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Deep in the forest of Carnuta, a group of druids comes together for their yearly ritual. Not to hug trees, although I’m not judging, but to brew potions and decide who deserves the title of druid of the year. In Carnuta, you collect ingredients, manage sun and moon runes, and slowly build your own potion in front of you. Every card scores in its own way, so you’re not just taking cards because they look nice. Sometimes you are, because some of them do look very nice, but that’s not always the best strategy.
At first, Carnuta looks like a gentle little potion game. Then you play a card, flip a few runes, send another one back to the reserve, and suddenly your next perfect plan is not so perfect anymore. You’re trying to plan your actions well, keep your runes useful, and avoid ending up with a hand full of cards you can’t actually play. We’ve all been there, standing in front of a potion with great plans and absolutely no moon runes.
👥 2-4 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 25 minutes
📝 Designers: Yohan Goh, Hope S. Hwang & Gary Kim
🎨 Artwork: Davide Tosello
🏢 Publisher: Repos Production (review copy provided by Asmodee Belgium).
Gameplay Overview
The goal in Carnuta is to make the most valuable potion by playing ingredient cards in front of you. Every player starts with one starting card already on the table, so your potion has already begun before your first real decision. From there, you add more cards, build ingredient columns, and try to make your scoring conditions work together. The game ends when one player has their eleventh card in front of them, including that starting card. After that, the current round is finished up to the player on the right of the ancestor, and then everyone gets one final turn.
On your turn, you take two actions. These can be the same or different, and you can do them in any order. You can take a card from the display, play a card from your hand, take runes from the reserve, or flip your runes. The card display is split into day and night cards, with four of each visible in the middle of the table. When you take one, it is replaced immediately from the matching deck. So the market keeps changing, but not in a messy way. It’s more of a gentle “oh, that card would have been nice two seconds ago” kind of feeling.
Taking cards is easy, but you can’t keep everything. At the end of your turn, you may only have three cards in hand, so you can’t just collect every card that might maybe perhaps be useful later. Carnuta asks you to choose a direction, even if you’re not completely sure yet. Playing cards is where the runes come in. Each card has a cost in sun and moon runes. Some costs make you flip runes to their other side, while others make you return runes to the reserve. That small difference matters a lot, because a card might be playable now, but playing it can leave your board in a strange state for the next turn.
When you take runes, you fill as many empty spaces on your board as possible with runes from the reserve. You choose either sun runes or moon runes for that action, but you can’t take both types at once. You also don’t flip them when taking them, and spaces with padlocks are blocked until you unlock them later. The flip runes action lets you flip runes on your board so that all your face-up runes show the same type, either suns or moons. It’s a simple action, but sometimes it’s exactly what you need. Other times, it feels a bit like cleaning up after your own bad decisions. Very relatable.
Cards are placed in columns by ingredient type. The ingredients are clover, flower, egg, honey, skull, butterfly, berry, and mushroom. Some special cards count as two ingredients of the same type at the end of the game. Salt cards are wild ingredients, but they must be placed on a card you already have. Once a salt card is placed, it stays there. No moving the salt around like you’re correcting a bad soup.
As you play more cards, your counter moves along your board. This unlocks more rune spaces and gives bonus ingredient tokens. Each player also starts with sickle tokens, which can be spent during your turn, on top of your two actions, to refresh all four day cards or all four night cards. This is useful when the market is not helping you, or when you want to change what’s available before choosing your actions.
At the end of the game, you score every card in your potion, ingredient by ingredient. Some cards give fixed points. Others score based on how many matching ingredients you have, or certain combinations. Bonus ingredients, salt cards, and double-ingredient cards can all help improve those scores.
Artwork, Components, and Visual Design
Carnuta comes in a compact box, but once the day and night cards, player boards, runes, sickles, padlocks, and bonus ingredients are on the table, it doesn’t feel like a tiny filler game. The game includes ingredient cards, double-sided sun and moon runes, player boards, sickles, padlocks, bonus ingredient tokens, counters, the ancestor token, and a score pad. The playmat you can see in our pictures is an exclusive item we received from Asmodee Belgium. It is not available in retail.
The game has a bright fantasy look. It’s not dark or serious. It feels playful, with colourful druids, strange ingredients, and a nice sun-and-moon contrast. I like that. It gives the game that slightly strange druid-market feeling, without making the table look crowded or difficult to read. The player boards are probably the first thing people will notice. Each one shows a different druid character, and they all have their own little vibe. They’re not just there for decoration either. You use the boards to store runes, track your progress, remove padlocks, and collect bonus ingredients, so they feel connected to the game instead of just being pretty mats under the mechanisms.
The ingredient cards are clear rather than spectacular. They won’t make everyone stop and stare, but the ingredients are easy to tell apart, which helps when you’re scanning the market for one more mushroom, berry, or flower to make your scoring card less disappointing.
