I’m going to begin with the conclusion. Arcs is a masterpiece. It’s a game bursting with so much variety, discovery, and depth, all crafted meticulously by designer Cole Wehrle. Every mechanic feels intentional, every element serves a greater purpose, there isn’t an ounce of unnecessary bloat. It’s a work of art and genius in game design, a triumph that deserves all the praise in the world. It’s just a shame that I don’t like playing it.
Arcs at its core, is a ghost of a trick taking game. That said, even labelling it that way will give players the wrong direction. A player leads a card, and the card has a number and a suit, and players are generally encouraged to follow the lead card with a card of the same suit but with a higher number. But they don’t have to. Each card gives the player access to specific actions, and affords them a number of action points. The lead player gets full use of their card, and everyone else has to react to it. If you play a higher card of the same suit, it’s called Surpassing, and you get the full benefit of your card, but as the cards go up in numerical value, they offer less and less action points. You can choose to pivot, playing any card face up and taking a single action of the card you just played, or play a card face down to copy the actions on the lead card, again, only for a single action.
There’s both great flexibility and strong restrictions in this action selection mechanism. On one hand, being able to copy or pivot almost guarantees that you can do something helpful on your turn. On the other hand, if you don’t have a specific action, like Secure in your hand, and no one leads with that suit, you are completely blocked out from that action.
I’ve said before that Arcs has a fascinating approach to action efficiency. Unlike Euro-style games where you almost always want to have the most actions, or you can plan a long series of events that will pay out in dividends, Arcs is much more tactical. Action efficiency in Arcs doesn’t mean you take the most actions or turns, it means that you take the one pivotal action that swings the game from a crushing loss to an overwhelming defeat.
Everything you choose to do, or choose not to do, in Arcs has consequences. When you lead, you can choose to declare an ambition, depending on the value of the card you play. Doing so, activates one of the end of round scoring conditions, but it also drops the value of your card to a 0, making it likely that every player after you will have several actions to play with when they surpass your 0. Just in that choice alone, you need to weigh the balance of which card you want to play to declare the ambition vs. which and how many actions that card gives you access too. If you use an aggression card to declare the Warlord ambition, you’re probably going to trigger a lot of combat in the round. But waiting to declare an ambition is risky too. Ambitions can only be declared 3 times per round, and they can be consumed quick, and they get less valuable as they’re declared. You also just might not have the opportunity to be first in the round again.
Everything in Arcs has a purpose. The game gives you dozens of levers to pull, and understanding which lever to pull and when is critical to doing well in Arcs. Then you add The Blighted Reach expansion, and it takes the base game of arcs and stretches it into a 3 game space opera. Every player begins as one of 8 factions, each with their own personal objective, abilities, and character. After the first act ends, players who completed their objective draws a single new faction and gets the choice to either pivot to a wholly new set of abilities, or keep the faction that you’re currently playing and follow their story a bit longer. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Blighted Reach introduces a crumbling empire. Every player starts out as a regent of the empire, with one player being the first regent. They control the empire’s coffers, and gain benefits when the empire does battle. In addition to the normal action cards, there are now event cards that can trigger a summit, where players can leave the empire, and negotiate trades with each other. You can even trade future favours that can be cashed in later to force a player to negotiate with you. While a regent, all regents have to be friendly while big daddy empire is watching. Empire ships control regions by default where they have ships, and you can drag empire ships along with yours to battle and defend against non-regent players. As I said before, all the factions you play as have their own objectives, some of which may encourage you to bolster the empire’s forces, while others will encourage you to leave their fold.
The space opera bit is absolutely intriguing. A full campaign is 3 games long, and at the end of each game, some things get reset. Damaged ships and thrown out, damaged blight get stronger, captives and trophies are returned to other players, and factions that change return their favours. But the guild cards you’ve earned up to this point persist perpetually, the resources you’ve acquired, you retain, and in general, the ships and buildings you’ve produced remain on the board. The intermission is less of a full game reset, and more of a seventh inning stretch. You get up, shuffle some things around, digest your new objective, and launch into the game once again. This means that if you’re ready to write off a game, you can just focus on setting yourself up for the next one, putting yourself into a good position instead of scrapping for points in the short term.
