by quiet_fish

Arcs: A Board Game from the Far-Flung Future of 2024

It's possible that many people do not feel this way, but I've had this sense over the past two or three years that the board game industry is stagnating. There seems to have been an explosion of growth in the industry over the past fifteen years, and many incredible games have come out of that period of expansion. But the past few years have felt different to me. More subdued. I'm sure there are many reasons for this, but to name a few: changing audience expectations, increased production costs, the difficult of innovating as a designer, the increased formalization of genres and mechanics, gamers having more games in their libraries and less time to play them, burnout, atomization, late-stage capitalism, and more. I don't think there's one thing that's caused me to feel this way. It's just a sign of the times.

How refreshing and wonderful, then, to have Cole Wehrle, Kyle Ferrin, and Leder Games doing the work that they do. Root, Oath, and now Arcs are all games which feel like the product of relentless creativity, dedication, and care. All three games share a clear design ethos at their core. Yet, despite those similarities, each game is radically different from the others. None replace the others. They all stand alone and attempt to evoke their own unique player experiences from the way their mechanics intersect with their themes.

I won't bury the lede here: I think Arcs is an absolutely inspired piece of work that I find delightful to play and think about. I also think there are a few clear aspects of both the design and the production that will make me unlikely to play it even semi-regularly. And I think that's just a shame. Not only because I would like to play more Arcs, but because I think regular play is likely the best format in which to experience the base game (I'll talk about the expansion briefly here, but it's so radically different of an experience from the base game that it merits its own separate discussion). I'm not really sure what's to be done about this disconnect between my experience with the gameplay being so delightful and the fact that I can't shake the feeling that the game is… uninviting. But I think it could make for a worthwile discussion.

What's a Theme?

I think the thing that surprised me most about Arcs when I first sat down to play it was how close it is to an abstract game. Let's take Root as a counter-example. Many of the mechanics in Root seem to have emerged as a way to bring a thematic concept into the play of the game, rather than existing as interesting mechanics which were given a thematic context later. For example, the token-placement by the Cats in Root is very thematically motivated. Oath is less mechanically thematic (with the exception of powers on cards, which are VERY thematic). However, Oath is so weird (and amazing), and there's such a staggering emphasis placed on emergent storytelling and the use of art to evoke a living world that, in my experience, it's just as thematic as Root.

Arcs isn't like this. At least, not to the same degree. There's certainly a theme to the game, but the moment-to-moment gameplay is much closer to a generic war-game than Leder's previous titles. Your suite of actions, i.e. building, repairing, taxing, moving, battling, and bidding (influencing and securing) would not be out of place in a war game set in the 1100's. The only base-game mechanic which, to me, evokes that of a space opera is the way that ships can catapult across the map (a brilliant and wonderfully evocative piece of design). Aside from that, however, the mechanics are perhaps surprisingly simple and obvious.

So, it's a good thing that the cardplay in Arcs transforms these rudimentary and borderline abstract actions into something sticky, tactical, and unrelentingly fascinating.

Innovation in Game Design

Innovating in game design is incredibly hard. I mentioned earlier that I've felt like board games have stagnated recently, and I think this may have to do with the difficulty of innovation as a design-space gets explored. Many games that come out these days are remixes of existing ideas, with a few spritzs of flavor added by twisting a rule in an unexpected way. There's nothing inherently wrong with this. But it does make it difficult to justify purchasing and teaching a new board game to people, especially when you find yourself asking, "is this REALLY worth trying when we know that XYZ is already excellent?" Don't misunderstand me; small twists to rules can certainly make for great games. But it's rare for a game to present an experience that feels completely novel.

For me, Arcs is that. It's a resoundingly impressive, novel combination of existing game genres (trick-taking and area control) which somehow not only manage to avoid feeling incongrous together, but actually work together to create something which is substantially more than the sum of its parts. The cardplay is neither superfluous to the board-state, nor is the boardstate an afterthought that can be ignored with good cardplay. The trick-taking game being played forces you to come up with responsive and, ideally, flexible short-term (and sometimes long-term) plans. So, let's take a moment and talk about what the cardplay brings to the gameplay of Arcs.

The Card and the Board

The cardplay in Arcs does several things. First, it changes the fixed-turn order that was grudgingly acceptable in Oath and is possibly the biggest frustration I have with Root. The shifting of the lead around the table means players have to think about when they might be best poised to take control, perform many uninterupted actions, and declare any ambitions to score points in the round. There's a good sense of needing to gauge your timing in this game within rounds. This has been present in both Root and Oath as well, but I quite dislike it in Root and think that playing Oath well with respect to timing your big moves is maybe less flexible than I would like. Arcs takes this consideration of timing your big tactical operations and turns it into, for me, basically the heart of the game.

