I’ve said this a lot in the past, but I don’t really play a ton of games in the year they come out. Between my impressive backlog and my unwillingness to go to any board game conventions, I’m usually a year or two behind when it comes to playing the hot new games. In fact, I usually do this list around July, but this year, I’ve been much more active on Board Game Arena, and more and more games are launching on BGA close to their physical release date. It also helps being on the Alpha test list, so I can play lots of games as they’re being added to the site, with the caveat that there may be bugs. ANYWAYS, I’m not here to talk about BGA, I’m here to run down my 10 favourite games that released in 2024 (so far)
Also, side note for myself. Next year I really need to complete this list before my kid goes on Christmas break, because, I was completely unable to get ANY writing done during the last 2 weeks!
Harmonies was incredibly popular when it hit the scene in March. Pitched as a cross between Azul and Cascadia, it felt like everyone was talking about this little game. Now, I’ve only had the opportunity to play Harmonies on BGA, but I can see why this game had everyone so excited.
Designed by Johan Benvenuto, Harmonies tasks players with building specific shapes in their personal ecosystems to satisfy the demands of the fauna cards. Each animal wants something different, perhaps a lion wants a mountian 3 discs high, with 2 plains discs adjacent, while the boar wants a tree thats only 2 discs high next to a 2 disc high building. The name of the game (literally) is finding the animals that can exist harmoniously, as each of their requirements compliment each other.
While luck plays a major factor in which discs are available to you each turn, and you’ll quite often be forced to take discs you don’t want or can’t use just to claim the few that you really need, Harmonies remains a calm, enjoyable experience. I really look forward to fleshing out my thoughts in a full review, once I can get a few more plays under my belt.
9 – Castle Combo
Another game introduced to me via Board Game Arena, Castle Combo, designed by Grégory Grard, Mathieu Roussel, is a fast, simple tableau builder about trying to squeeze the most points out of a courtyard of servants.
The cards you’re drafting come in two rows. The servants, and the nobles. All cards cost money to bring into your tableau, and once you take possession of the card and slot it into your 3×3 grid, they’ll offer some immediate benefits, as well as offer some end game scoring. After 9 rounds, you evaluate all the cards in your grid, and whoever has the most cards wins!
The artwork by Stephane Escapa is colourful and full of funny caractures, and the gameplay is so fast and butter smooth that it fits the role of ‘filler game’ perfectly. There are still satisfying decisions to make, as a lot of the end game conditions will depend on where each card is, and how many of the other tags are in the rows and columns next to each card.
It’ll remain to be seen if Castle Combo will stand the test of time, but it’s worth at least a dozen plays or so!
An area control and stock market game about the ever increasing value and presence of flowers was a bit of a surprise hit for me. Another BGA game, Stalk Exchange by Christopher Ryan Chan, gives players some hidden information that will inform their final score, then tasks players with swapping the flowers they have behind their screen with the ones that are able to go onto the board.
When flowers are on the board, they start off as bulbs, after a single turn if they have an open side, they grow into flowers. If a cohort of flowers are ever fully contained by the borders created by other flower varieties, they’re removed from the board, and the value of that flower goes up 1 spot for every flower token removed from the board. At the end of the game, you score your portfolio. But before you do that, the bubble bursts on the most valuable flower, its value gets cleaved in half.
Stalk Exchange is clever, quick, and simple to teach, making it a pretty appealing game. I’ve enjoyed the few plays I’ve gotten of this one, and if I can source a physical copy, I’ll be sure to push it onto my local game group.
7 – Wyrmspan
Building off the core gameplay mechanics of the massively successful Wingspan, Connie Vogelmann crafted a new game in which players hew homes for dragons out of caves, then entice those dragons into your sanctuary, all in the effort of building an engine by chaining together powerful abilities, and turning those abilities into victory points.
