do it. Exactly. But if you had to pick one as your least favorite card, which one would it be? Well, some cards are better early and some cards are better late. So if you look at animals, there's almost no reason to flip animals early because you can't build two. You can't.

It's weird to say build animals. Every time I play this game, I say build animals or whatever. Build your animals, enslave them. I don't know. What are we doing? Play animals. Yeah. Right. You can't play. I mean, it doesn't let you play more than two animals, which the first one lets you play two animals. So. Exactly. You can't take advantage of that.

Whereas cards early, which if we're going to get to what's my favorite one to flip first, I'll start with that cards by far because that's, you know, like in, we talked about an almond ray where cards are going to be so important. The more you can see early, the more you can plan with what you're doing. That's a great point. For me, my least favorite and something that I almost never flip unless I have a really good reason to is sponsors.

If you want to get up into six sponsors, six or seven value sponsors, sure. But early in the game, I'm probably not fishing for those. So I would agree with that, except the last game that we played sponsors was one of the cards that I had drafted. And so I had gone ahead and flipped it. And one of the things that it had on the upgraded version was if you got money with this action, you get five more. And early it was like fantastic. Right. But late I was not getting the value out of it.

And I was like grinding my teeth that I had chosen to flip sponsors over something like association. I kept looking at it going, Oh, I wish I had it or even cards because my reputation was pegged and I couldn't advance to the next level because I hadn't flipped my cards yet. So I think you're right. To be clear on the game we just played, we were using the Marine world's expansion or whatever it's called. And we were playing with the Marine's world's expansion.

You were talking about drafting your action cards that specific to that expansion. That's true. Thanks for clarifying on that one. So I was eager to use the extra abilities. Absolutely. It gives you incentive to flip that early. Yeah. As far as the cards I like or don't like to flip, it really depends on the map, but generally I try to forego upgrading my build action and my animals action. I am the opposite of Dave, I guess. I like to upgrade sponsors first. Interesting. For two reasons.

One, I like that it gives me double money. And two, the ability to play more than one sponsor. So in two sponsors actions, I can get 10 bucks and play two sponsors if it's been upgraded. Right. Whereas if it wasn't upgraded, it would just have to use both of those actions and play two sponsors and I wouldn't get any money.

I think the biggest reason I like it is because there's so many times where I'm looking at another action at any strength, but especially at high strength and I'm telling myself, oh, I don't have the money to build. Oh, I don't have the worker to do an association. Oh, I don't have the money to play animals. So it's either cards or sponsors. And I think those are the two actions I probably take the most in the game. Interesting.

I'm surprised that you don't like build as much because if you're going for a small animal strategy, being able to build two buildings on one turn is really nice to get a lot of pens out there for you. Yeah, that changes everything. If I have a card or in-game bonus for small animals, then build will be a priority. I agree. And I also, when we played last, I had the map that it was a high income map and I don't know what number it was or what it's called, but I had to unlock.

Oh, Silver Lake, right? That sounds right. Because it had high income around the lake. So I had to unlock my build early because a lot of those required a level two build in order to do that. So the game was telling me to up, just like the game was telling Todd to upgrade his. It's not income. It gives you free buildings basically, right? Because you get kickbacks for building next to the lake. You have to have the money to start with, I think.

Right. Although I didn't clarify that when we played, but yeah, you pay four bucks for a two size building and you get four bucks back. Exactly. Interesting. I think the correct answer is which one to flip first is it depends. And that's what I think is so good about the game. There is no sure answer. That's why I was trying to say least favorite. Yeah. I was trying to say least favorite. There's no clear answer. Okay. Is there a must slip at some point?

Like I feel that's association because when you flip association, you're getting the opportunity to make donations when you claim a conservation project. And I almost feel like that's a must have. You got to be in the running for those additional conservation points. Agree or disagree? I've played a lot of games where I never flipped association. That might depend on player count a little bit. Now we just played a four player game and it did come into play.

And in a four player game, you're probably going to get fewer donations. Yeah. So in the game we just played, I flipped association early and I got the first three cheap donations. But after that, I couldn't afford them anymore. So I never took another one. And that turned out to be the difference in the game. So in a way, it's true. You can point to any three conservation points. I could choose those.

You could also choose the fact that you did really well with your personal end game scoring bonus card. Right. So how far ahead can you plan in this game? You discard down to three each coffee break or five with the university. And then I actually had gotten up to six because I had taken the conservation track bonus at like the 10 point level that allowed me to add an extra card to my hand size. But normally you're just discarding down to three.

I feel like the game is telling you don't plan too far ahead. It's trying to keep it tactical. It's trying to keep you from building some sort of full game-arcing strategy. That's making you bob and weave as you go because three cards is not very much. That's not that far ahead planning, especially when you want to between every coffee break, you want to use your cards action at least once. And so you're going to get over three cards until you start building.

And it's just I hate discarding cards. I feel like I was inefficient with my actions, but it's the game telling me to like, you can only look so far ahead. So what do you mean by being inefficient with your actions?

Well, if I ended up with five cards in my hand, I feel like I'm wasting, you know, using my card draw that if I could have got those cards up and then built or use those cards, played the sponsors down or something like that, it tells me that I held on to the wrong cards because when we get to coffee break and I have to get rid of two of them, well, that last cards action I took where I got to keep two cards, it kind of helped me cycle

my hand a little bit, but it's not I'm not growing anything out of it. Right. I don't know, Dave. But mostly if you've upgraded your cards card, you're going to be able to draw more cards than you can play. And I think that's fine because you're basically sifting through the trash to find the treasures. Yeah. We talked about action efficiency before taking actions at full strength versus the minimum required. Does that factor into your efficiency?

