Tour de Arcs

It’s a strange thing to write a review in two parts. Originally I was going to have everything I thought about Arcs in one piece. It would have been about 4500 words and that felt a bit much. I have written so much because I truly think that Arcs is a unique game. It feels like a culmination of the team of Leder Games, Cole Wherle and Kyle Ferrin. I hope I am wrong in that. I hope that triumvirate of talent goes onto make something I love even more. For now we have Arcs and in The Blighted Reach the team have created one of my favourite gaming experiences of all time.

I bought the base game of Arcs and the Leaders and Lore expansion with my own money. I have played the Blighted Reach campaign with a friends copy. The images in this piece are my own or from the Leder games press pack for Arcs and The Blighted Reach.

Although Leaders and Lore expands the narrative and gameplay scope of Arcs it could be considered a mere trailer for the Blighted Reach Campaign (Arcs:BR). Let me be absolutely clear: the base game alongside Leaders and Lore are complete experiences in their own right. You also need to play them before attempting the campaign to get a really good feel for the rule fundamentals. As I said in my First Thoughts piece on Arcs, when Leder tells you to approach their game in a certain way, you listen. I can’t imagine the confusion of jumping straight to the campaign. As such this second part of my review is going to assume that you have familiarity with the base game. If not, go and read the first part that should give you an overview of the basics.

The Blighted Reach sees you battling through 3 Acts. Each Act is a game of Arcs with the first two being only 3 chapters long and the third being 4 chapters long (base game Arcs can be up to 5 chapters long). 

The setup is wildly different from the core. Now the Reach is ruled by the Imperium, whose navy has been pushed back into one section of space. It is collapsing under its own weight as the Blight appears throughout the systems. The Blight is a mysterious alien fungus that destroys everything it touches. Worse still free cities around the Reach have broken away from the Imperial yoke. A few loyal Regents, the players, see this situation as an opportunity. An opportunity to do what? That all comes down to Fate. 

You got to have Fate

Each player gets dealt two Fates at the start of the game and secretly chooses one of them. These are like the Leaders in that they introduce asymmetry and narrative. This isn’t just a sprinkling like that expansion though, this is the whole bottle. Gone is the abstraction of the core, here you have a role to play and the tools to do so!

Each of these “A Fates” tells you what your rough goal is going to be in each of the Acts to come. Let’s look at one of those Fates and the one I played in my first campaign of Arcs:BR: The Magnate

In Act 1 I’ll barter for Resources and Favours during Summits. Summits and Favours are two of the new mechanisms that the campaign introduces. We will get to them in due course. When it comes to Act 2 there is something about monopolies. I know what a monopoly is, just not in the context of the game. By Act 3 it sounds like I am doing some sort of heist with the goods and leaving the Reach! How is that even possible? There is a lot to take in from just this short description but it gives me a rough direction of travel. It still roots these ideas in the base game, having you aim for points from Ambitions as the victory condition. At least initially. 

Along with each Fate comes a bunch of cards that give you more information, options, rules, and more. These can fundamentally change many aspects of Arcs as you have come to know it: giving players new guild and lore cards, changing the court deck, and sometimes even altering the composition of the action deck. They can even introduce whole new rulesets which you put in the Accordion of Laws (at least that’s what I called it).

This starts simply with just a couple of edicts that pour forth from the Imperial Government. As Fates are chosen this is expanded with new edicts, rules changes, and whole new mechanisms to reflect how that Fate’s presence in the story affects the world around them. The scope of Arcs is expanded by the Blighted Reach and with the Accordion of Laws Cole Wherle gives themselves the permission to dial everything up to 11. 

As you progress through the campaign the Accordion might stay relatively sparse or become fat with new ideas and rules. The trouble with Fate is that you might know the direction you are going in, but the details of how you get there can be surprising. Fate evolves. 

Among the cards you get with the “A Fates” is a countdown objective. This sits at a certain starting value along the victory point track and you move it towards zero by achieving certain objectives. Let’s look at how the Magnate achieves this as an example. 

In Summits, I promise I am getting to those, I get 2 ticks down everytime I am given a Favour or a resource by someone else. I can also discard 3 resources in Summit to advance 3 down the track. The merchant league this card refers to is a special card that the Magante gets as part of their setup. It gives the Magnate two resources everytime they declare an ambition, but can only be used to trade in Summits.

If you get this objective all the way down to zero then you have succeeded in your Fate’s objective for this Act. This gives you the option of continuing with this Fate into Act 2. You get to see the next part of this particular story. You can check out a “B Fate” for Act 2 and choose between what you have and what you are given, taking your tale in a new direction. If you fail to achieve your Fate’s desires then you are forced to switch to a “B Fate” but you get two to choose from. Yes you’ve been thwarted, but opportunity to change now abounds.

“B Fates” have objectives just like the “A Fates”. You get your countdown clock, and points are still the main aim of your play through declaring and winning Ambitions. The Fates are broad strokes with room for narrative justification for how A becomes B. You will develop your own headcannon, tell your own tales round the space campfire. The emergent story is some of the best I have ever seen. 

When you approach the third Act this shift happens again. If you’ve achieved your objective you get to stick or twist. If you haven’t you have to twist. This brings us to the ‘C Fates’ and if you thought this was sounding weird already you haven’t seen anything yet. 

