Hey there sports fans! It’s okay if I call you sports fans right? I’m aware that not all of you are into sports. It’s an expression. Like, “See ya later, alligator!” I don’t really think you’re an alligator, do I? Well, maybe you’re a ‘gator in Animus fan’s clothing. How do I know? I feel I may be getting a little sidetracked. That happens when I’m hungry. As I am now. I’m going to try to keep this brief so I can eat foodstuffs sooner rather than later.
We played another new game this weekend: The revised edition of Arcana from Fantasy Flight Games (actually, originally from Dust Games but distributed in my neck of the woods by FFG). It’s a deck-building game set in the Cadwallon universe where each player controls a guild trying to amass the most influence in the city of Cadwallon. The twist on the deck building mechanic is that rather than buy cards outright, everybody is assigning their cards to one of the city’s districts and hopefully secure the card in that district before anyone else. If it’s a friendly district, they can keep the card face down so people won’t know what they bid. If it’s an enemy or neutral district, they have to play the card face up so everyone else will know if it’s worth committing to that resource. There are three types of cards: Agents/Personalities, which you use send to the district to secure the resource, Locations, which allow you to perform an action such as relocating a friendly or enemy agent, and Relics, which can be used to bribe Personalities to join your guild. There’s more to it than that of course, but it’s just a short summary for the purposes of this blog.
Now normally when I bring out a new game, I forgo the ‘first game’ recommendations given in the rulebook and just incorporate everything in at once. In Arcana’s case, one of those added options was building your own starting deck. Because none of us had played we wouldn’t really have been able to decide what cards were worth adding to a deck and which ones were okay to leave out. So we played our first game with just the basics and then added everything else in for the second game. I’d say it worked out well. We were able to appreciate the other options better thanks to our first experience without them. I will say that I was and wasn’t a fan of the event deck. It did put the game on a definite timer (there could be no more than 12 rounds) and the events did add some major twists that made the game more unpredictable, but it made going for objectives (another option added in the second game) much more difficult to achieve since if cards from the districts you needed to possess for your objective didn’t show up quickly, you really had to hope you were lucky and they showed up in time. Also, some of the twists were maybe a bit too wacky for my tastes. Everybody having to play cards at random from their hand for instance. Do we get to look at the card we picked before we assign it? Well, if not how will I know if it’s a personality or not? If so, what’s the big deal? I guess it means you might not get to play your cards in the optimal order, but still. I wasn’t as big of a fan.
To keep things fairly balanced, the starting decks for each guild are pretty similar to one another. I would have liked to see a little more variety. In the second game, I had a deck that was geared towards diplomacy (staffs) but almost every card in the districts needed religion (cups). It was a little frustrating to have my options so severely limited because there were four out of five cards I couldn’t even think of going for.
These quibbles aside, Arcana was a fun game and I’d play it again, though I’d probably leave the Event cards out. I’d also recommend it for anybody who enjoys deck-building games.
That’s all I’ve got for this week. My stomach is taking over now. Have a good week folks!
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