21st August 2024
A very busy night in St Ives with 25 gamers covering six tables with ten different games over the course of the night. A mix of favourites and five new games with a range of themes from the more tranquil wine making and art collecting to magic and space battles.
A few tables quickly got started with their pre-booked longer games, Arcs, The Gallerist and Underwater Cities. While one table managed to crack through four different games in the night, Ticket to Ride: Europe, Braggart, Century: Eastern Wonders and Ecosystem, which had already been out as a starter on another table. The final tables chose Viticulture Tuscany and Res Arcana followed by Akropolis.
Arcs is the latest game from Cole Wehrle at Leder Games (also creator of Root, Oath, Pax Pamir 2nd Ed, John Company 2nd Ed), it has been through many changes during it’s development - it looks nothing like the original kickstarter pitch, but a few years of refinement have created something rather interesting. Arcs is the current “hotness” in the board gaming world and it finally arrived in the UK a few weeks ago for the kickstarter backers. Three people joined to play for the first time (only the second game for Simon).
There are three ways to play Arcs. Base Arcs is, well, the core of the game which is a space themed rush for victory points. This bit feels very much like Root, each player trying to get to a pre-set total (depending on the number of players) to win. How do you score points, well the players decide… by selecting what Ambition (from among five) scores each chapter (sort of like the achievements in Terraforming Mars, where the player that selects the criteria might not be the one to win those points). The “cool” and “weird” part of the game is how you take actions within a chapter, which is done by playing cards in something akin to a trick taking card game (not exactly a trick taking game, but some of the ideas and language come across). This is a game of adapting plans, given the cards you are dealt at the start of the chapter you have to come up with a plan to score points, but everything is hard and timing your lunge for points - while also ensuring that aspect is even up for scoring this chapter - is a complex dance; which the other players are also trying to perform and get in your way. This is not a game for long term plans and turtling, a substantial contrast with other space themed games (for example Eclipse that has recently been played at the club); you can never do exactly what you want and the random cards each chapter make this a “tactical game” (although that term isn’t terrible well defined, it evokes the right feeling). Players can, do, and must get in each others way and attack each other. There is no hiding and, like many other Leder Games offerings, there is a strong sense of direct conflict between the players (which is not to everyone’s taste).
We played a four player game of Base Arcs, with minor differences between players due to starting locations, these differences grew as each player began to focus on specific ambitions - partly driven by starting location and by the cards they had in each chapter, and getting court cards (small but impactful rule tweaks). Getting your head around the card action system takes a chapter or two; then understanding the scoring ambitions and how to achieve them (and stop others achieving them). It was a messy game, with many “oh that’s how that works” moments. It was my first four player game, and the addition of the ones and sevens to the deck made a surprisingly big change. The game was slightly ruined in the last chapter after a small rules mistake threw the balance of the game. However, there was strong interest in trying again, so this will likely be on the table at the club next session.
The other two ways to play are only for those who have played Base Arcs a couple of times; it even says so in the rules. Leaders and Lore add asymmetric powers, hardly any new rules however the advantages and disadvantages these cards bring add substantial changes to how players navigate the game. L&L Arcs might be seen as moving closer to Root, but the players draft the Leaders and Lore cards at the start of the game. Campaign Arcs is a whole other beast, playing three linked games where the players have Fates (essentially a complex Leader) that grow/change over the three games. Campaign Arcs might be seen as moving closer to Oath. Having not tried L&L nor Campaign Arcs yet I cannot say, but I’m excited to explore them in the future.
The work of Vital Lacerda, renowned designer responsible for some of the crunchiest Euro- style games there are, has rarely if ever featured on club nights. While his designs may not rival the legendary Campaign for North Africa for complexity (4.74/5 on BGG’s difficulty scale, but surely an understatement), they come close with titles such as On Mars (4.67) and Weather Machine (4.59; Carcassonne 1.89 for comparison) regarded as true heavyweights.
Against this background, Jyo K., Steph H., Darren C. and Steve L. embarked on an interesting sociological experiment; could four experienced boardgamers, only one of whom had played a Lacerda title before, manage to fit a complete game into one club night without actually reading the rules and relying on nothing more than a 30 minute ‘how to play’ video? The title chosen was The Gallerist (a relatively balmy 4.24/5 on BGG’s complexity scale), a ‘why did I do that?’ remorse inducing worker placement game built on the premise that art isn’t actually about beauty at all and is really just a vehicle for the pursuit of wealth by other means. Art for art’s sake? Nah! Show me the money!