In classic Stonemaier Games fashion, Wyrmspan is a beautiful product. The art is lush and fanciful, the eggs are speckled, the components have a premium finish, it’s a wonderful production to hold in your hands. Gameplay wise, Wyrmspan is much more complex than Wingspan, there’s a lot more interactions between the dragons and caves and the resources you hold that players need to be aware of. The potential to craft a runaway combo feels greater in this rendition.
Personally, I’d be much more willing to play Wyrmspan over its predecessor, but I’d also be much more reluctant to introduce newer players to Wyrmspan, at the very least without the Wingspan background. It’s a great ‘next step’ game, where it has some familiar mechanisms to ease the learning burden, but offers a more satisfying gameplay experience.
6 – Draft & Write Records
A prototype was provided by Inside Up Games
I was fortunate enough to receive a prototype copy of Draft & Write Recordsto review from Inside Up Games back in the fall of 2023, but it was officially released this year, so I’m including it on this list!
Draft & Write Records by Bruno Maciel, is as the title indicates, a draft and write game. Each player gets a large sheet of paper and every round, they’ll draft a card from their hand, cross off the appropriate resource from their sheet, and pass all of their unchosen hands to the next player. After each hand of cards has been picked down to nothing, there’s a short weekend, where players evaluate goals, and play continues in this fashion until someone triggers the end of the game.
In 2024, Draft & Write Records came to Board Game Arena, and I decided to hop into a couple friendly tournaments for it, which ended up putting another 10 games of it under my belt. Draft & Write Records is the perfect async game, as on your turn you just need to quickly assess your board state and the few cards passed to you, before making your choice. And the combo-tastic nature of the game is really satisfying when you manage to stretch a single action into 5 or 6 resources getting crossed off.
5 – Nucleum
While I haven’t reviewed Brass or Barrage on this site (yet), I’ve touched on how much I enjoy Brass: Birmingham as it sits at number 18 in my top 100 games of all time list. Nucleum by designers Simone Luciani and Dávid Turczi has players erect power plants, build links between urban buildings, and completing milestones. Each player has asymmetric technologies, and throughout the game the action tiles you’re using to take actions are spent to establish links, giving the game a really great feeling of tension.
If I’m being really honest, I suspect that when I look back at all the games on this list, Nucleum will have the most staying power. That said, I didn’t like it more than Brass, so I’d be more inclined to return to that game if my group is in the mood to play a heavy economic euro game. Not to diminish how great Nucleum is as a game, it’s really amazing! It just has some close parallels that evoke similar feelings to other games that I already love.
4 – Fromage
Coming in right at the end of the year on BGA, Fromage was a really enjoyable euro game that played fast and offered intresting decisions. With simultainous worker placement, and 4 different scoring areas to play in, I had a really good time exploring this french cheese game.
I enjoyed it so much, I felt compelled to give this one a full review, which you can read here!
All 3 Kinfire Delve games were provided by Incredible Dream for review purposes
Are these technically expansions? They can be mixed with the previous Kinfire Delve games, but each box is stand-alone. While the core gameplay is the same between all sets, each character and boss are wildly different. Mixing characters to address specific challenges for each boss is a real treat.
In 2024 I transitioned to being a stay at home parent, and solo gaming suddenly became much more of a reality for me as my child napped during the day. My time with Kinfire Delve was a delight, and I’m very much looking forward to exploring the rest of the Kinfire universe, whenever that opportunity arises.
Another game that got the full review treatment, The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-Earth is a reworking of the 7 Wonders Duel system. Folding in both the Pantheon and Agora expansions, then streamlining the whole package down into something that is just a joy to play, LotR:DfME is an achievement of game design.
That said, when all is said and done, I find more fun in the 7 Wonders Duel experience, especially with the Pantheon expansion. I don’t mind the dozens of little calculations you need to do every time you want to buy a resource that you don’t have, and the engine building powers of the yellow cards is something I dearly missed in this new edition.