Like if you get to needing to play animals and it's at strength five, so on the base card you can play two of animals, but you are only looking to place one. Is that being inefficient or do you chalk that up to the actions you took before and animals wound up there? I think it's completely situational dependent. I mean, I got wrecked in our last game. At one point I had two constriction tokens and two venom tokens.

And you know, when that happens, all your plans go out the window and you're just trying to survive. So I was taking low value actions because I had to. It changed all my plans, like I said. And you know, the coffee break tends to change my plans too. Sometimes I feel like the game is just a series of micro games strung together. Like the coffee break ends the first game and then you start a second and then the next coffee break ends that game and then you start a third.

And each one you have your own puzzle to solve. Okay. So it's like a Kenesia game where we're going through eras. Yeah. Or a legacy game where you're modifying everything and then you start fresh. One night legacy. Geez. Wow. Go ahead and copyright that now because someone's going to come up with it. Right.

Well, back to your question though, Todd, I think, I mean, if you have an animal to place and you're going to get it out before the coffee break, it doesn't matter that your animals is on five and you can't use it for its maximum efficiency. It's still great for you to place that animal. And also what it's doing is when you play that animals card action card from five, what you've also done is boosted every other one of your action cards one.

And so that's part of the value of playing the card is everything behind it gets moved up. Yep. That's fair. That's a big reason to use the cards at five is to move up all the others. I agree. And it's an interesting discussion we had earlier because remember we saw on the mechanics list on a board game geek that it says, but it's what's it called? Card sweeteners or that's not what it's called. Increased value of unchosen resources. Right.

Which we normally think of, you know, you sweeten the card on. Yeah. You add money to it or small world. Yes. You didn't take, you have to put a coin on each race. You didn't choose. Exactly. And this is a different way of doing that exact same thing. Every action you don't choose gets a little bit better until you choose it. Yeah. Assuming that you selected stuff above it. Right. If it's sitting at four and I chose power level three, then my four didn't get any sweeter. It's still waiting.

Right. It's almost as sweet as it gets. Like Dave said, I think that's the defining aspect of Ark Nova is this action card advancement that you have to solve. And we've seen other games like that where you have say five actions, but you have to use each one before you can turn them back over. You know, sure.

And it's a different way, but like Niagara has that Piranha Pedro has something like that where you've got a hand of cards and you can only use each card once before you can get them all back and start over again. But this one says you can still use your cards when it's at its lowest value. It's still there for you. It's just not as awesome as it will be three turns from now, five or four turns from now.

So there's another game that's out there and I don't want to step on one of your full speed ahead. Just do it. Like if you think about soaking the Mayan calendar, you place your worker on the gears, right? And the longer you leave it on the gears, the more powerful it gets until you finally take it off and use it for whatever level it's reached. Yeah, 100%. That was another game that in my mind had that idea of the longer you waited, the more powerful the power got. I totally agree.

Yeah. So good. I didn't steal that from either of you for your comparisons later. Good to know. I might still use it as my comparison. Don't worry about it. Paul, you mentioned each round in between coffee races, like you have your own private puzzle to solve. So is this just a bunch of multiplayer solitaire? One of the things I would say about this is that this is a really heads down game. Yeah. And going back to our original topic, I think that adds to its popularity.

Yeah. But there is, I mean, it is a race. So even though it's heads up, you're trying to get ahead of your opponents. And you also have to compete for the best cards in the display. You have to compete for the best spots on the conservation projects. You have to compete for partnerships early. I think there's a big contest for that association board in the first two coffee breaks. Okay. All right. I can see that.

So there's a couple of maps that have placement bonuses of a partnership or university. And if you decide to play with one of those, you should beeline to those placement bonuses, get them as soon as possible. Interesting. Okay. Right. Yeah. I agree though, overall, the experience is very heads down, very lean back. I am in my head doing my own thing. I'm referencing up and like, all right, is anybody else going for birds? Do I need to worry about anything?

Okay. If I do, I'll keep an eye on you. Otherwise I'm fine. That interaction is very minimal, except for when it isn't, you know, then there's a time when you know, you see Venom card. When Todd plays at Black Mamba or whatever, it gives us all two Venom tokens. That was the most... David just hit us with Venom the coffee break before. It was a constriction, I think. Constriction. That was the most aggressive interaction I'd ever seen in an Ark Nova game.

Because we were in an early game too, where it just put a speed bump on everybody. I know. You know, Todd tore ahead and then he sandbagged himself because he drew that card so he could play it on all of us. Yeah, I totally did. There was like one coffee break where I was just planning it to be able to play two animals. That was the first one. And all of you guys were ahead of me. But by the end of playing the second animal, I was in the front.

But in between, you all got to take two Venom tokens because you had more appeal in your zoos than I had. Right. Fortunately, our sponsors were, I think, all of us on the higher end. So we were able to sponsor, sponsor, sponsor and hit that next coffee break pretty quickly. But it really changed my plans for sure.

Yeah. And if anybody listening doesn't know, the game comes with a peaceful variant where you can decide upfront, you don't want to play with any of those attacks and you just do this alternate ability at the very bottom of the card. Yeah, but this was us. Exactly. I mean, if the game didn't have the option to be so nice, would it have had 5000 plays in November of 2023? Would it be as played if these things come out all the time? The appeal would be smaller. Yeah. Yeah, I think so.

