The 5 Best Board Games Like Ark Nova

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The best board game like Ark Nova is Underwater Cities — it is the closest match for the card-and-action-slot tension that makes Ark Nova sing, even though it swaps zoos for undersea domes. Terraforming Mars is the answer you will hear most often, and it is a good one, but it is the sprawling cousin rather than the true sibling. If you want the zoo puzzle at half the weight, New York Zoo is the pick.

Ark Nova (1–4 players, 90–150 minutes, designed by Mathias Wigge) did something unusual: it made a heavy Euro feel like a hobby, not a homework assignment. You are building a zoo, and the game lets you actually feel it — the sponsor cards, the conservation projects, the animals that break the rules in specific, delightful ways.

Which is exactly why the “what should I play next?” question is so hard to answer well. Most lists throw ten heavy Euros at you and call it done. But people fall for Ark Nova for different reasons, and the right next game depends entirely on which reason was yours.

First, work out what you actually loved about Ark Nova

Four different things are happening in that box, and almost nobody loves all four equally:

• The card/action tension. Five action cards, sliding in strength, and the constant agony of needing Build at power 4 when it is sitting at power 1.
• The engine payoff arc. Ark Nova’s late turns are monstrous. You spend an hour setting up dominoes and then get to knock them all down.
• The spatial zoo puzzle. Enclosures, kiosks, pavilions, and the slow fill of an ugly grid into a working park.
• The animals themselves. Real species, real conservation framing, cards that genuinely break rules rather than just adding numbers.

Each game below nails one or two of these and misses the others. I have said which, and — more importantly — who should skip each one. A recommendation without a warning is just a product listing.

1. Underwater Cities — the closest match, and the one people actually reach for

1–4 players · 90–120 minutes · designed by Vladimír Suchý

Here is the thing that gets lost in most “games like Ark Nova” lists: Terraforming Mars gets named more often, but Underwater Cities is the game the people who have answered that question a hundred times actually put on the table.

The structural rhyme is uncanny. In Ark Nova, a card is only as good as the action card you can pair it with. In Underwater Cities, you play a card onto an action slot, and the colors have to match — so every turn is the same delicious problem of holding a great card you cannot yet afford to use well. Same hard three-card hand limit. Same split between cards that fire once, cards that give you an ongoing engine, and cards that only pay at the end. And crucially, the game runs a fixed thirty actions, so nobody can stall it out.

It is also, oddly, easier to teach than Ark Nova despite sitting in the same weight class. The rulebook is excellent and most groups are playing in twenty minutes.

Who should skip it: anyone who came to Ark Nova for the animals. This is the big one. Underwater Cities’ art is corporate and cool where Ark Nova’s is warm and alive — you will be looking at boardrooms and infrastructure, not okapis. The upkeep phase is also genuinely fiddly, closer to reconciling a spreadsheet than to a satisfying production step. And if you are colorblind, be careful: color-matching is the core mechanic here, with no backup iconography.

2. Terraforming Mars — the consensus answer, with an honest caveat

1–5 players · 90–120 minutes · ages 12+ · designed by Jacob Fryxelius (2016)

Ask any group of Ark Nova fans what to play next and Terraforming Mars comes up first, every time. The recommendation is sound: the tag-matching combo chains are the direct ancestor of Ark Nova’s continent and animal icon requirements, and the blue cards create the same early-engine-versus-late-points tension as sponsor cards. The shared-map land grab scratches something similar to the appeal and conservation race.

Here is the caveat nobody puts in the listicle: a lot of the people recommending it do not love it. They recommend it because it is the obvious structural match, then quietly add that they would play Ark Nova instead given the choice. Take that seriously.

It is also worth correcting a common assumption — Terraforming Mars is not the heavier game. It is the looser one. Ark Nova’s break-even track gives it a tight, insistent arc; Terraforming Mars ends only when three global parameters max out, which players can and do drag out. At two players especially, expect tableau bloat and a long back half.

Who should skip it: anyone who loved Ark Nova’s tightness, and anyone for whom production quality matters. The base game’s player boards are notoriously flimsy — cubes slide the moment the table is bumped, and an entire cottage industry of aftermarket trays exists to fix it. The deeper complaint is card-draw luck, which compounds over a long game and bites hardest at low player counts.

3. Earth — if what you loved was the combo cascade

1–5 players · 45–90 minutes · ages 13+ · designed by Maxime Tardif

If the specific dopamine hit you are chasing is the turn where everything fires at once, Earth delivers it more often than anything else on this list. Every action triggers a left-to-right cascade across your tableau, and with 300-plus unique cards the combinations stay fresh far longer than you would expect.

Earth also quietly solves Ark Nova’s worst practical problem. Everyone resolves their action simultaneously, so the downtime that makes a four-player Ark Nova game a two-and-a-half-hour commitment largely evaporates. The nature theme and photographic card art keep it in the same emotional register, too — it belongs on the same shelf as the rest of our nature and animal board games.

