The nuts!
By Flundran at 2024-08-25
Regarding Arcs!
Alright, so, my first impressions of Arcs. The trick taking game is really fun. It's a simple way to get some excitement, variety, and just the right amount of tactical challenge. You're really playing against your opponents here. Growing up with card games like Five-Card Draw, Chicago, and Plump, this felt familiar and a little cozy. At the same time, it adds a nerve and a twist to the game. You want to keep the initiative, make the most of your hand, and pull off the actions you need. You have to start ambitions to score points, and that basically sacrifices a card and, most likely, the initiative. Fun, exciting, sweaty.
Then, something I missed at first, you can pay for extra actions with your resources. You do this in the "prelude." It really throws a wrench into things and opens up the game quite a bit.
And then there are cards that give you extra abilities, Guild Cards. You want these, and there's a little subgame around them. It’s almost like a little bidding game that you have to keep an eye on as you try to wrestle the epic space battle.
And on that note, you have the whole game of navigating the board. Building stuff. Fighting, taking resources, taking resources from each other, taking Guild Cards from each other, taking prisoners and trophies. This plays into winning ambitions.
And of course, winning ambitions is how you score. How the ambitions get resolved can swing the points standing wildly. You must pay attention to the ambitions. This I believe, can lead to races in the race as ambitions get triggered and people try to secure points.
I get a similar feeling as you get in Crisis. You know what you want to do, but you don't quite get there, but you're satisfied when you manage to take a trick and pull off some clever maneuver. It's mean, but it's mean all the time, so it's not a "gotcha!" but just general weird misery in space. It’s wonderful. :D