By the way, I think the appeal would be smaller either way. The fact that some people can choose to play aggressively and some people can choose to play more pacifists is why it has more universal appeal because you can choose the experience you want. Yeah. Also, I think the theme is important. It's a contemporary theme, which is far more popular than the sci-fi theme. Yeah, I would agree with that. And the art is fantastic, right?

I don't know if you guys had this, but like growing up, I had this collection of cards that was from like, I don't know, National Geographic or whatever. And every month I'd get a stack of cards of all these different animals. And I would sit there and sort them and put them into the holder based on the fact that these were reptiles or birds or mammals or region of the world and stuff like that. And Ark Nova captures that wonderfully. That's awesome. I think I had the same thing.

Yeah. That's a great point. I even playing Ark Nova a bunch of times, I hadn't thought about that until you mentioned it as I definitely had that too. I used to get World Magazine when I was a kid and that was like a junior National Geographic kind of thing. And I think it would come with some cards sometime. But yeah, you would have these encyclopedia entries on various animals from all over the world. We didn't have the internet back then.

So you have a great question in our prep document here on how to evaluate cost versus reward, money versus conservation, reputation, appeal. Yeah. I thought that was a very interesting point because I hadn't really given this the, looked at it from crunching the exchange numbers as much before. Especially after our Runes of Arnak episode, right? Yeah. Right.

And for this game, it's hard to evaluate because the cards, it's not just you're going to get like in Lost Ruin, you get a compass and a gold and that's what this card does. That's very calculable. In this game, it's like you get this thing, you get that thing, you also get to look at two cards and keep one. There's so many different text options on these cards. It's hard to evaluate those.

But in general, what I went through the card manifest and I looked for the cards that don't have any text where you're just paying money and you're getting appeal or conservation points or even reputation. And very, very loosely, it looks like you get about three, you pay about $3 per appeal. I found it was different. I found it was about two if you're counting the animals with no text. If you get, yeah, so there are a lot of reptiles that are going to give you $2 per appeal.

So that's going to be like $4 get you two appeal or something like that. But I was looking at some of the bigger ones too, like the tigers and the panda and things like that where it's going to give you, but this one's also giving you other things. So I guess we could put that in the exchange. My rule of thumb, I think, was if money is one, appeal is two, reputation is three and conservation is four. And then it looked like snapping is the most expensive ability. Hmm, that was around five.

Wow. Okay. Yeah. Well, and that actually brings us to another point on we talked about the value, you know, kind of the hierArkhy of flipping cards. What about the hierArkhy of pulling your cube off the board when you go to a conservation product and creating that income? Again, the correct answer is it depends. Right. When you don't know what's coming and you just have to make a decision based on I don't know what cards I'm going to have next or where my game's going, it's early on.

Where do you like to start? Like I said, the second worker, I think is the most important thing. And then for me, if I'm pursuing small animals, I'll take the free building. Yeah. Every coffee break. The free two space enclosure. Yeah. Otherwise, I really like the free snap. Interesting. Dave, did you want to talk about what you like to unlock first? I think in general, they're printed on the board from top to bottom as far as what's a little bit stronger.

And again, like I said in the beginning, the correct answer is it depends because who knows what direction your game is going to go in. But that first spot is snap. And that's probably the best one when you don't know what's coming around the corner, because being able to control your hand is everything. Yeah. And drawing cards is actually not easy in this game. It's not easy to see a lot of cards. Right. And you got to go with the game.

You got to do I forget what other game we talked about that where if you try to swim against the current, you're going to have a miserable time. But in this one also, you got to want to do listen to what the game is trying to tell you. That was in brass. We talked about that. But in this one, listen to what the game is trying to tell you to do. 100%. And in that case, too, getting a lot of two size building enclosures.

So that reward there, if you take that, that's nice, too, because it's always nice to have a two enclosure in your back pocket. If you just need to take a quick pivot, pick up a small animal and put it in your zoo, it can really bail you out. Yeah, I agree. And it helps fill up spaces.

So sometimes even if you're not planning on dropping an animal in there, if you're using it to cover up an area of your board that you had been neglecting or had a bonus that you want to take advantage of, it's a great way to get that without having to sacrifice one of your action tempos. Yeah. And honestly, I'm thinking back, I think I foolishly played the board that I had last time we played that had the money around the lake.

I think a reward like that, being able to place that to enclosure every coffee break really is giving me four bucks every coffee break for the next three, four coffee breaks as I surround the lake. Oh, you'll have to play that one again. I need redemption on it. That's for sure. Just don't get bit of next time. I promise nothing. So let's move on to the prompts. Weight and complexity on BGG scale of one to five. How would you rank the weight of Ark Nova? What do you have, Dave?

I know there's heavier games out there, but there is a mental tax on this game. And I don't know if it's just me, obviously with how many people are playing it, maybe it is just me. But to me, this is a five. It's super fiddly until you get 10 plays under your belt. Even when we played last time, we came up with the rules question that we had no idea what to do when you upgrade a card in between a 2X action.

We had to kind of just use our gaming wits to get us through until we could go look it up and find an errata somewhere else. And there are so many little things like that going on. It's definitely not for the uninitiated. So I'm going to give it a five. I've been kind of stingy with the fives, but this is on the heavier end, I think, just because of that rules overhead. I mean, what the rule books 30, 35 pages. I forget, but it's a big rule book. I've read novellas smaller than that.

