Arcs board game review – scrapping in space never felt so good

The latest board game from Root and Oath creator Leder Games, Arcs has set the internet ablaze with a gasoline fire of hype in the past few months. With a combination of unique mechanics and satisfying gameplay, Leder seems to have found a perfect blend that appears to please almost everyone.

It’s complex enough to hold anyone’s attention, straightforward enough that most people will give it a go, and different enough that even the most jaded of board gamers is now hopping around, all fresh-faced and newly excited.

With the retail release of Arcs expected for next month (and our hall-of-fame guide to the best board games in the world crying out for new blood) we thought we’d take a good, hard look at this for ourselves, to see if it lives up to the hype.

What is Arcs?

At its core, Arcs is a capital S, capital B, capital G Space Board Game. You build ships and ping them around the galaxy, plop down starports and cities on empty planets to start sucking up resources, and if someone’s getting too big for their boots (or has something you want), engage in some old-fashioned dice-rolling fisticuffs.

But it’s also a card game. The basic system that drives all of Arcs is that of a trick-taking game, not completely divorced from classic playing card games like Hearts or Whist.

The space game is unremarkable. It does the job, but by itself, would wear pretty thin pretty quickly. Luckily, it’s like the practical, hard wearing canvas of a fantastic tent, held up and raised high by the twin tentpoles of Arc’s cardplay and its scoring system…

Taking tricks

In each of Arcs’ larger rounds (called Chapters) you’ll get a hand of six cards which will set the course for everything you can do across the next six turns. Each card comes in one of four suits: construction, mobilization, administration, and aggression.

You’ll play one card per turn, and this will determine what actions you can take (building or repairing with construction, fighting or moving with aggression, etc). Each card has a number of actions printed on it, and a separate number, which represents how strong it is in the trick-taking game.

You see, you’re influenced in what you achieve each turn by whoever is the lead player. The lead plonks their card down first, and then immediately gets to take all of that card’s lovely actions. Everyone else can ‘surpass’, following suit with a higher value card, in which case they also get to take all their card’s actions and potentially win the initiative, getting to be the lead player next go.

But if you can’t or don’t want to follow suit, you must either ‘copy’, playing a card face down and taking a measly one of the lead card’s actions, or ‘pivot’ playing any card face up, which unshackles you from the need to follow the lead suit, but again restricts you to just a single action. Inefficient!

You can also spend two cards at once, wasting one of them, to immediately seize the initiative and lead the following turn. Do this however, and you’re doomed to skip a go entirely at the end of the round.

Already, there’s interesting stuff going on here. The actions you want to take on Arcs’ board may bear little resemblance to what you’ve actually got available in your hand, and you may be prevented from making the best use of them anyhow by a lead player who keeps trotting out the wrong suit. It takes a cunning alien fox of a player to expertly maneuver so they can grab the lead and hold onto it.

But how do you win a game of Arcs? Well, that’s when the other tentpole slides into place, and doesn’t get trapped in the canvas, prompting you to tug on it from the other end and inevitably causing it to come apart – it’s a good tent.

Winning the game

Your objectives in Arcs shift like sand. The players set targets for each chapter by declaring ambitions. There are five of these available, three based around collecting specific resources, one on blowing up buildings and ships to take as trophies, and one on taking little meeple agents as captives. However, players can all go after and compete for any ambitions that are played, and only three can be set each chapter.

The tricky wrinkles are, you can only declare an ambition on a card when you lead with it, each card has one specific ambition it can set, and setting an ambition reduces your card’s value to zero, letting others easily surpass you.

If you declare an ambition early, it’s likely to be worth more points. But early on in a chapter, you might not have a great idea what you’re going to be able to achieve. The earlier you set an ambition, the more time your enemies have to go pursue it, but wait too long and you’ll miss your moment entirely. When you’ve taken the lead, it might be your only chance to set down a crucial objective. But now you’re in the lead, do you really want to ‘zero’ your card and give it away so easily?

The trick taking game and its ambitions mechanic are the beating heart of Arcs, but the whole thing is made up of really neatly interlocking systems that require you to constantly make difficult choices about how to use what’s available to you. For instance, resources are vital for scoring objectives at the end of each round, but it’s also tempting to spend them, as you can also use them to take additional actions.

There’s a central court, home to a sort of a bidding war system where one type of action places agents onto guild cards representing secret orders or mining organizations, and another claims cards you have the most agents on. These guild cards tend to have multiple functions, giving a resource bonus and a static ability, but also another power if you discard them. Grabbing cards that other players bid on also gets you their agents as captives, and if someone has a card you like the look of, you can use your military to bombard their planets and try and take it.

Arcs is a compact but deep game. Everything has more than one use, and there’s more than one way to achieve any goal. This makes it a game that’s pretty easy to learn, but very hard to master.

How does Arcs play?

In the first half of your first game of Arcs it seems impossible to plan for the long term, and everyone is likely to spend their first few actions engaged in some amount of semi-random floundering. But once you get to grips with what the different cards and resources can do, you realize that’s not quite the case. You can always make plans. It’s just that the best laid plan never survives contact with the enemy. And in Arcs, you and your enemies are always in close contact.

