Arcs (board game)

Arcs: Conflict & Collapse in the Reach is a 4X-style space opera board game designed by Cole Wehrle, illustrated by Kyle Ferrin, and published by Leder Games in 2024 alongside Arcs: The Blighted Reach Expansion, a large expansion which significantly modifies the base game into a three-act legacy campaign. Its full retail release is expected in September 2024. In Arcs, players compete to gain the most points by fulfilling variable objectives, taking actions through a trick-taking system and using different dice to attack enemy starships, with each player possessing variable powers.

Gameplay
The base game of Arcs is a fast-paced strategy game set in the "void", an area of outer space. Players portray spacefaring societies, and attempt to win by obtaining galactic supremacy, gaining points by fulfilling various objectives called "ambitions", which include constructing buildings, upgrading their respective spaceships, gathering resources from the various planets depicted on the board, and waging war. Each game is played over five "chapters", or rounds, and begins with a randomized setup.

A large amount of gameplay revolves around trick-taking using action cards. This begins each round with one player, who has the 'initiative', leading by placing a card onto the table from their hand and taking actions based on the card's suit, and other players following based on the number on that card, being restricted into copying the same action. Some cards allow more actions to be taken, with a base number of 1 actions per turn and extra actions allowed if resources, which are also used to score points, are spent. The player who leads is able to declare an ambition, determining how players score points in that round, but in doing so drops the number on their played card to zero, meaning that others can easily overtake them in the turn order. Available court cards enable players to customise their personal gameplay through individual powers, and can be stolen by other players.

Players fight with starship pieces which can be in three states; healthy, damaged or off the board. Three types of dice are used for different types of attack on the board, with blue dice offering low damage but no risk, red dice being more aggressive but coming with significant risk, and orange dice which enable the theft of resources but at a high risk.

Development
Wehrle has stated that after the completion of the design of his 2021 game Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile, he "was filled with all sorts of odd ideas that didn’t fit into that game", and "wanted to stay in the space but design something new," making a more "narratively chunky" game. He was inspired by roguelike games.

Initially marketed during development as Arcs: Collapse and Conflict in the Void, the game was announced on October 3, 2021. At this point, Wehrle described it as a "short campaign game" playable in 2 to 4 sessions for 3 to 4 players and with a total run time of five hours maximum. In February 2022, Wehrle stated that the game would have "40 to 50" different objective cards to pursue, leading to "tens of thousands of different possible game states", including secret objectives, with the result of each game having a direct impact on the setup of the next.

On May 3, 2022, A Kickstarter campaign was scheduled for May 24 until June 14 that year, with shipment to backers estimated to begin in December 2023. Unlike Wehrle's 2018 game Root, players of Arcs were expected to have starting identities rather than asymmetric factions, and unlike Oath, the game world would be reset after three games of the campaign.

On May 17, 2022, Leder Games announced that it planned to separate the campaign section of Arcs from its replayable base game, instead marketing the campaign as an expansion; Wehrle cited potential future struggles in marketing Arcs as a big-box experience, as well as the need to provide an "arcade mode" for players to understand the game better before beginning an "overwhelming" campaign as the main reasons for this change. In doing this, the game could also be designed with the intention to add further expansions in the form of add-on modules by their other designers. He designed the campaign expansion as a "three-act structure", in which the acts were individual playthroughs that each flowed into the next game through analog "procedural generation". Wehrle intended for the game to operate in a similar way to games such as Twilight Imperium and Eclipse, though with significantly quicker games of 60-90 minutes.

The Kickstarter campaign earned over $532,000 in its first five hours when launched. In March 2023, while Arcs was in its early access development stage, Wehrle stated that the game would feature a two-player mode, requiring a restriction of the size of the map, alteration of how cards were drawn and change to how players gained resources and scored points. The game's full retail release is expected in September 2024.

Reception
Rob Wieland of Forbes praised the game for its speed compared to Twilight Imperium, Eclipse and Star Wars: Rebellion. He remarked that the base game was "one that’s stayed in the conversation with my friends long after we’ve tried it out," and compared the start of each game to "a Star Wars cold open", with players feeling as though they were "the head of a big space bureaucracy". Bell of Lost Souls compared the game to "if Warhammer 40,000 stopped pretending it wasn’t as goofy and silly as it is" and called it a "space opera". In July 2024, Luis Aguasvivas of NPR listed Arcs as one of the best games of the year thus far.