1 – Bullet: Paw & Palette
How dare an expansion take up the number 1 slot? Well, the answer is easy. Bullet remains one of my favourite games, especially the solo mode, and getting 8 new characters and bosses was a highlight of my board gaming year. Bullet: Paw focuses on animals, while Bullet: Palette puts the emphasis on heroines with an art pursuasion. I have indepth looks at both of those expansions, linked above, so if you want to read about those games specifically, please check out those reviews.
As for the new year, Bullet Cubed is coming to Gamefound with two more expansions, which means Level 99 Games is going to continue to get more of my money. Dang, I hate it when companies give me what I want!
And those are my top 2024 games. Soon I’ll have a couple more lists out, my top 10 best new to me games that aren’t from 2024, and my top 10 BGA games from last year. Let me know if you’ve played any of the games on this list, and what your favourite games of the last year are! See you again soon!
I have a regular group of fellows that I play board games with every Wednesday night. After work, dinner, and kids are mostly in bed, we gather at one of our houses around 7pm, and play until 9 or 10. This means that our usual games are the ones that we can teach and play within 3 hours. That said, we’ve all been board game fans for over 10 years, we all enjoy games that are more complex in nature. The downside is that some of our biggest games don’t see the light of day because we’re a bit nervous to break out a big game on a weekend game night.
Enter The Gallerist, designed by Vital Lacerda, and published by Eagle-Gryphon Gamesin 2015 following a successful crowdfunding campaign. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about Vital Lacerda games before, but as a board game designer, he’s quite prolific. All of his games are these big, complex boxes of interconnected mechanisms that require a thorough studying in order to understand and comprehend. In the past I’ve played two other games of his, 2014’s Kanban and 2019’s Escape Plan, both were similar in that they required more than a weekend game night to get through.
Players in The Gallerist take on the roles of gallery owners, and must discover artists, commission and display works of art, promote the artists, then sell those works of art to make a profit. The goal of The Gallerist is to make the most money, but the path forward is not always clear.
It shouldn’t be difficult to play The Gallerist. On your turn, you take a single executive action (which can be one of two options), then move your pawn to one of the four locations (if someone is already there, bump them out and they get a kicked-out action after your turn is done), and take one of the two actions at that location. A total of 8 possible location actions in the whole game. It can’t be that difficult to learn just 8 actions, can it? It turns out, Vital Lacerda’s games are like clockwork. Every mechanism, each action turns a gear, which influences everything else in the game. It’s not enough to know how to do each action, what’s important when playing The Gallerist is that you understand why and when you want to do each of the actions for maximum benefit.
The devil is in the details when it comes to these 8 actions, but thankfully the included player reference cards are verbose and cover the major points of every action, making them invaluable to learning players. I’m not going to go into detail about all 8 actions, this review is not intended to teach you how to play The Gallerist, after all.
In preparation for game night, I watched Rodney Smith’s excellent Watch it Played video, and then read the rule book, which made me feel fairly well-prepared, although during the process I felt like I was crunching for an exam. My wife came out as I was pouring over the rule book and asked, “Is this fun for you?”. And the truth is, yeah, I really do enjoy learning how to play Lacerda games. As you process each mechanism, each action space, as you peel back one more layer of the onion, slowly the shape of the whole comes into focus. Thematically, things mostly make sense, and the thematic integration assists with learning how to play. When you sell an artwork, one of the people in your gallery leaves with the painting. Little details like that make sense and help me retain the rules to this complex game, and made the gameplay feel a lot smoother than many games of a similar complexity.
I remember reading once that some designers design mechanics first. Their early prototypes are plain cards with numbers, and the game is just manipulating numbers. Theme comes afterwards. I doubt this is the case for Vital Lacerda, as the theme and the mechanisms are often so well tied together. I feel like he gets inspiration from the theme that informs the mechanics of the game he wants to create. It’s something I really appreciate about his work, and it’s something worth highlighting here.