The second thing the cardplay does is it forces players to be creative and adapt their tactics to fit their current set of resources. Don't have many high value cards? Burn one to seize the initiative. Don't have the suit you were hoping for? Voluntarily give the lead away and use psyonics to take extra actions. Realized everyone has already played their cards for a suit you have several of? Use all of them relentlessly and make THEM burn cards to seize the initiative from you! These are just a few examples of what's possible. The randomness of the card draw means that you must constantly make difficult evaluations about whether a. you do the thing you don't care too much about, but do it really well, or b. the thing you wanted to do, but do it sub-optimally. Of course, sometimes you get exactly what you're looking for and you get to do both. But these choices players must make about how to use their cards as resources is endlessly fascinating and exciting.

A Competitive Game?

I've seen several reviews that say something to the effect of, "Arcs is all about getting the right cards at the right time." Or, alternatively, "Arcs is all about short-term tactics, and if you don't have what you need at the crucial moment, you're screwed." I hate to say that these feel like first-impression comments to me, but this hasn't been my experience. The court cards in Arcs make it possible to do all sorts of tricky things when you don't get the cards you want, and the ability to copy and pivot means that there's usually SOME way to work towards what you're hoping for on any given turn. Acquiring resources and court cards can make your play very flexible, even when you don't have the cards you might have wanted. And, if you don't have those court-cards or resources, then that might suggest someone outmanuvered you strategically. So, in my experience, several plays have made me feel like this sentiment might be misguided. HOWEVER... This is an important complaint that we'll come back to later.

Regardless, this leads us towards an argument that I'm building up to: I think Arcs is, by far, the most competitive-minded game out of Root, Oath, and itself. It might seem surprisingly to hear that a game with the randomness of the card-draw might be so competitive, but the cardplay allows for such parity in terms of player actions that the game never feels outright lopsided. Root is so asymmetric and has such a strong king-making component that winning Root often feels like something that happened almost outside of your control. Oath's high variance means that each individual game is often decided by completely different parameters than those you've played previously. By contrast, I've found the variance in Arcs is at a much lower level. There's still some spikes of randomness, without question, but there's a baseline consistency you can expect to get out of a game of Arcs. And this means that you can, and often will, compete.

The Consequences

So far, this might all sound quite positive. But all design choices leave their mark, in some shape or form. And I think, with Arcs, the consequence is that it's just… not very welcoming to new players.

I imagine some of you out there reading this will have a strong reaction to what I just said, but before you do a spit-take and start angrily typing up a reposte, hear me out.

Admittedly, neither Root nor Oath are particularly welcoming to new players either. But let's look at each in turn anyway. Root is also not very welcoming to new players, as I think good play tends to require a strong understanding of how each faction operates. However, since you only play your own faction, it means that you essentially have to learn four different rulesets that three other people are playing. And yet I think someone new can still theoretically sit down with Root and have a decent time with it, because the art is so rich and the mechanics are so evocative. You might not care that you don't understand how the Woodland Alliance operates, because on your next turn, you're going to finally build that extra sawmill and then you'll be unstoppable. Oath is so mechanically weird that it's quite tricky to teach to new players, but everyone is using the same rules as you are. This means you get to watch everyone else's turns to reinforce your knowledge. Plus, Oath feels more like a game which emphasizes an almost RPG-like experience, so you might be content to simply walk through the world, encountering stunningly drawn denizens and trying to find some competitive edge so you can eek out a chance at the crown.

Arcs, as we have established, is much less thematically rich than these two games. In fact, it's probably time that I bring this up: I think the art in this game was a big let-down for me. Every player's pieces are identical with the exception of color (with the exception of different board backs, which you cannot see during play). The board is nicely drawn but rather plain. I don't really like the unfinished sketch-art that's included on the Vox cards. The line-art on the cards players play to take actions look, to me, like almost random noise (I know they're thematically matched to the suit, but they don't stand out when playing). And while there's great art on the court cards, they all have this homogenous yellow border/background which makes none of them very memorable. This might sound like a nitpick, but when you compare the court cards to the denizens in Oath or even just the deck in Root, I think few would be able to convicingly argue that the art in the court deck is more evocative.

I think a lot of these choices were made to make the game work better with the expansion. But it means that the experience the game is trying to evoke resides VERY heavily in how the game actually plays, rather than the aesthetic concepts the game presents. Don't get me wrong; I'd rather have a game that plays well and looks terrible (Bohnanza) over one that looks great and plays terribly (Nemesis) any day of the week. But Oath managed to do both, and I can't help but feel like the presentation is a bit of a regression here. Which is unfortunate, because it means that new players are less likely to be immediately excited about what the game fundamentally is.

Expectations and Framing

And yet it sounds like this should all be ok, because, as we've established, I think Arcs is a delight to play.

Well… let's qualify that statement: I, PERSONALLY, think Arcs is a delight to play.