Up to this point we have cared about the base game objectives of Arcs: declare ambitions, win or come second, accumulate points. Sure we have some new ways of going about that with our Fates, but effectively our aim is the same as the base game. The ‘C Fates’ don’t give a damn about your points based objectives and many of them don’t even look at an Ambition. 

‘C Fates’ seek their own end to the stories you are telling. No longer are you seeking dominance through attrition and gathering resources, now you have your own goal. Maybe you will open a hole in space-time to leave to another Galaxy like the Gate Wraith Fate. The Pirate becomes the Overlord using their spoils to subjugate the people. The Planet Breaker finds themselves without the fabled weapon they sought out and turns back to the faith they established as the Believer in Act 1. As the Redeemer they seek out the relics of their Faith and destroy them. Idolatry is Blasphemy. 

There are so many new mechanisms that you might see in a single campaign of Blighted Reach I am simply not going to dive into everything. I would however like to take a moment to look at Summits and Favour. Told you I would get there. 

Summit up the strength

Every now and again a player will get an opportunity to call a summit. There are various ways to achieve this but the core two are a new card in the court that is always present and events that pop up in the action deck. The player calling the summit gets to do a few special things that are interesting and useful, but the main thing everyone gets to do is negotiate. You do this in very specific ways, with rules about what can be bargained and traded. As an example you can swap one of their ships for one of yours, and maybe that benefits you both. One of the things you can trade is Favour. 

Favour is represented by your agents, the ones you use in the base game to show your influence on court cards. During a summit you can offer them in trade. You might get something you really want for this deal, but it comes with a price down the line. If a player has one or more of your favour in a summit they can give it back to you, to force you to negotiate in a way they dictate. Still within the rules laid out, but you have no choice in the matter. This can be absolutely devastating at the right moment and gives the play a very ‘Sword of Damocles’ feeling as you never know when those favours are going to be called in. 

I simply adore the Summits and the way Arcs:BR handles negotiation. The rules give you structure but allow you to use them creatively while simultaneously being firm on how the contract is signed. Of course this being Arcs:BR, there are other ways to get Favour and some Fates will use the Summits more than others. 

I could keep going about the different mechanisms that Blighted Reach brings to Arcs but I honestly want to leave as much as possible up to you to discover on your own. One of the delights of this campaign is seeing the stories emerge as Fates change, rules alter, and expectations are table flipped into a different galaxy. This variety is also the only major weakness of the expansion and that comes down to the way the rules are laid out. 

Regular readers will know that I am a huge fan of Leder Games and their attitude to helping you learn their games. Their player aids are excellent, the rules clear, allowing players to get to playing the game instead of remembering the rules. For the base game of Arcs and Leaders and Lore this still holds true. The little help booklet looks intimidating but it is actually a really good summary of everything you need to know. There are also 4 of them, one for each player. Looking at you “almost every other game” and your “one cheat sheet” or “summary on the back of the rules”.

The Blighted Reach is a lot murkier. There are so many combinations of Fates that I think it would be unreasonable for them to have covered every potential rules clash perfectly. However we found ourselves looking up rules that felt pretty fundamental online rather than in the rules. As we played we found ourselves scrambling to figure out edge cases and that was not a good feeling. There is a card database for Leder Games where you can get some clarification, but I feel Arcs could maybe do with a Law book like Root has to cover some of the weirder possibilities. I wouldn’t say it ruined anything for us, but the lack of clarity I found surprising and disappointing in a Leder Games product. 

It Reaches Out

The Blighted Reach sits beside games like Twilight Imperium, Eclipse, and the numerous 4X titles that exist within our hobby. It is a genre with a reputation for table hogging play areas, huge time commitments, and fiddly mechanisms. The Blighted Reach gives the narrative arc, couldn’t help myself, of these epics but in a tight play space and time. You can get through a whole campaign in a day (I’ve done so twice). Not only do you get a satisfying story, you can experience lots of different aspects of the campaign through your choice of Fates. It feels like the team looking at the legacy genre and wondering how streamlined they can make it. You don’t have to commit to 20 or 30 sessions to get your epic story here, just 3 games.

The Blighted Reach feels to me like the game that Oath promised to be. It takes that idea of legacy and being affected by the actions of the past and places it in a tighter, more understandable game. I admired Oath very much but I didn’t enjoy it. In The Blighted Reach you get your narrative arc for the individual Act, but also the path of history between the Acts. You get to see how actions reverberate down through the ages, and how our choices set us on different paths. It taks the more abstract base game of Arcs and pushes it into the realms of Space Opera.

The Blighted Reach is simply one of the most mind blowing gaming experiences I have ever had. Every twist and turn of the Fates delighted me. It builds on the base game in surprising, clever, and often hilarious ways. As you play you find yourself leaning into the character of your Fates: negotiating and dealing as the Magnate, putting down insurrection as The Admiral, or being mysterious about those ancient robots you are waking up as The Caretaker. It is a truly unique experience and a phenomenal achievement from the whole Leder team. I can’t wait to go back out into the Reach and see what Fate has in store for me. I hope to see you there. 

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