some spare words about Arcs

 Hello!

So I just wrapped potentially my favorite Arcs campaign that I've played to date. It was one of the closest finishes I've ever seen - the last card of the last hand of the last chapter determined the winner - but it was also a triumphant narrative that had me thinking a hell of a lot about the game we’d just played - which is madness, considering how many times I’ve now sat down to mess around in The Reach. I wanted to ramble about it all, just a little bit.

Act One had us start as the Steward (build a powerful empire!), Partisan (seize the initiative and cause trouble!), and Magnate (facilitate trading and export resources). Our Steward struggled to get things rolling in the early game, with high-scoring ambitions going to this outrageous, populist Partisan hoovering the limelight, with the wealthy Magnate funding them. The Steward’s empire was growing healthily, but its benefits were shared a little too freely - plenty of purple ships were on the board keeping things in check, but no points were actually there for the Steward, to make it all worth something. Act One eventually saw The Empire fall into the Partisan's hands, at the height of its powers! Actually, it didn’t so much as fall into their hands as it was neatly placed - gifted to them through a small court manipulation from the Magnate - who traded their agents for a hefty stash of resources leading into Act 2. This then soon led to the Magnate actually leaving that very same Empire - becoming an outlaw as an elaborate means of tax evasion.

Act Two was a stunner, opening with our Partisan revealing their true colours as the vitriolic Planet Breaker - leveraging their now staggering military might for Empire-sanctioned worldbreaking. Huge fleets of pristine empire ships watched on as planets were torn apart with ruthless efficiency.  Whilst this happened, The Magnate offered bountiful tributes of weapons to this despot in order to maintain preferential treatment - terrified by the powerful yet fickle monster they had helped to create. The Steward, scorned, became the equally cruel Hegemon - traveling to the deepest corners of the Reach to scorch the earth and raise banners in their name. This alarmed our Planet Breaker - there was only room for one despot in town! Time for a spot of warfare.

The Magnate took the opportunity to play both sides of the ensuing conflict, dispensing weapons to the highest bidder, and eventually securing monopolies on Fuel and Material both - just in time! The Planet Breaker swiftly fells the Hegemon with a decisive blow and subsequently shatters their original homeworld, removing another fuel city from The Reach. The Magnate spies an opportunity to permanently secure their monopoly - electing to themselves eradicate one of the final material cities! But their frequent tributes to the Planet Breaker meant that their monopolies were not enough - ultimately failing their second act objective by a single point of progress as the reach began to burn…

Act Three brought total chaos, as the Planet Breaker tried their best to fend off two freshly created horrors. The Magnate twisted into the Judge - seeking to restore balance and order - and the Steward-turned-Hegemon once again shapeshifted - into the chaos-oriented Gate Wraith, who would seek to blow holes in space, and send ships into an amorphous limbo called 'The Twisted Passage'.

In this final act, the Planet Breaker continually tried to keep these squabbling factions in check. The Gate Wraith collapsed space alarmingly fast, and the Judge halfheartedly arbitrated whilst accumulating healthy interest on their monopolies of material and fuel both. For the Gate Wraith - creating this twisted passage was not enough - they needed to control it - and saw returning to their Regency, to their Stewardship, as the only way to do so.

An immense, multi-chapter battle for the regency took place, whilst the judge quietly siphoned allies from the court. But whilst they were looking in one place, something far more frightening simmered. With all this attention placed on control of the Empire - nobody checked its health. A freak chance event caused the Empire to fall - turning both squabbling regents into outlaws, and decimating Empire control across the board. What’s worse, this event coincided with violent storms within the Twisted Passage - sending the already-ailing imperial fleet to a sudden demise. It was total chaos - reducing the entire board to just a few sad ships circling the drain.

But then! The very next round? Legions of those Empire Ships returned from the dead, ghost ships drifting through the Twisted Passage and once again staking a claim on this focal territory for the Empire - an Empire with no leader. There they lingered, until, at the very last second, the Gate Wraith wrested control of the Empire for good - their entire presence in the Reach now condensed into the storm at its center. With that, they took victory of the campaign - their final goal achieved. What did they have to show for it? A Reach that was utterly devoid of motion - planets and gates devastated with equal measure, not a single scrap of life left on the board save for flecks of stranded blight, and the lone outpost of a once great Magnate still hoarding his vast material wealth.

My goodness, what a delight it all was.

So this is all gooey narrative stuff, which I obviously adore, but I was also just in disbelief as to how it all ticked along mechanically despite the board state getting so loopy.

I played as the Magnate in this game, and whereas I’ve previously felt a little adrift in the negotiation space of Arcs, here things really popped to life. I felt confident and competent! I managed to have what people needed at the times they needed them, leveraging a powerful court position to make deals with a Steward who had no access to relics - and who was also curiously reluctant to use their signature ‘Dealmakers’ card - and a Partisan with a shopping list of needs for scoring ambitions every single round. At one point in the game I sold the initiative! It just clicked in a way I’ve previously felt a little unable to scratch.

