Space! It’s divided into sectors. Arcs if you will. Be ambitious! Control them all!
I’m not obligated to tell you anything about the quality of the gameplay in this ‘unboxing’ post, but TBGD is going to play a few games of Arcs and publish a review in a few weeks, so keep an eye out! Arcs is the latest Kickstarter delivery from Leder Games, with packages just starting to roll out in Australia and soon to the rest of the world. The game touts an innovative ‘trick taking’ inspired action system and a mechanism of scoring reminiscent of something like a combined Root and Oath. Anyway, I’ll stop rambling and let you get to the pictures!
1-6 Players | 45+ Minutes | Designed by Cole Wehrle
As per Leder Games convention, Arcs features a four letter long name and art by Kyle Ferrin. I adore Kyle’s artwork (you can see my praise in my other Leder Games reviews) and the adjustment to a whimsical space fantasy style fits Arcs‘ pseudo-sci-fi setting really well. Today I’ll be looking at what’s in the the base game box of Arcs!
Box Design
The box is the same size as Root‘s box – so fairly compact. It’s completely covered in lovely art inside and out. On the back of the box is a quick run down of the style of game, including a indicative list of the components. The blurb on the back of the box succinctly describes the game-play loop and win conditions of the game, giving a reasonable indication of what kind of games Arcs is.
Upon opening the box you are greeted with the rulebook, and the rules reference/player aid cards. The game-board and punch-boards are below this, separated from the other game components by a later of foam. I love this, as often wooden pieces can leave dents in the game board during shipping, and this shows that Leder wants your game to arrive in pristine condition!
Rulebook
Arcs presents its rules in a single rulebook. The rules are concise and clearly laid out. The book begins with game setup (which also serves to explain what each component is called). It then features a double page explaining the broad game concepts before describing the game-play loop in detail, finally moving onto minutiae of actions and other rules. I found it to be a pretty quick read and nothing seemed overly complicated.
The large reference cards included are very welcome, and include all the details of the gameplay steps and actions. If anything, they are probably too detailed as the game seems pretty straight forward, but that’s hardly a complaint!
Components
Arcs has a number of cardboard/chipboard components – the resources and player’s buildings are all cardboard tokens, along with a few other markers and tokens. Leder seems to have a fixed quality/material choice now for punch-board (seen across games such as Fort, Oath, and Root). The cardboard is a nice quality, thick and with a light linen finish. I had no problems with punching the tokens. The player boards are all the same stock but come pre-punched.
Arcs includes a set of 18 custom dice that are used for combat during the game. They are high quality engraved and paint filled dice, so no worries here about the faces wearing off!
The gameboard is a 6-fold board. It also has a light linen finish similar to the tokens. It is interesting in that it folds out to be ‘long’ rather than more rectangular, and is quite striking with its dark colouring. The back of the board features a space print pattern that matches the inside lining of the game box.
The cards look similar to the Fort and Oath cards, which were great quality, but unfortunately not linen finish. I’m not sure if I’ll be sleeving this game, so my gripe with smooth finish cards is that I struggle to shuffle them as they tend to clump together.
Finally, the meeples that come with the game are very nice. As with the other components Leder seems to have settled on a standard type of wood thickness and quality for their wooden pieces. They are very nice, however there is only one ‘cut’ for each of the two meeple types (ships and agents) where previous Leder titles often featured unique shaped meeples for each player’s forces. For those who want to spice up the wooden pieces, Leder is offering a box of Arcs miniatures to replace them all with custom sculpts.
Insert
The game box is well stuffed and features a simple cardboard insert that holds the meeples and cards and supports the player boards and game board on top. The “big box” that comes containing the Blighted Reach expansion has a much more fully featured insert containing spaces for all the components and individual trays for player pieces.
Availability
Arcs is just delivering through Kickstarter at the moment. I’m lucky to live in Australia where we are a bit closer to China so we get it a little early. Leder usually releases games to retail soon after Kickstarter backers get their copies, so keep an eye out in you local stores for this game if it interests you and you missed the Kickstarter! It’s also available on the Leder Games store!
Overall Thoughts
Overall I’m very impressed with this production. Of course I knew Leder Games wouldn’t skimp on any of the components of this game and Arcs demonstrated the consistent high quality that Leder is now producing games with. I’m very excited to get together some friends and start playing this game, and hopefully it won’t be too long before I can put some thoughts together as a review here on the blog – subscribe if you want to be notified when it goes live!
The copy of Arcs used for this post was provided to The Boardgame Detective by Leder Games.
The Boardgame Detective 