This year’s Spiel des Jahres, the prestigious “Game of the Year” award issued by a consortium of German game publishers, manufacturers, critics, and designers, as announced early this week and the prize went to DOMINION. I reviewed DOMINION a couple of months ago and I stand by my opinion that the core, CCG-influenced deck building mechanic is brilliant despite the fact that it is really an efficiency planning game in a clever disguise. I also think that it is an oddly incomplete yet laboriously overdeveloped game lacking any sense of surprise, theme, or context. And as such, I’ve kind of given up on it despite the promise of an endless series of expansions that will likely do little to increase the level of conceptual theme. And I’m not sure that I’d want it to be any more thematic anyway- building a medieval kingdom isn’t very thrilling once you’ve done it in a hundred other games.

DOMINION might be a total failure in terms of providing gamers with anything other than a really smart non-collectible implementation of the deck building and tuning mechanic, but an out-of-nowhere upstart has emerged from the frozen, post-apocalyptic wastelands of 2097 to show this Spiel des Jarhes winner that a great theme coupled with conceptual and executive theming results in a much better and more exciting game. The game is ARCTIC SCAVENGERS, a practically D.I.Y. publication from Driftwood Games that has been largely noticed as a “DOMINION clone” but I think it would be a tragic mistake for gamers to dismiss it along those terms. Sure, the game has some similarities in design and I don’t doubt that designer Robert Gabhart took a few notes from the DOMINION playbook, but the end result is that ARCTIC SCAVENGERS turns out to be a better, much more exciting and fun to play game than its predecessor.

ARCTIC SCAVENGERS is a 3-5 player card game that positions the players as tribal heads of apocalypse survivors struggling to find tools, medicine, food, and other people in the ruins of civilization. In a neat, under-used twist in the post-apocalyptic canon, the wasteland is a frozen, icy wilderness created by massive climate change that has wiped out almost all human life on earth. The graphic design reflects the theme well, with blue, gray and white hues that provide a chilly atmosphere and an actual sense of setting- something DOMINION can’t seem to muster despite its relatively big-budget production values.

But more than the executive theme afforded by the game’s visuals and its well-drawn depictions of the thugs, brawlers, hunters, sled teams, field crews, and tribe families that populate the arctic desolation, the game actually manages to weld the deck building and card drafting mechanics to a strong sense of conceptual theme- what you actually do, the actions you perform, actually map directly to thematic actions. And for that alone, I think ARCTIC SCAVENGERS succeeds in all the places where DOMINION was at its weakest.

Gameplay is very simple, fast-paced, and immediate. Players start the game with a small assortment of cards in their decks which afford some basic actions. Each round, a player draws five cards and then gets to take actions using them. Mercenary cards, the “people” of the game, have a number of stats that enable them to perform actions. Some mercenaries have a “draw” skill that will let the player draw additional cards from their deck. Those with a “dig” number can draw that many cards from a “Junkyard” pile that may contain invaluable, action-enhancing equipment, essential medicine, or worthless junk. “Hunt” generates food, which is in turn used to hire additional face-up mercenaries into the player’s deck, and when combined with medicine cards more powerful mercenaries can be lured to the tribe. Each value can be increased by tools: pickaxes, shovels, spears, multi-tools, and so on, so the combinations are simple and straightforward. And the need to create a deck with a good balance of tools and people to use them is a key strategic element.

And then there’s the “Fight” stat that some mercenaries and tribe cards feature. Where DOMINION lacked any sense of actual competition or conflict, ARCTIC SCAVENGERS incorporates a simple bluffing and combat mechanic that introduces a lot of friction- and fun- into the mix. When a player is done performing actions, he or she announces how many cards they are keeping. Or a player can do nothing and keep all of their cards. There is a card on a top of the “Contested Resources” pile that the first player in a round gets to peek at—it may be a very powerful weapon like grenades or a large tribe family with a lot of people (the game’s measure of victory). When everyone is done with their turn, the held cards are revealed and the player who has the highest fight value among any held people cards coupled with any tools wins the contested resource. Ties are broken by who brought the most population icons to the fight. And then there are special mercenary cards players might reveal such as the Sniper or Saboteur who knock opposing mercenaries or tools, respectively, out of the fight.

The simple addition of a basic combat mechanic adds a lot to the game in both overt and subtle ways. The need to hold cards to try to get those valuable Contested Resources creates some tough decisions when choosing actions, and if the player who looked at the contested card for the round has announced that they’re holding all five cards, it may very well be something worth fighting over like a five-population tribe family. Or they may be bluffing- it could be something not quite so great, like another Sled Team. The game ends when the Contested Resource pile runs out. I’d say that represents about 30-45 minutes of game time once players have hit their stride with it.

Aside from the conflict element, the game does follow the basic DOMINION model in that players are building decks and drafting cards but I really feel that’s the extent of the similarity. Whereas DOMINION turns into a resource grind, with players combining actions for greater and greater efficiency, ARCTIC SCAVENGERS is more about, well, scavenging. DOMINION calls for players to balance earning victory point cards with functional cards, but in ARCTIC SCAVENGERS points are on any card that has people on it—which again, makes more thematic sense since the game is about increasing your band of survivors. The combinations may not be quite as complex but I think the gameplay has a lot more to offer as a whole. Anyone who played DOMINION and thought the game didn’t mean anything or that it doesn’t offer any sense of setting is going to be quite surprised by what Mr. Gabhart has done with the core concepts.

ARCTIC SCAVENGERS is very much Mr. Gabhart’s own game; there is an authorial stamp present that is missing from many games dismissed as “clones” of previous designs. Unlike a game such as GALACTIC EMPEROR, where the designer simply sought to reduce another design into a smaller footprint without much inspiration or innovation, ARCTIC SCAVENGERS is a much more positive line of succession where the designer saw a great idea and realized that what it needed was a context, a sense of marrying action to purpose, and I’d completely recommend the game over its predecessor to practically anyone.

If there’s one thing that the game needs it is definitely expansions—even more so than a professional production. It isn’t hard to play the game a couple of times and see where it could use some more material. I’d love to see some hazardous cards in the Junkyard pile- maybe a mutant polar bear or an avalanche, for example- that would make the digging action carry a risk that could be mitigated by mercenaries or tools played out of hand. And I’d like to see some negative cards in the Contested Resource pile as well so that players could bluff to greater effect, tricking other players into winning a fight for a card that spreads a disease among their people or wrecks any tools they brought to the battle. The possibilities are rich, too, for more mercenary cards and more diverse functions and special abilities. Two expansions have been announced for the game titled DECEPTION and HQ, here’s hoping that Mr. Gabhart has some more surprises up his sleeves. I’ll definitely be buying both.