Right. Okay, Paul, what you have? You know, I considered giving it a five, but I think the designer successfully limits the amount of thinking you have to do with things like the coffee break, the limited hand size, the player setup. And so I'm giving it a four. Okay, that is true. The designers do kind of keep some information from you so you can kind of ease your toes in.

But I've definitely drawn cards where I'm like, look, I got a lot going on at the moment and I don't have the bandwidth to even try to figure out what this card is telling me to do. Like I get a penguin enclosure or something. And then it's like, I'm going to get extra points at the end. Maybe if I get seven of this one, like it's just every card I draw, I'm like, now what? When I'm first learning the game, I'm starting to get my sea legs, you know, quite a bit more than when I first started.

But I mean, took quite a few games. Right. That's fair. I'm going to say that it's easily a four and that's just because the 18 17 rule, right? There's a game out there that stands alone at rank five for me. So this one's a four. But how about strategy? So we talked about, can you plan ahead? You discard down to three. So how much opportunity is there for strategy in this game on the same scale? One to five. Paul, I give it a three for the reasons we talked about. Okay. How about you, Dave?

What'd you put for strategy? I give it a four. I think you not only have to know how to navigate the game, but experience is going to win. I think there's no beginner's luck in this game. And I think understanding what you can do with the cards that you're shown, understanding what's available for you. It's not a long-term strategy like we talked about because it's only doling out a few cards at a time.

So you don't know where you're going to be four turns from now, but you got to be able to decipher what you're seeing and if you can turn that into something. So you got to know the deck or at least a very good idea of what's in the deck. And that's some pretty big overhead. I don't know if you do, but the long-term decisions are definitely what to upgrade and how to score your conservation points like we talked about. So I think what you're saying is fair.

Yeah. And what I was thinking when I was thinking through this earlier today is that even though the cards are unique and I don't know what the card count is on here, but it's definitely one of the taller draw piles we have. 255. 255. So I'm not going to learn all the cards, but what does work well is the combos aren't necessarily that this specific card works well with this specific card. It's more like this tag works well with that tag or those tags or something like that.

So that way groups of cards work well with groups of cards. So once you kind of understand what's possible on the cards, I guess you don't need to know the individual cards like you would in Twilight Struggle or something like that. Yeah. I mean, understanding that is really next level. Like there's people who are like, oh, I've counted all the cards and the least number of icons in the deck is Australia. So that's the hardest conservation project to get a five on.

Yeah. I don't know if you need to know that, but it'll certainly help if you're playing with other long toothed veterans. I had strategy down as a four because I think it does reward focusing on a goal. And Dave, when you talk about the tags working together, that depends on the conservation projects, right? Or either that or my private goals, which you don't know. It doesn't feel like the same interrelation that there is in a terraforming Mars, right?

Where I need to know that if I'm going to pursue a plant strategy, I need to focus on getting cards that are going to help me increase my numbers of plants. But if I am looking at number of diverse locations from which my animals come, then I might be looking at a spread of tags, but maybe I personally am holding one that says, oh no, you're more interested in small animals. And so now I'm going to be looking at size of animals and I don't care about the tags.

Like I think one of the unique things about Ark Nova is the way these cards blend together is going to be very personal to my understanding of the game and the goals that I set, but I need to commit to those goals through the course of the game. And so for me, that's a four. Yeah. You know, I remember a game I recently played with my wife where she just surprised me because she was collecting Africa tags. And I was like, why is she doing that? It's not one of the base conservation projects.

I did not realize she was holding a rhinoceros in her hand. And what all the rhinoceros I do is when you play them, they'd allow you to take a base conservation project that's not in play and then put it in your hand. So she's like, okay, I'll take the Africa one. Boom. I just got five conservation points. We won the game. Wow. Wow. Well done. That's stealth. That is stealth. So then along those lines, she got you by surprise. How much you think luck plays a factor on the same scale one to five?

I rated a two because early synergies and windfalls can snowball into a victory. If you can like miraculously fill a petting zoo before the second break, I mean, you're just going to be dominating in money. Things like that can happen because of the randomness of the cards. Right. And I think poorly, I want to say it's a five. I just drew bad cards. I think the truth is experience mitigates that and knowing what to do with those cards that I would agree with Paul.

I think that's it's closer to a two. Yeah. I also doubt it as a two. And one of the reasons is because you can snap, right? If you're planning to snap, you're letting your cards, your base cards action get to five when you can snap. Card synergy can still be a thing, but there definitely seems to be ways to mitigate that luck. You can run into top decking and getting lucky draws. So it's definitely not a one, but for me, I agree it's a two.

Well, Paul, when you say it's a two, you're saying that the deck could make you, but do you think the deck can break you? Not really. I think because it's a shared deck, it would be the other players that are breaking you. Yeah. Because it's a race and even with the good cards, it's a race to be the first to grab them. Yeah. So then theme, how much do we think the theme has been integrated? Same scale one to five. I give it a five. It's the best zoo game by far.

And then Zoo Loretto, I don't like at all. And so I finally have a good zoo game. I think it's excellent. I also rated a five. Ark Nova is definitely in the top 20% of all board games when it comes to theme. I agree. I also had it down as a five. And I think the theme even provides a great reason for the map building and hex covering process. I think it is the best implementation of that concept, even more so than Feast for Odin.

I realize that's just squares, not hexes, but that one felt more like an afterthought. This makes sense, right? I'm building out these enclosures for my animals and I think that is just a wonderful pairing. So I agree. Hexagons are the bestagons. They are. Yeah, I definitely, I think it creates, like you feel like you're building something. Like I've got this place now with my monkeys over here and my tigers over there or whatever I come up with.

And when the theme is informing the mechanisms in the game, that's when I know you've got a well meshed integrated theme game. When you've got to put these animals need to be near water and these animals need to be near rocks. And doing the work that any zoo would be doing is we're doing conservation projects. And all of that theme is really what drives how the game runs and it works so well while staying within that theme. There's no weird things on like, and then we got some victory points.

It's like appeal points, conservation points, reputation. Those actually make sense rather than abstract victory points. Right. I agree. So what's your favorite player count? And I'll jump first. I'll say it's three and that's just for generic zero sum avoidance reasons. Not that it doesn't shine at two players. I like the idea of three player games and being caught out of left field by someone I may not have been paying attention to. David, you have.

Well, my favorite player count, I think is probably two because I think the game works well maybe even works a little better at three and four because of the competition for the conservation projects, but it's too long. It's just too long at four players. And so, and even at three players, it can well, no, three players. I have a few that have come in when we're going to get to player count pretty soon, but I have a few that have come in at a very reasonable time.

But for some reason, four players just off the charts. So, but I'm still going to say two player because it's pretty burdensome game as it is two player kind of keeps it nice and simple. Great. And Paul? I almost always played it too and I love it. All right. So what's your least favorite player count? Well, like Dave said, four just has too much downtime. Although four is really fun on board game arena. Yeah. Because you can play asynchronously. Yeah, I agree. What about solo?

Where, where do you rank that? Oh, I forgot it played solo. Okay. My least favorite player count is one. I think it's a decent solo game, especially when you're learning the game. I think it solos very well because then you start to really feel the mechanics. I've soloed a couple of times and I do enjoy it. Yeah. I'm going to answer exactly what Paul's saying. Like the least favorite is four, but if we're counting solo, I guess it's, that's my least favorite. I got my dance card for solos full.

I don't need this. Right. I'm going to stick to four. It takes way too long at four. And the one drawback to playing online, and I agree, like online is a fantastic way to do it. You definitely have the fastest set up and tear down possible, which is great. But for me, it's just maintaining the context. And it doesn't matter how detailed of notes that I write to myself. You know, I still have that time to get readjusted to the game, reactivated to it and understand where I was to move forward.

And I just, I don't like that about asynchronous games. I get it. But hey, that could just be my brain. So what about the actual playing time? So boxes can lie. I think the playing time on this one is written down as 90 to 150 minutes. So an hour and a half to two and a half hours. What are your thoughts? I have played the game in 90 minutes with my wife, but after a lot of plays, we're down to about a hundred minutes on average. I think that's the two player. That sounds fantastic.

I think it comes in at about 45 minutes per player, though with two of my kids, we've played three player in about 90 minutes before. Wow. Yeah. Okay. But for some reason, when we played four player the other night, that was over three hours. Right. I have another three hour logged game of four players, but we took a break for lunch. So that one doesn't really count. I can't believe it took us three hours to play the other night. I don't know what, I don't know what our problem was.

We're just slow. I mean, we just are. We can be, we can be. And we, we asked a lot of questions. I think there's a 20 minute pause for that rules question. And it had been a little while since some of us had played. So that was a little slower. That's right. But with all that said, I think your 45 minutes of players sounds right for us. And that would also lend to my four players would be my least favorite version. That's just too long for what it is. Yeah. All right. Which edition is the best?

There's a board game arena implementation. So that's almost like a different edition. I love to play in person, but I really enjoy the board game arena implementation. And it has a couple new cards. Basically every year they've been making a new card and putting the tournament winner's face on that card. So that's kind of nice that you could draw a card with your face on it later. Oh, are they a little sponsor or an animal? They are sponsors. They're not making them a baboon or anything.

No, no, they create a new sponsor for the tournament winner. And then the thing I still haven't gotten used to though, is that the board game arena implementation uses the designer's new scoring method. And the game is printed to calculate your score. You subtract the lowest number next to your conservation marker. In the BGA version, the conservation steps just have numbers printed on them and you add that number to your appeal number to get your final score.

So instead of subtracting, for example, 62, you're adding 38. The scores are the same plus 100. Interesting. Okay. I don't know. Look, I am actually the kind of person who likes participation trophies. I mean, you showed up. It's hard work to be consistent. I like that kids get participation trophies. But this adding 100 points because you don't want a negative score, I'm not on board with this. It's a coddling I can't get behind.

Like, look, you sit there and you take your negative points just like you earn. And if you want a positive score, you come back tomorrow and you get better. I don't like it at all. That's awesome. I have to say that I prefer the original scoring as well, but I can understand that it's easier to add two numbers. So whichever moving on from additions, let's talk about expansion. So there are two expansions that have been published.

One of them I wasn't even aware of until Paul brought it to game night. So that would be the map expansion pack one. And then of course, there's the larger expansion that was released last year. And that's Marine Worlds. What are your thoughts about these? Well, I'll go first on this because I think Paul might have some more input than I do. Sometimes more is just more. And in this case, I didn't really feel the Marine expansion that much. I built an aquarium, I added some fish.