Each player takes the part of a gallery owner with money and influence to spend on discovering and promoting new artists across a range of media types (painting, sculpture, digital and photography), buying and selling art at a profit and running a successful gallery popular with investors, collectors and VIPs. Not having read the rules, let alone played before, no one had any real idea of how the detailed endgame scoring would work in practice, so a number of different strategies were pursued. Jyo majored on building influence in the art world and dealing, selling her entire collection at a decent profit but ending the game with an empty gallery. Steph and Darren focused more than the others on the auction and international market actions, which require a big staff of assistants but (as it turns out) can provide some hefty wins in end game scoring when everything converts to MONEY! Eschewing these more ‘obvious’ approaches, Steve tried the alternative strategy of having no influence, no assistants and precious little money for most of the time (think Del Boy selling fake art from the back of a yellow Reliant Robin and you will be in the right area).
Half- way through the evening, Steve was convinced he was destined for an ignominious last place, but by the end had at least managed to sell some art and have a nearly full gallery. This somehow proved enough for an unexpected second place, but Steph romped home for a comfortable win by a very substantial margin. No one was quite sure why, but whatever you have to do to win, Steph clearly did it better than everyone else. No doubt there were some mistakes with the rules (e.g. why was the neutral central plaza knee deep in VIPs for most of the game? Was someone hosting a Davos type event there?), but a big shout out goes to Rodney Smith of “Watch it played” fame for making it possible.
Underwater Cities with the New Discoveries expansion was back for its third club play last out in session 77. In fact it was almost a rematch of that game with Kathy J., Natasha M. and Tom M. returning while Neil O. was back from the other previous play back in session 23 in early 2022 so he needed a quick rules reminder.
Tom had remembered how useful the museum board bonuses were and focused his strategy on expanding across his board to claim those first and established a good lead with in game victory points. Kathy had intended on a resource building (labs, farms, desalination plants) strategy after selecting the Manager as her assistant which comes with a expansion site building bonus, but then picked up a few cards that worked well together and suggested a sideline in the “shopping” cards. This was working well and she was keeping up with Tom’s in game points, but Natasha was steadily working towards her end game bonus of sets of building upgrades with four sets completed by game end. Neil was busy building, with a city and tunnel network covering most of his board including mostly red domes with many desalination plants that would generate a lot of end game points and resources.
Then in the final era it was a race to snag the best end game bonus cards that matched each person’s strategy and get them played, and try to finish the museum board bonuses to squeeze a few more victory points out of the last turn. The final scores were all over one hundred and quite close with Neil one point ahead of Natasha, Tom a few more points ahead of them but Kathy’s museum bonus of an extra metropolis with shopping card based end game score helped claimed the win.
A variant of Viticulture played once before back in session 17, Viticulture Tuscany was selected for some winemaking by the next table. This expansion adds an extended game board, new workers and structures, extra visitor cards and an asymmetric start. The players were soon growing grapes and fermenting the various wine colours in a quest to be the best vintner in the room.
On a another table, Jeremy taught Richie the rules to the duelling wizards game - Res Arcana. They played with both expansions, so this included the extra resource of Pearls and various other items such as the ability to create scrolls. The rules have been explained in more detail in other sessions - 80 and 17.
The first game, Infuser versus Healer, saw Richie getting to grips with the rules and learn how to build an effective magical engine for generating victory points. A second match was played where Richie as a Transmuter tried to drain Jeremy’s Illusionist of Mana by sending multiple dragons against her. But with a couple of well played defences - a Temple monument and the Alchemist’s Tower these attacks were deflected. In the end it was quite a close game with the Illusionist just pipping the Transmuter to scoring the most victory points.
Richie and Jeremy then tried their hand at a new game Akropolis a city building game using tiles consisting of 3 hexes joined together depicting different buildings. The aim is to follow the building placement rules to score points, but you also need scoring plazas of the same building type otherwise they don’t score! For added fun, you can also put tiles on top of others to add levels to your city which increases the building values.
In this game, though Jeremy excelled at housing and universities, Richie was the clear winner by ace-ing all the other building classes - merchants, barracks and gardens - as well as collecting the most stone blocks from covering quarries when building levels. Its a very quick to learn and quick to play game that will hopefully visit the club again.
Century: Eastern Wonders is a new variant in the Century series which has been on the tables previously session 45 and session 72. This version continues the spice trading theme but adds a new grid based pick up and deliver mechanic to the usual set collecting and trading up gameplay.
The final games were club classics with the various Ticket to Ride variants having eight plays now and Braggart on its thirteenth club outing while Ecosystem or its Coral Reef variant has been out on the tables at 32 different sessions, sometimes multiple times!
The next session is the 4th of September, do come along and join us, bring some of your favourite or new games or suggest what you would like to play in advance on Discord and we will see what we can arrange.
- Total Session Attendance: 25
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Board Games: