Arcs, Played the Way the Tower Allows: Two Players, No Bot, No Choice

Got Arcs up here on a gamble, mostly because Cole Wehrle’s name was on the box and I’d sunk a lot of hours into Oath a couple winters back. Weather was doing that thing in early October where you can’t tell if the ridge going white overnight is the first snow or just smoke haze, so I had the stretch to get through the rulebook slow, twice, before anyone showed up to actually play it with me.

First honest thing to say. There is no solo mode. None. Not a bot, not an automa, nothing. So up here Arcs is a strictly two-player game or it doesn’t get played at all, and that turned out fine, because the two-player mode is apparently one of the better ones Leder’s put out. Somebody backing it on Kickstarter thanked Wehrle directly in their review for making the two-player game work, called it huge, and after four plays with the one hiker who wandered onto my trail in August I’d say the same.

The trick-taking core is what stuck with me. You’re not so much building an engine as reading the one person across from you, guessing what they’ll lead and deciding whether to follow or blow the hand open. Quiet, tense, a little like deciding whether to bring the binoculars down early when weather’s coming in from the west and you’re still not sure what it is.

Teach’s long though. The rulebook’s own estimate, something like 45 minutes per player for novices, held up exactly for us. And there’s a real snag a handful of people flagged that I ran into myself: get boxed in early with a bad hand and nothing built, and you can end up reduced to a hopeless position with an hour of the session still left to sit through. No elimination, technically. Worse in a way. You’re still there.

Rating it a 4. The campaign box is still sealed, needs three people minimum and I don’t get three people up here, maybe someday if the smoke’s slow enough.