It didn't feel any different than building an aviary and adding some birds. I didn't really feel that we were getting anything more than just more cards, more of the same. But I will say I really did like that wave icon, that if you turn over a wave icon, it cycles the deck more. And I think that's really helpful when you're splashing new cards into a big deck because you're diluting the deck.

And we talked about this in Wingspan 2 is that, well, what about the potential combos that used to be there when you throw in the Asia expansion or whatever? Well now you've just got wildly chaotic at this point. And in this case, like the Moonstaff and Lost Ruins of Arnak, they've added some cards. So they've added some cards. So now let's cycle the card row a little bit more. So I really like that part of it.

But I'd like to hear what Paul has to say because I just played it the one time and I didn't really feel that there was a lot more into the game, just cards I hadn't seen before. Right. And I think Marine Worlds does a great job of making it seem like it was always there. It's not a necessary expansion per se, but it doesn't detract from the game at all, which is usually our complaint about expansions. So silver trophy for that for sure.

I think Marine Worlds is great in that it erratas or updates many of the cards from the base game, especially the end of game bonus cards and a few of the base conservation projects. It either makes them more difficult or in most cases easier to achieve to balance them with the rest of the cards that came with the base set. Okay. That's I praise from our group. When we say an expansion doesn't make the game worse, that means it's awesome. That's right.

Well, I'll flat out say I really liked the initial card draft we had so that we could each have our own enhanced versions of the action cards. Oh yeah, that's my wife's favorite part actually. So for me, that would be a must include. It's even more variability. So yeah, that's true. I think a lot of people are going to love that. All right. Most recognizable comparison. What's the highest ranking game that reminds you the most of Ark Nova? Well, can I take the low hanging fruit here?

Because it's about all I've got. I'm going to say Terraforming Mars. To me, this took a lot of what was going on in Terraforming Mars. And ironically, by taking out the common player board, I liked it more, which no other game would I say that about because I like, I prefer the common player area where we're going to get in each other's way. Technically, it has two boards that are common. Yeah. The display of cards and the association. That's true.

Yeah. But there was something about the Terraforming Mars, the actual planet itself that I felt disconnected from what I'm doing in my tableau. And that's probably just my shortcomings in Terraforming Mars. But at this game, I liked Terraforming Mars a little bit, but this game I like quite a bit more. And there are a lot of similarities, but look, Terraforming Mars walked so this game could skip. I didn't want to say one. I just do cliche.

You know, I had down Rajas of the Ganges because that was the first game I played that I recall that had the idea of two tracks going around the board and you were advancing one clockwise, the other one counterclockwise. And when those two tracks finally intersect, triggered the end of the game. So that made me, you know, I played Ark Nova the first time I was immediately recalling Rajas of the Ganges for that reason.

My pick is Zolkein. Like I said, I think that the action improvements and timing of when to take them is the key aspect of this game. And Zolkein is the only other game I can think of, at least popular game, right? Where it has the same thing where a lot of your decision making is about waiting for the right timing. So now I feel bad about bringing it up earlier. Did you have that picked from before? I wrote down two.

I wrote about Terraforming Mars and Zolkein hoping that one of you wouldn't pick one of them. No, don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Keep it in. And a game that almost comes to mind, you'd mentioned it earlier, is Wingspan. To me, Wingspan is a very different feel. It's not as taxing. You still have that big deck of unique cards that you're going through, but it's a little more of a walk in the park. And I mean that in a very good way. It's more like Terraforming Mars.

Yeah. But they're not as similar as it seems like they should be on paper. Right. I agree with that. All right, Paul. So I'll give you first crack at less recognizable comparison. OK. Well, I don't think this game is going to be less recognizable for long. This is a brand new game called Forest Shuffle. You took my answer. What? I don't have a backup. I didn't think there was any way. Go ahead. Just say what you're going to say and I'll say ditto.

To me, Forest Shuffle is like a distillation of Ark Nova to just the cards. And some of the cards are trees and the other cards are the animals that live in trees. And so you're taking these cards from a card row pretty similar to Ark Nova. And when you play a tree, it counts as a building. And when you play an animal, it lives in the tree. And instead of money, you're just discarding the cards you don't want back into the display for other people to pick up.

The first time I played Forest Shuffle, I was like, wow, I think the designer really loved Ark Nova. That was my thought. Yeah. Like I said, that's my answer. And it's the interaction of the tags or the different types of cards. I've got this card that it's going to do well if I've got bats and these bats are going to do well if there's squirrels nearby or whatever it is.

That that's sort of building a tableau based on how these tags interact with each other, not necessarily the individual cards themselves. It really had a similar feel. Hey, look at that tag team, Dave. Yeah, right. Nice. The good news is I had something different picked. I went with Belfort. Wow. And here's why. In that game, it's easy to get preoccupied with managing your resources and dwarves and gnomes and you forget that it's an area control game.

The area control portion of that game is one level of complexity beyond what most other games offer. And that's the same feeling I get from Ark Nova. It's easy for me to get preoccupied building out my zoo and increasing its appeal with all the amazing animals. And then I lose sight of the fact that, oh yeah, I'm also supposed to be setting up for conservation projects and I'm also supposed to be doing these other things.

So I get the same, it's almost a bridge too far kind of complexity feeling out of Belfort that I do out of Ark Nova. Interesting. So house rules, how would you improve this game? Any thoughts? So board game arena has a variant which is extremely difficult to play with in real life. And that is it allows every player to use the exact same zoo map. And I really like that, that everybody's kind of starting on the same foot. It has its positives and negatives, but I think it's a really nice variant.