It’s a cutthroat game, where not playing rough is simply not an option. There are only five of each resource available, for instance, so if you wanted to sit back and accrue fuel for the Tycoon ambition through lawful taxation, you’d quickly discover there’s none left to drill up, that it’s all locked in your neighbor’s vaults. Suddenly, that undefended planet is looking mighty tempting; and, oh look, you’ve got an Aggression card or two you didn’t have a plan for five seconds ago.

Arcs is all about being reactive, working out what to do now they’ve done that. I like that because it’s quite accessible – you don’t have to be a genius to be responsive.

But Arcs is nonetheless a complex puzzle, deceptively so, and because the timing with which you play your cards can mean everything, it runs to an interesting rhythm. There are turns where you play a single card, move two ships one space and pass, and turns where you chain events together, using your resources and special guild cards to pull off an explosive sequence of devastating moves.

Figuring out what to do with your cards – especially how to squeeze some juice out of a lopsided hand, is immensely satisfying. Arcs is a game where even the clear winner can still feel like a hardpressed, scrappy underdog. It seems like 90% of the time every single person at the table spends the first few seconds of each chapter grimacing at what fate has dealt them.

This game is highly strategic, with loads of different tactics to explore, but there’s still a healthy dollop of luck thrown into the mix. In what cards you receive, of course, but also in a more perceptible way in the delightfully quick risk-reward of combat. As cerebral and satisfying as other parts of Arcs can be, my friends and I were never having more fun than when a battle either went spectacularly well (and a successful player was taken for everything they’d got) or even better, spectacularly poorly, and ships blew up in the aggressor’s stupid warmongering face.

The scoring system is maybe my favorite thing about Arcs. The idea that you can be doing really well in one area, and that can be completely crucial or entirely insignificant is truly enticing to me. It’s great how the things that matter change each turn, and that you need to maneuver carefully not just to beat objectives, but to have a chance of setting them in the first place.

A dominant player can still be left woefully behind if they can’t marshal their cards in the right way to best take advantage of their board state. And if you’re the clear leader in one realm then you’ll need to fight tooth and nail to set the relevant objective – because no one else is going to.

The scoring system also encourages fiendishly opportunistic behavior. You beat objectives by having more than someone else but (outside of a two player game) there’s no other threshold you have to beat, so you can sometimes rack up big points just by achieving the bare minimum in a place others aren’t looking. Or perhaps you can wait for the last possible moment before laying an ambition that no one else has a hope of scoring for.

While the game is unapologetically competitive, it’s never felt too mean, at least at my table. It’s somewhat self-balancing. There are more points up for grabs the later in the game you go, so it’s not uncommon for an early leader to fall way behind and actually end up losing overall.

Who is Arcs for?

If you love strategy board games, you’ll probably love Arcs, that almost goes without saying. But what about if that’s not really you?

I’ve found it a bit difficult to grade Arcs’ complexity. It’s certainly easier to teach than Leder Games’ previous titles. But that’s not saying much: Root is an infamous example of a board game that looks really cute, but thanks to its asymmetry and fairly complex rules can actually be a nightmare to learn. (I once literally spent the entirety of my time at a board game cafe preparing to play, then had to pack up and go home).

Despite its slim box and few components, I’ve found casual players can still struggle at first to get to grips with Arcs. That’s partly because the concept of variable objectives can take a while to get your head around, and partly because everything has multiple uses – which can easily lead to choice paralysis.

However, ultimately I think most people will have a really good time with Arcs, provided they’re not completely turned off by the concept of a slightly deeper board game. It’s got a little something for everybody. There’s the spectacle of pushing little pieces around like a WWI general, the chaos of rolling dice and firing on your friends, and the satisfaction of staring at everything available to you and seeing the 1s and 0s line up as you spot just the right action to take.

Arcs isn’t for gamers who can’t stand conflict, or for people who get salty when things don’t go their way. If you can find failing fun, then you’re the right sort of person for Arcs.

If, more so than succeeding in a grand campaign, you find it satisfying to make the best of a bad situation, finding unexpected ways to come out on top then Arcs is definitely for you. Even when you’re badly behind, it’s possible, but rather rare that there’s nothing you can do to try to put you back on top.

In Arcs, everything is temporary. The resources and cards you need to score points are thrown to the fire to fuel your next hail mary of a turn. Your valuable action cards are tossed to the wind so you can seize the initiative at just the right moment. Succeeding by the skin of your teeth or just coming up short is what I’ve found to be the joy of Arcs.

All that can be pretty full-on, however. The rapidly changing board state in Arcs means you’ve really got to pay attention and be switched on the whole time. The best course of action is prone to change at any moment, so you can never sit back and play on autopilot – which might make it wrong for some groups and some game nights.

The game seems highly replayable, so I’m going to get some good use out of it. The interaction between board states, guild cards, and objectives will ensure no two games ever play out alike – and even the base box contains plenty of ways to shake things up further, like different starting positions, and the Leaders and Lore cards which provide powerful permanent abilities to shake up the game.

Overall, I had a blast with Arcs, and if anything I’ve said so far resonates with you, I think you probably will too.

Source: Wargamer