Talking about The Gallerist specifically, gosh, I’m bad at this game. I don’t know how or where I go wrong, but golly do I ever flounder. I fall behind at buying artworks, which means I don’t have the money to buy more artworks, and I fail during the end game scoring. I never seem to have the right guests in my lobby so I’m shut out of the influence actions that inform another large aspect of the end game scoring. But I do have fun. It’s fascinating seeing all these mechanics work together, and the main board is tightly packed with action spaces that you’re going to constantly rub elbows with your opponents, which is to your benefit, as getting kicked out of a space awards you a benefit.
I’ve talked about positive player interaction before, and I quite enjoyed it here as well. Getting bumped out of an action spot awards you with an extra action. No one owns the artists, so buying their works of art and promoting them benefits everyone. A rising tide lifts all ships, after all. The point of The Gallerist isn’t to step on each other’s necks, but to be the player that excels. The most ‘feel-bad’ part of the game is when you drag a visitor kicking and screaming out of an opponent’s lobby and into your own, but that’s it. The kick-out mechanism has an added bonus of making the time between your main turns feel a lot shorter, as you may be gifted a bonus action during someone else’s turn. I quite appreciated that aspect.
I find myself wanting to replay The Gallerist again and again, mostly to see if I can figure out where I’m going wrong. So many of the mechanics have players looking at the thing they want to do, and work backwards through all the steps they need to do in order to make their plan happen. It’s a satisfying puzzle, and one that has me interested and intrigued, even if I’m awful at it.
The Gallerist is a big, well produced game. It looks gorgeous on the table, and the components are high quality, even judging by today’s standards. The puzzle is solid and engaging, and I can’t really find any place to truly fault it. I’m not a Lacerda fan-boy by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have reverence for his craft. A Lacerda game has a certain, specific quality to it. When you play one of his games, you know what kind of experience you’re going to have. Part of me really appreciates when a designer has a specific flavour, that I know what I’m getting into when their game hits my table, but at the same time, I wonder how many Lacerda games I need in my life. It’s been too long since I played with Kanban or Escape Plan, and I’d gladly play them again at any request. But if someone asked me what Lacerda game I wanted to play, The Gallerist is sitting right at the top of my chart.
Expeditions by Jamey Stegmaier, released in 2023 debuted as the sequel to 2016’s Scythe, which is fairly high on my favourite games of all time list at number 16. While visually very similar to Scythe, the gameplay in Expeditions is quite different, and I think it’s worth being explicit in saying right from the get-go in saying that Expeditions is a fully separate game. Jakub Rozalski returned to provide the distinct art and world building, which helps players familiar with Scythe to feel right at home from the moment they get their hands on the box, but nothing in the Expeditions box can be ported to Scythe, nor the other way around.
The box for Expeditions feels oversized for what’s inside. It is just a bit smaller than the original Scythe box, but it feels like it contains so much less. 5 large mechs, 20 location tiles, a huge stack of cards, 50 worker meeples, a bag of thick acrylic markers, 5 square player mats, and a home bast tile is what that box contains. The included plastic insert holds everything quite well, and should facilitate fast set-ups, when you’re not playing a public copy at the board game café and whoever played it last was not so careful in putting everything back in the right spots.
I’ve never been able to complain about Stonemaier Games component quality. Everything here feels about as deluxe as you want it, and they showcase thoughtfulness in small ways, like including little riser stickers for the player boards to make it much easier to tuck cards under your player board. The home board that holds the glory track has the end game scoring listed right next to it, making it really easy to remember what is worth points come the end of the game.
The play area itself is expansive, which I think is quite good for a game named Expeditions. After all, what kind of adventure would it be if you only travelled 6 metres from where you started? The main play area is
Playing Expeditions is pretty straightforward. There are 3 actions available to you. Move, Play, and Gather. Moving is simple, move your mech from hex to hex, up to your movement value. If you enter an unexplored tile in the centre or north side of the map, your movement ends, but you get to reveal the tile. Play just has you play a card from your hand. Each card gives you guile or strength, and if you place a worker on the card at the time of playing it, you get to activate its special ability. Gathering just lets you take the action of the tile your mech is currently sitting on.