There is so much to explore in Arcs. 24 factions, some of which change multiple times in a game, exploring the effects of moving from one faction to another. The objectives drive players to explore different corners of strategy, and keep the game state in perpetual flux. The first regent might have a monopoly on a resource, but then suddenly an outlaw pops up and robs them blind, throwing the balance of power completely off kilter. Another faction that seemed down-and-out switches into a mothership, pulling all their cities and star ports off the board, and plonking down a single, massive ship to control from then on. Even at the concluding act, anyone with a C faction has an instant win condition, meaning that a player who’s been struggling for the entire game still has a chance to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
Arcs is an aggressive area control game, a tight resource management game, and an intriguing above the table political game all at the same time. To be good at Arcs, you always want to be changing and positioning yourself to make the game pivot from one ambition to the other. Chasing the goals that have already been claimed is a fools’ errand, and there’s enough manoeuvrability in the game system to allow for the balance of power to be upset that in theory, you could figure out a way to upset the other players in interesting and unexpected ways.
So why don’t I like it then? For starters, it’s unique and hard. And that seems like a weird complaint. In what world is being unique a bad thing, especially in what can be such a crowded market like board games? Shouldn’t I be complaining about the umpteenth ‘new worker placement deck building game’ that hits my table week after week? Well, being unique means I have nothing else to really compare it to, I don’t have a foundation for the rules and mechanisms that have becomes so second nature to me. Instead, I have to keep all the rules of all the aspects of Arcs in my head, which is a significant burden, especially as the person at my table who is the arbiter of the rules. I can’t tell you how many times over all my plays I have to say “no, you can’t do that.” and “No stop, that’s not how that works.” or “No, first you need to do X, then you can do Y”. There’s a lot of nuance to the rules, and in Arcs, the nuance is IMPORTANT. It’s important that you prelude before you take your actions, it’s important that you can’t surpass with an off suit card, it’s important that you have to be the one to call a summit to force negotiations with your favours. All the restrictions that make the decision-making really satisfying also make it really tedious to manage a table. My head aches after a single act, and by the end of the second act, I’m looking for ways to escape the table.
Somehow, Arcs manages to make me feel like there’s nothing I can do to upset someone’s stranglehold on the economy, and that no advantage I hold is ever safe from the bastards who sit around the table with me. In the short game, trying to amass an army feels like Sisyphean task, by the time you’ve built your starports and generated the ships, someone pulls up and swats them down to claim the warlord achievement, and then the game comes to a screaming end.
In the long game, there are so many character powers and different objectives that have rules on cards clear across the table, that it’s impossible to remember exactly what everyone can do, and what you should be doing to stop them. I won’t complain that factions are unbalanced, I’m nowhere near experienced to make that claim. But Arcs demands a certain level of mastery for players to really revel in its system. It’s a system that utterly rewards mastery, but getting to that point requires so much enthusiasm and repeated commitment from everyone at the table.
Arcs is a masterpiece. It’s a masterpiece in the sense that board game enthusiasts who have been around for a while will see how finely crafted this work is. While it’s a big, beefy box, nothing is extra, nothing is extraneous. Everything in Arcs has a purpose. It’s the Symphony No. 9 of board games, it shows Cole Wehrle’s complete and utter skill, creativity, and mastery as a board game designer. Every little aspect of the game is intresting and worth talking about (as evidenced by Shut Up and Sit Down’s two 40 minute reviews). But in the end, when I play Arcs, I don’t feel joy in my heart. I don’t have fun when I’m playing this game. I’m stuck in my head trying to remember the flowchart for movement as a regent, and trying to figure out how I can snag initiative so I can declare an ambition without having that ambition yanked out from under me. It’s probably just a skill issue, really.