But part of that comes from the fact that I have played several games and am the kind of person who doesn't mind losing games as long as I get to play them. Yet I still remember playing that first game and feeling like many of the mechanics were trying to hamstring me. Or, perhaps instead, that I could not do things without having to make major concessions. Some examples:

- Leading with a high valued card means taking few actions
- Leading with a low value card means likely losing the lead
- Declaring an ambition almost CERTAINLY means losing the lead
- Declaring early means someone else might gain the lead and steal your ambition wins from you
- Waiting to declare late might mean someone else declares first and your ambitions are worth few points
- Seizing the initiative means you have one fewer card, and will have one fewer turn than everyone else
- NOT seizing the initiative means you're just waiting for the right moment to surpass and gain the initative

These are just a few examples, but they're very real thoughts I remember having. Reading other reviews online make me think many other people have encountered these thoughts, too, and may be the reason why people complain about the game being about having the right cards at the right time. As we've established, I don't necessarily think that's true. But on a first play, this is how it feels.

In fact, it's worse than that on a first play. Arcs's two halves of cardplay and area control work beautifully together, but they're so novel in their implementation that it takes some time to wrap your head around how they're intersecting with each other. And because the game exists in a design-space that seems ripe for competitive play, it means that poor play is PUNISHED. Heavily. A simple oversight can mean someone takes everything from you. That your whole plan for the round has been ruined because you forgot someone can seize the inititative. Or that you simply waited too long and now your shot at declaring your preferred ambition is gone. And none of this has even touched my biggest complaint with the game (which I think outlasts early-game adoption), which is that players can simply have too many court cards. It's too hard to keep track of what every else's cards do, and it means you can be tactically decimated simply because someone had a card on the other side of the table that you could not possibly have read. Not a good feeling to have.

This is just a consequence of playing games with higher skill ceilings, but again, there is very little theme in the base game to fall back upon when you encounter these frustrations. I think, with some open-mindedness and reframing, these frustrations suddenly turn into fascinating decisions you have to constantly grapple with. For example, thinking of the pips on cards as "special actions" rewarded to the player with the lead as opposed to "only taking one action (you absolute LOSER)" when you copy makes you realize a lot of this frustration ends up being about perspective.

But something about the perspective as presented by the game's terminology and manual made first impressions rather emotionally frustrating for me. I've seen many others online echo similar sentiments. And unfortunately, I think that sentiment is shared by my current group. I have two other people who I would be most likely to play Arcs with, and both have said (after three plays) that they're still not sure they even like it. These are people who I've played many wargames and area control games with… so why don't they like this one? I know that three plays isn't too many, but how many games have you played four times through when each of the previous experiences has been one of contending with a sense of inadequacy and inability?

And hence we reach the crux of this review. Arcs is a game I quite like. I would love to play it regularly. I would love to get into the weeds, improve, see what the design-space and accommodate. Soak in the gestalt of the gameplay. And yet... I don't think I will. Not because I don't want to, but because I don't think I have a group of friends who are excited to play it. They aren't excited to play a game that, at first brush, feels so mean and imposing. That makes you feel like every choice you make is suboptimal, or an outright misstep. Like you're being evaluated the whole time and underperforming. Like you just don't get it.

So, What to Do?

Personally, if any of you have experienced this feeling, I strongly encourage you to try the game one more time with Leaders and Lore.

Good god, do I love Leaders and Lore.

This optional built-in expansion does so much work in an attempt to fix many of these problems for me. Having a personal leader suddenly brings a sense of identity and role to the table (just like The Blighted Reach does). Now, you're not just fighting Blue, or your buddy Annie; you're fighting The Fuel Drinker, and attempting to stop her spread of Cloud Cities. And suddenly, we really truly have it: theme. Flavor. Color. Stories. The game yields itself to you under Leaders and Lore in a way that I think is almost criminal to not have in the base game, and I almost encourage first-time players to distribute leader cards anyway just to provide a sense of identity to players; just don't actually have them do anything (treat them like the portraits on the Oath playerboards). In fact, the art on the Leaders and Lore cards is fantastic. I can't believe the best art in the game is tucked away in an optional expansion. Each of the lore cards is EXACTLY what I want from Kyle Ferrin's artwork, and I'm appalled that I had to wait three full games before getting my fix.

But it's not just the art. Leaders and Lore adds a small bit of Root-like asymmetry. It's nowhere near that level of difference, but the persistent abilities mean that sense of identity extends to the play of the game. Suddenly, that sense of having a role in the game exists again, just like it did in Root. It's more complex, but it's inviting in a way that I think the base game fundamentally is not. The reach is harsh and full of schemers. But it doesn't matter. You're the Feastbringer. You belong here. Go get 'em, champ. Give 'em hell.

So… yes. I'll keep watching Cole Wehrle, Kyle Ferrin, and Leder Games's work with decided interest. They're a breath of fresh air in a world that is increasingly treating all thi

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