Who should skip it: anyone whose favorite part of Ark Nova was the map. Earth has no spatial puzzle, no shared board, no conservation race, no sniping a card out from under someone. The most persistent criticism is that it plays like multiplayer solitaire — tables go quiet and heads go down. It also has no arc: where Ark Nova builds to a crescendo, Earth is a steady, flat accumulation by design. Some players find that relaxing; Ark Nova fans often find it anticlimactic.

One myth worth dispelling: people warn about Earth’s “symbol soup,” but if you have already internalized Ark Nova’s iconography, it is genuinely not a step up in difficulty. The real cognitive load is the number of scoring vectors running at once, not the symbols.

4. New York Zoo — the actual zoo puzzle, at half the weight

1–5 players · 30–60 minutes · ages 10+ · designed by Uwe Rosenberg

This is the one to hand someone who says “I love Ark Nova but my family will never sit through it.” New York Zoo takes the enclosure-filling spatial puzzle, strips out everything else, and delivers it in under an hour with a mountain of animal meeples.

It is smarter than it looks. Breeding triggers fire for every player holding that species, so there is a real shared-timing layer, and the elephant rondel that determines available tiles creates genuine blocking — the closest thing here to sniping a card off the Ark Nova display.

Who should skip it: anyone whose real love is card synergy and engine building. There are no cards, no tableau, no combos, and no arc — if that was the whole appeal, go play Earth instead. Be clear-eyed about the weight, too: this is a family game that happens to be deep for a family game, not a lighter heavy Euro. And unlike Ark Nova, where the theme drives the mechanisms, New York Zoo’s theme is decoration on a polyomino puzzle. It is a good polyomino puzzle. It is not a zoo simulation.

5. Wingspan — the obvious pick, and why it often disappoints

1–5 players · 40–70 minutes · designed by Elizabeth Hargrave (2019)

Wingspan is on every list like this one, and it earns its place on paper. Habitat rows do what enclosures do. Brown powers fire right-to-left, so each new bird lengthens a chain — a direct analogue to cascading animal triggers. Hundreds of real-species cards with individual powers. Same shelf, same audience, and it is the natural bridge from games like Wingspan up into heavier fare.

But I want to be straight with you about why so many Ark Nova players bounce off it, because it is structural rather than a matter of taste. Wingspan’s payoff curve runs backward. You get eight actions in round one and only five in round four — twenty-six turns total, shrinking every round, precisely as your engine gets strong. Ark Nova does the exact opposite: it hands you monstrous late turns as a reward for the hour you invested.

So the moment Ark Nova fans live for is the moment Wingspan structurally removes. Some players consider that the point — the fun is in the building, and falling agonizingly short is the design working as intended. Plenty of others just feel the game ended right as it got interesting.

Who should skip it: anyone who found Ark Nova’s complexity to be the appeal rather than the price of admission. Wingspan sits a full tier lower, and its 170 birds — beautiful as they are — are mechanically more similar to each other than Ark Nova’s animals, which genuinely break rules. Interaction is also minimal beyond racing for shared dice and cards. If you want the comparison in detail, we put Everdell head-to-head with Wingspan here.

Quick comparison

Game	Players	Playtime	Closest to Ark Nova’s…	Best for
Underwater Cities	1–4	90–120 min	Card/action tension	The truest structural match
Terraforming Mars	1–5	90–120 min	Combo chains, shared map	The famous answer, if you want sprawl
Earth	1–5	45–90 min	Engine cascades	Combo payoff without the downtime
New York Zoo	1–5	30–60 min	The zoo spatial puzzle	Family tables and short evenings
Wingspan	1–5	40–70 min	Animal cards, chained powers	A lighter, calmer cousin

A note for solo players

If you play mostly solo, the ranking above changes — and the honest answer is that you may not need a replacement at all. Ark Nova is exceptionally strong at one player: ten different zoo maps, only a fraction of the animal deck used per game, and a solo game that runs under an hour, which neatly dissolves the length objection that dominates multiplayer discussion. Solo players who own both routinely rate it above Underwater Cities, and not by a small margin.

If you are building out a one-player shelf more broadly, our guide to the best 1-player board games covers the wider field, and the best long board games list is worth a look if the 150-minute end of Ark Nova is your happy place rather than your complaint.

So which one should you buy?

Buy Underwater Cities if you want the same brain, the same tension, and you can live without charismatic animals on the cards. It is the pick most likely to actually stay in your collection.

Buy Earth if the thing you replay in your head is the combo turn, and if the downtime at four players is what stops you getting Ark Nova to the table.

Buy New York Zoo if the problem is your group, not the game — it gets the zoo-building feeling onto a family table in forty minutes.

And if what you actually want is a lighter nature game with the same warmth rather than the same weight, our roundup of board games like Cascadia is the better shelf to browse, alongside our wider animal-themed board games guide.

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