I think that a (by his own admission) slightly weaker Steward led to a terrifically interesting gamestate. Stewards normally present a problem for Magnates, who really want the power that comes with the taxation options of the regency. I felt like securing the First Regent title might have created an embittered relationship, and so took myself elsewhere and became an Outlaw that resisted Empire control and violence through the odd favour of resources garnered through the ever-useful ‘Merchant Leagues’ card. I was more than happy to see the Partisan compete with the Steward for control of the Empire as it represented a high profit environment for me to thrive in - but my goodness it started to get really ugly once they’d shifted to the Planet Breaker.

Cripes, the Planet Breaker is simply terrifying when they’ve got a powerful Empire behind them. I’ve never felt like The Empire has been more ‘we’re the baddies’ coded, as this wrecking-ball of a fleet shot around the map and leveled planet after planet with zero resistance. Arcs stories have complex villains - characters pushed to the edge resorting to any means to make their beliefs into reality. Here, everyone was scum - no two ways about it.

I also found a rare situation where, as a C Fate, I quite quickly had my signature card taken away due to planet breaker outrage. Without ‘The Arbiter’ card, The Judge has a tremendously difficult time doing the ambition-balancing that makes them a threat - and it immediately made my Act 3 rather tough on a conceptual level. See, I thought I was out straight away! But I simply was not. Playing a very successful Magnate in Acts one and two meant that I had a near 20 point lead on both of my opponents - so I stood a significant chance of winning on that front even with the mega points our Planet Breaker had access to with their Grand Ambitions! I realised far too late that I should have committed hard to that approach - I could have been pretty unstoppable. Those fuel and material monopolies were nigh impossible to get off of me because there were so few cities left on the board due to empire mismanagement and a greedy planet breaker, with both other fates sporting flagships reticent to upgrade to get resource slots in favour of instead increasing their millitary might. I should have been declaring Tycoon every single round and completely palmed off my C Fate objective! I would have taken a small penalty in points, but I think I might have outstripped the planet breaker even with their grand ambitions.

And goodness, there were just so many sparkly little moments. I’ve left out of my retelling a moment where the Planet Breaker was no longer appeased by my Magnate tributes, and bragadociously arrived over my homeworld to eradicate it - it was next on their shopping list of populous planets to destroy! They felt unstoppable, not expecting me to seize the initiative and blast them into smithereens before they had a chance to fire a single shot - a fabulous moment!

Similarly, the Gate Wraith was popping open gates phenomenally quickly at the start of act 3 - and were just about to use one of my starports to open another! I felt helpless to defend it - with so few ships present anywhere on the board to contest. But then, out of nowhere, the Planet Breaker turns up and doesn’t fight their fleet, but rather detonates my starport! Rather than stay to fight afterwards, they then just peace out back to the Twisted Passage where they can’t be harmed, and the Gate Wraith has to drag their flagship off to the other side of the Reach to build a recently-broken slipstream drive. Very funny.

And what a horrible space we lived in by the end of our campaign - next to no buildings on the board, five planets completely out of play, and every single gate collapsed into the Twisted Passage. It didn’t come out of nowhere, though! It gradually slipped, turn by turn, through greedy players and bad decisions.

The climax of the game was quite literally a perfect storm. The ‘Empire Falls’ card spells absolute disaster for anyone in the Empire - but its chances of triggering naturally are quite slim - a 50% chance of a crisis triggering from an event card, and then a further 33% chance of that card causing real damage. The Empire played the odds - putting all their effort into wrangling control of the power itself without ensuring that power had stayed relevant! Not only that, but the ‘Empire Falls’ card was seeded into the deck all the way back in Act One, when the Steward first lost their power! For that specific card to return at that specific time? When a shadow of a shadow of that Steward desperately attempted to crowbar themselves back into an Empire that they failed to control, and to maintain? It was exceptional. It was one of those moments that had everyone physically stand up. It had heads in hands, It had wide-eyed disbelief at quite how bad things had gotten.

The thing is - all of this still came with a lot of Arcs’ signature mess. Lots of rules disputes, lots of misremembering cards, lots of having to parse all of this on top of the trick taking game. Our Steward player, whilst playing the game, had the realisation that they probably wouldn’t be introducing the campaign to their game group in the near future. The whole thing took us about 10 full hours, and would have been even longer if our fourth player hadn’t dropped out beforehand.

Arcs, the base game, is the kind of box that I think anyone can love - given the right approach to the systems, and electing to meet it on its own terms. 

The Campaign? I would personally recommend it more than anything else out there in board games - I think it’s one-of-a-kind and spectacularly iterates on the ideas of everything Leder made before it, whilst building a more competitive (if more complex) experience. 

But it’s so much. It’s too much. It’s a bonkers, bonkers box. But I’m so glad it exists.

I’m hoping some of this will make it into a definitive ‘campaign guide’ for Arcs that i’ll make down the line - focusing on how to teach this huge new version of the game, how to approach it as a player and as the person who owns the game, and how to strategise within its monstrous sandbox. But that’ll come down the line. For now, more campaigns. What a treasure.