The tiles are laid out in such a way that there’s space for 5 cards between the hexagons. Those cards can be quests, items, or meteorites, all of which can be claimed to be used for a unique ability, and then upgraded, melded, or solved to offer some more permanent effects. The stack of cards in the game is impressively large, offering a wide variety of effects that could show up.
Each turn on the game has you move a cube on your map, covering one of the three actions, enabling you to preform the other two. This was a great mechanic, and figuring out your own tempo on how you want to move and play or play and gather was a good puzzle to try and squeeze some efficiencies out of. The cards you play and the workers you spend on them sit on the table in front of you until you take a rest action. This takes the cube off your board, pulls all your workers back to your mat, and lets you play all your cards again. And, on your next turn, you get to take all 3 actions, which can be very powerful and is a nice consolation prize, making that lost rest turn a little less painful.
The general flow and card play of Expeditions can be quite satisfying. If you happen to pick up cards that compliment each other well, you can find yourself specializing in specific ways that lead you to claiming an achievement long before anyone else can. In one game we played, I just happened to pick up 4 items, and uncover the upgrade action. I very quickly was able to boast to claim the 8 cards achievement, then immediately turned around and started upgrading those item cards to claim my second achievement before anyone else claimed a single one. The downside is that once you hit the achievement threshold for something, continuing to pursue that objective is meaningless. You’ll need to pivot and figure out a different way to get the rest of your stars onto the board.
For a game to be called Expeditions, I expect a fairly heavy focus to be on the discoverability inside the game. I found it surprisingly disappointing that all the tiles are in use in every game. The discovery isn’t about finding new tiles and which abilities are available to you during this game, it’s just a matter of figuring out where the tile you want is hiding. In addition to this, if you happen to find the tile you needed, great luck! Another player is probably crawling across the north part of the map, frustrated that they’ve just collected their 8th map token that have no value beyond collecting 5 for an achievement. Exploring isn’t rewarded, which is awful in an action efficiency game.
The art on the tiles and cards all tell a story. Much like the encounter cards in Scythe, the art is a wonderful vignette featuring a grim 1920’s aesthetic, with the shadows of hulking mechanical behemoths in the background. A tale can easily be told by these cards, but at the same time, the theme can very quickly melt away. Guile and power turn into brain and strength, which are just values you accrue, vanquishing is merely a transaction, solving is just being on the right spot at the right time. Nothing you do in the game feels thematic, it’s purely mechanical.
The interaction between players is merely being in each other’s way. Someone can camp on a tile that you need for a few turns, and someone might sweep the card you were pining for, but that’s really the extent of it. You can’t take anything from your opponent, you can’t bump them off their tile, they exist to just be in your way. A score to compare yours against at the end of the game.
The gripes I have with Expeditions mostly stems from mis-matched expectations. I went in with all the thoughts and feelings of Scythe, but found a game that feels more like Century Spice Road wearing Scythe’s clothing. I really wonder if calling it the sequel to Scythe was the right thing to do, considering just how different the games really are. The Scythe world was so unique and gripping that it does make sense to set more games in that universe, but I really feel that Expeditions suffers from sitting in the overbearing shadow of its predecessor.
I’m going to be honest with you, friends. I may be an adult, but inside I’m basically a big kid. My affection is easily won with trinkets and sweets. I do not have sophisticated tastes, rather, I yearn for simplicity. In my spare time, I just want to play with my toys.
Published by Queen Games way back in 2006, Shogun is set during Japan’s Sengoku period (1467-1573). Players assume the roles of a great Daimyo, leading their troops to conquer provinces across Japan. With an interesting twist of action programming and area control, playing the game is fairly straightforward. Each round begins with the 10 actions cards shuffled and placed along a row, indicating the order the actions will be taken. Only the first 5 are face up, however, giving players limited information on how the season will develop.