Well, you can only do that live in person if you use the map zero or map A, right? Are those different? There's four zeros and four A's or if both players have their own copy of Ark Nova, they can do it. Ark Nova Overlord Edition and put all the cards together in a two foot tall Belfort. We're all playing ice cream parlor. Let's go. Since I don't have a house rule, I've been taking this category to kind of daydream about possible expansions or changes to it.

And in a game like this, I would really like to see multi-use cards. Sometimes if I just draw this wildly unusable card, I wish I could get some other value out of it. I mean, obviously on my next draw action, I can just draw my new cards and that becomes my discard that I get rid of these ones that I didn't like. I would like to see some multi-use cards when you have this sort of game where you're getting who knows what you're going to get with this large deck of unique cards.

But that was just a side note. But really, does this game need like Terraforming Mars' Prelude expansion, something to kind of get you kickstarted in the beginning? That's a good idea. Because that Prelude expansion is amazing. It has map A. I like that. Everybody can play map A. Right. Everybody can start with a size three enclosure in a kiosk. I guess so. That would be the closest there is to like a Prelude expansion. You kind of hit the ground running. Right.

I'm waiting for the dinosaur version. Well, we know. So that's probably after Marine Worlds, we're going to get Dino Worlds, right? After, or no, after Wormspan, we'll get Jurassic Nova. You can go anywhere with this. I'm surprised they did Marine Worlds as an expansion that it could have been Sea World, a water park. Right. That's probably copyrighted. Right. But yeah. A dinosaur would be easy to do, obviously. But yeah, it's there just waiting. That'd be easy money. That'd be awesome.

Yeah. All right. So if this game's being played at game night, what do you want to play afterwards? What's the best double feature game that goes along with it? I got Zoo Vodis. Let's keep in the zoo theme. But now instead of heads down, let's lean in and go heads up, have a very high interactive game. Let's anthropomorphize these animals and have them start creating councils and republics and throwing their influence around. And run for the Roman Senate. Yeah, let's do it.

Zoo Vodis is a short game with a lot of interaction where I think works perfectly. Okay. So the other night after our marathon, Ark Nova, we played Sea Salt and Paper and I really enjoyed that. Alternatively, I've really been enjoying Village Green, but a short card game like that really appeals to me after Ark Nova. Okay. So I agree with something short and just for grins, I will riff off of the game that Dave hates that being Zooloretto, but I'll take its progenitor in Colorado. Perfect.

Which was the card game version and I think embodies the I cut you choose mechanic very well. Yeah, good pick. The problem with Zooloretto is that the smaller, cheaper version of it is way, way better. There's no reason to have Zooloretto. You mean Colorado for you is way up here and Zooloretto is way down here. Absolutely. Colorado is great. Zooloretto is just, it's a burden. I just, there's something about it that sticks in my crop that I just don't like that game. Well, okay. There it is.

Did you ever play Aquaretto or were you just done? Of course not. Yeah, I was done. Why would I? I just, I have Colorado. You've got a deck of cards. You sit down and play some Colorado. What do you need all this stuff for? All right. Fair. I usually don't like to disparage games too much. I mean, it's a fine game, right? It won the Spiel des Jars, didn't it? It did in 2007. Good, good for it. I'm happy for it. All right. What feature of the game still stands out to you?

Admittedly, this is still a current game, but what do you like the best about it? I'll hammer on it again. The action cards sliding up into more powerful slots. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I had to the action increasing mechanism. Absolutely. No debate here. So in what feature of the game disappoints? What do you like the least about it? I honestly could not think of a single thing. Yeah. Dave, anything? No, not really.

I mean, if I have to come up with something, I might say it would help to know the deck and that's just not in my ability. My skill set. That was my problem with Twilight Struggle is a great game, but I just can't memorize all those cards to know that like this card's coming in the mid war and all of that. And it's just, I'll never be good at it. But like Paul was saying, you don't have to memorize the deck.

You just get an idea of what might be out there and you just play, play with the game shows you because it meters it out slowly. So even that's not a big complaint. Yeah. You get an idea where you're like, reptiles are kind of like this. Birds are kind of like this. Big cats can big game kind of does this. You have vague understanding of the different types and what they're going to do for you. I think that's enough to get off and running.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm in a weird place with these, as we called it earlier, big deck energy games. I love the art. I just don't like having to know all those cards. Like I have a finite capacity for the number of games like this. I think of terraforming Mars. Great. I think it wingspan. Great. I think of Ark Nova. Okay. You know, just got a copy of earth and I haven't even cracked the shrink wrap on it yet. And I'm like, how many more of these big deck games do I really want to absorb?

If there's anything that is disappointing, it's not about Ark Nova, but it's this style of game. I don't know that I have a lot of capacity for too many more. You better get on board because we were talking about the stats earlier. Five of the 10 most played games last year are big, unique deck games. Maybe six. I don't know Everdell. Is that in that category? Six of the 10 most played games last year have large, unique card decks. This is the future. Yeah. Big deck energy.

BDE is the future of board gaming. I don't have to play all of them though. No, no. Let's change gears to deck build, worker placement, deck build, worker placement. There we go. But deck build, worker placement, like Dune Imperium, Lost Ruins of Arnak. Same thing. Those are the big deck games. Did this game replace a previous one? For Dave, the answer is Zoolerado. Well if I need a zoo thing, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, for me, it's Terraforming Mars.