I like the day and night decks being represented with potion cauldrons. The two cauldrons make the day and night decks feel like part of the potion contest instead of just two card piles. The golden day side and blue night side are easy to tell apart, and the sun and moon runes match that visual idea nicely. The rune tokens feel like the kind of component you want to touch. Since you’re flipping them and moving them often, that’s important. Nothing is more annoying than a game asking you to handle a component all the time when that component feels bad. Here, the runes are chunky enough and easy to read.
Our Experience
Carnuta looked like it would be a fairly relaxed potion game, but it asked for more planning than we expected once the runes started flipping back and forth. The rules explanation didn’t take long, and after a round or two everyone knew what they were doing: take two actions, manage your runes, play ingredients, and try not to make a potion that scores like warm bathwater. Easy enough. But once the first turns were underway, the game became less about simply collecting cards and more about choosing the right order for your actions. You may have the card you want, but not the runes for it. Or you may have the runes, but playing that card could leave you with nothing useful for the next turn. So you’re not only thinking about now, but also about the small mess you might create for future-you. And future-you can be very judgemental.
The runes were the part we talked about most during play. I liked that they don’t just disappear when you pay for cards. Sometimes they flip, sometimes they go back to the reserve, and that makes your board change all the time. A card in your hand may look perfect, but if the runes don’t line up, it’s not happening yet. And even when a card is playable, it’s not always the right card to play if it leaves your board in a bad state afterwards. Especially early on, we noticed that one action spent fixing your runes could mean one turn later for playing the card you actually wanted.
I first treated the progress track as a simple counter, but that was wrong. Those unlocked rune spaces and bonus ingredients really change how much room you have to work with. As more cards enter your potion, the game opens up and your turns feel less restricted. I enjoyed that growth, but rushing forward isn’t always the answer. You can play cards quickly and still end up with scoring combinations that are only half-finished. So there’s a nice little question running through the game: do I play now to move ahead, or do I wait and make sure this actually helps my potion?
We weren’t attacking each other, but we were definitely watching the market. When someone takes the exact honey or skull you were hoping would survive until your turn, you feel it. The sickle tokens help here, because they let you refresh one side of the market without spending an action. Sometimes that helped us find something useful. Sometimes it just removed cards and revealed more cards we also didn’t need. Very magical. Very useless. Very funny. The hand limit also did more than expected. Since you can only keep three cards at the end of your turn, you can’t just sit on a pile of “maybe later” ideas. You have to let some things go. Emotionally difficult, but healthy.
After our first play, we already felt we would play better next time. Not because we missed rules, but because we started to understand what kind of cards were actually useful. A card with more points printed on it isn’t always the right choice. Sometimes a smaller card fits your potion much better because it helps several scoring cards at once. That’s where Carnuta became more enjoyable for us: when we stopped chasing good-looking cards and started building around what we already had. By the end, our potions had gone in different directions, and we all had at least one unfinished little plan sitting there, looking at us from our hand.
Our Thoughts
I like that Carnuta doesn’t try to turn its potion puzzle into something bigger than it needs to be. The mechanisms are familiar: drafting cards, building your own display, collecting sets, managing resources, and scoring at the end. But here it all comes together around sun runes, moon runes, and ingredient columns in a way that feels easy to follow without becoming empty.
Carnuta feels best in that space where you want more than a simple filler, but not a game that takes over the whole evening. I also appreciate that it doesn’t overstay its welcome. Some games like this stretch the same idea a little too long. Here, the race toward the eleventh card gives the game a clear finish point. You can see the end coming, and that gives the last few turns a nice sense of purpose without turning the game into a stressful maths exam. Nobody wants a maths exam in the forest.
I wouldn’t put Carnuta in front of every group. If you prefer games with very different player powers, changing setups, negotiation, or a stronger sense of story, this may feel a bit too steady. The cards and market will change from play to play, but you’ll still be doing the same kind of potion work each time: take cards, prepare runes, play ingredients, and squeeze points out of your columns. That can be a good thing if you enjoy learning a game and getting better at it, but if you want every play to feel very different, Carnuta may not be the one that gives you that.
The theme is charming, and the art really helps, but the game itself is still mostly about arranging cards and using your resources well. I enjoyed that, but I wouldn’t call it a very story-led experience. You’re a druid, yes, but sometimes you do feel more like a druid with a spreadsheet and some mushrooms. I also think some players may wish there was one extra layer, maybe player powers, changing goals, or something that makes each player feel a bit more different. Carnuta doesn’t really go there, and I don’t think it needs to, but it’s worth knowing before you sit down.
Overall, we enjoyed our time with Carnuta more than I expected after reading the rules. I’d mostly bring it out with people who already know modern board games a little, or with players who like card puzzles but don’t want something too heavy. On paper it sounded quite simple, but at the table the rune flipping, tight hand limit, and ingredient scoring gave us more to chew on. It may not be the perfect potion for every group, but for the right table, this is a lovely little brew with a few nice surprises at the bottom of the cauldron.
📝 We received a copy of the game from Asmodee Belgium.