The actions players can take are things like spending money to build castles, temples, and theatres, or deploy more troops in the provinces they control, taxing the peasants for food or coin, and initiating combat with a neighbouring province. Combat in Shogun is determined with a cube tower with a couple slotted baffles shoved into the chute. All attackers and defenders are dropped into the cube tower, and whichever team emerges from the tower with the majority, takes control of the province. Any troops that get trapped in the tower might fall out at a later time for surprising reinforcements.
A round begins with the action cards getting placed in their spots, some face up, others face down. Then the 5 bonus cards get put into their slots, that will enhance your faction for a round, and serve as the player order queue for the rest of the round. Then simultaneously, players take all the province cards they have in their hands, and place them face down onto their action mat, indicating which action each province will take during that turn. Players also have a few bidding cards to bid for turn order, or, they can place those bidding cards on actions as a feint. They pass doing the action, but your opponents don’t know that.
After everyone’s programmed their actions, the bid for turn order resolves, an event gets revealed. There are 4 face up events at the start of each year, and each round, one of those events will be randomly selected to affect everyone for the entire round. Then, the core of the game gets underway. Starting with the first action in the action queue, everyone preforms that action. Most of the actions can happen simultaneously, as there aren’t any more choices to make. If you said you were going to bolster or build or tax in a province, you just, do that. It’s the combats that need to take place in player order. Combat is simple, you just take a number of cubes from a province and push them into a neighbouring region. If another player was there, you scoop up all the cubes now in that province and dump them into the cube tower. Whoever has the majority of cubes in that tray gets control of the province. In the case of a tie, control returns to the neutral peasants, and any unrest or buildings in that province are cleared away.
Shogun manages to create some stand up and shout exciting moments. There was one game where the purple player pushed his 5 cubes into my 2 cube province, and I managed to hold onto the province by a single cube. Then the immediate next action was another player attacking a province that had only a single purple cube. Well, those 4 extra cubes that got caught in the tower came out in force, drastically shuffling the distribution of forces on the island.
The gameplay is smooth, once you start resolving that action row, only slowing down when it’s time to count tiny cubes in that tower. The phase in which you’re planning your turn and programming your actions, however, can be fairly long as there is a lot to consider. It’s a real saving grace that everyone is doing that phase at the same time, otherwise Shogun‘s playtime could easily balloon to 3 hours. The analysis paralysis here is real.
In addition to keeping the other players off your territory, you also need to contend with the neutral peasants. They’re the faction you fight against whenever you battle against an empty province, and they revolt when you attempt to tax them too much. If you happen to take over someone else’s province that they taxed previously, those unrest tokens don’t go with them, the peasantry is still angry, despite the change in management. If you ever lose control of a province, either to another player or to a revolt,
There’s a lot to consider in Shogun, especially as each round inflicts an event on everyone. These can range from getting a minimum or maximum tax, to forbidding combat in provinces that have a temple. While you know what the events MIGHT be, you won’t know which one is actually in effect until after you’ve committed your actions to specific provinces.
After 3 action rounds, a 4th scoring round occurs. First, everyone loses some rice, then you must have 1 rice for every province you control. If you don’t, you suffer a number of revolts. This can be pretty punishing, especially when someone manages to attack the province you were going to tax rice in before you were able to tax said rice. The joys of action programming.
Last week I wrote about Arcs, a game where every mechanism and decision feels deliberate and worth discussing. Every mechanism and decision that Cole Wherle put into that design is worth talking about. By direct contrast, Shogun feels boring, flat, and uninteresting. And yet, I had fun playing Shogun. If both Arcs and Shogun were set up on tables with empty seats, I’d sit down to play Shogun every single time. It’s not that it’s a better-designed game, because it’s not. But because it reminds me of why I play games in the first place: to have fun. Shogun isn’t a masterpiece, but it doesn’t need to be. The best game is the one that gets played, and for me, I’m so much more keen to play Shogun. I’m not sure if that’s an endorsement for Shogun or an indictment for Arcs, but in the end, only one of those games makes me laugh, cheer, and want to play again.
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 40minute 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.