I haven't played Terraforming Mars since I've gotten Ark Nova. And if you pull both of them out, I'm going to go with Ark Nova. Interesting. Okay. Honestly, I'm exactly the same. I did not play Terraforming Mars last year. And I think it's because of Ark Nova. Wow. Like this is one of the few times where this question comes up and I have an answer. This literally replaced Terraforming Mars, like very specifically. Yeah. Because it's in the same kind of game. Right.

Okay. I didn't have an answer for it, but when I think about it, yeah. I mean, I still play Wingspan. I haven't played Terraforming Mars in a while, so maybe it did. Has this game since been replaced? And if so, by what? Nope. I mean, probably no, but I was trying to think of games we've played in the last year that kind of fill the space in the same way as far as depth. I might say Space Station Phoenix. That to me has a similar feel as far as the mental capacity it's going to take.

I mean, they're very different games, but it's fitting that space in a strategy game that we're going to play together on our gaming night. And I think if you pulled out Ark Nova and Space Station Phoenix, I might be leaning towards SSP. Well, one of them takes half the time of the other, so I understand that. That's a big part of it. Yeah. Sure. Okay. For me, Ark Nova hasn't been replaced by anything. There are just other games that I would prefer to play.

So I don't have the same reaction data you did where it's like, oh, I know it replaced Terraforming Mars. If you were to break out Ark Nova and set it next to Dune Imperium, I'm going to pick Dune Imperium every time. Yeah. Soundtrack, what music would you want to listen to while playing this game? And I will go first because I really didn't have an answer. I can barely keep up with this game as it is. So if you're going to do anything, it can't be distracting.

So I need soothing sounds like rain or waves or something. Yeah, I agree. I would say nature sounds. If I had to pick a song, I might go At the Zoo by Simon and Garfunkel, kind of on repeat. But really, really, like, to be honest, here's what I want. I want someone to be there. I want some nature sounds going, and I want someone in the voice of David Attenborough kind of narrating our playing, you know, like seeking a foothold into some viable strategy.

Dave has wandered into the Predator's territory and just kind of narrating our play in that way as we're watching, you know, our planet or something like that. Isn't there an app that does that? It does what? Is there? That uses a large language model and a video detector of your facial expressions and kind of other things that it can recognize on your screen. And then it'll feed into David Attenborough voice synthesizer and he will narrate your life. That's amazing. I haven't heard about that.

I want it. I need to find this app. If that's a thing, I need to find it. Yes. Yeah. Somebody who's listening to this pod, post a comment and let us know where to find that. And the best part is I work alone in my office. I would definitely have that playing. It's just me by myself with that narrating, you know, as I go to the back to get an apple and come back to work. Once again, the primate procrastinates. I want that so hard. All right, Paul, did you have anything?

Well, there is a video game called Planet Zoo. So let's just listen to the soundtrack for it. Okay. I don't know it. That sounds great to me, though. That works. It's a lot of ambient instrumental stuff. Yeah. And these days, that's really what I'm looking for. It's so easy for the music to become distracting, especially when you're in a thinky game that I got things to do. I can't have too much music playing. Right. So rating on Board Game Geek's scale of one to 10, how do you rate Ark Nova?

I am currently rating it as an eight. All right. For me, it's a solid seven. No higher, no lower. Perfect seven. I'll play it on the regular. I really enjoy it. Nothing wrong with it, but it's not one of my favorite games, but it's a fantastic game. Right. I also had it at a seven. I enjoy it and I'll play it on a request, but that one bridge too far effect prevents me from rating it any higher. I'm not championing it a bit to try to get this one to the table.

I'm confident that it'll get there anyway without me being its champion. So then is it replayable? And how soon would you want to revisit this game? Well, I already spoiled this answer by saying it was my most played game last year. Right? So yes. You always have a game going, don't you? I mean, I'm sure I'm probably going to play it in a week or two with my wife. So yeah. Okay. Well, the correct answer is 2.8 times per month based on the BGG stats.

But for me, that's a little too, and I'm sure that includes the great BGA implementation that makes it very easy to get it, you know, two to three plays in a month. For me, it's definitely replayable, but it's more of a four or five times a year kind of game for me. It's not something that I feel like I need to constantly like, let's go again, let's go again, let's go again, so I can get deeper and deeper and deeper and like unpeel these layers of the onion.

I'm ready just about as much as I want to go visit the actual zoo, I think. And we live in, you know, we're spoiled of riches here. We've got the LA Zoo where they filmed the Three's Company opening, and then we can go down the road to the San Diego Zoo. So we have amazing zoos here. So probably about as much as I go to an actual zoo is how much I want to play this game. I haven't been to the zoo in like 10 years, so I'll play it more often than that. Your kids are older than mine.

So yeah, that's true. I mean, I can play this game face to face every five to six weeks. That'd be fine asynchronously online, maybe more. But again, there's that issue I have trying to recontextualize when I return to the game to take my turn. So I would need to get better at that, but it's definitely replayable and I enjoy each time that we do play it. So that our tracks have finally crossed each other, right?

For next episode, we'll be doing some family planning and looking forward to that one. Wait, what? It'll make sense, trust me. All right, guys, thanks for being available tonight. This was a fun one to record. Yeah. Have a good evening. Good night. Good night. Thank you for listening to Replayable. Support for our podcast comes from listeners like you. You can find us online at replayable.fm, on Twitter as Replayable FM, and on Instagram as Replayable FM.

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