Arcs is the most lucid title Cole Wehrle has created — and that’s speaking for someone whose ludography is packed with crisp thesis statements. It’s come such a long way in the two years since I previewed the prototype that there’s really no point drawing comparisons. The obvious lodestar is Oath; like that game, Arcs exhibits the long, ahem, arc of history, the way identities and meanings weather or buckle under the weight of time. But Arcs is the more resolute of the two, a game built as much on hindsight as with the benefit of additional years of experience.

It is sublime. It’s also a difficult game to pin down, arrayed like a blossom. Let’s start with the stem.

Space. The final colonialism.

Arcs is a trick-taking game. Sort of.

The scant first details of Arcs emerged from the trick-taking side. When Peer Sylvester released Brian Boru, his hybrid trick-taker about the unification of medieval Ireland, Wehrle voiced some surprise. He had been working on a trick-taking game of his own, also a hybrid title with a map, and apparently there was some coterminous invention going on. The overlap, it turned out, was minimal. Despite its deviations from the genre’s baseline, Sylvester’s approach was the more traditional of the two systems. Also, it helped that Wehrle was still a ways out from actually releasing anything.

Now that Arcs is here, its approach to trick-taking is a pleasant surprise, a scaffolding that supports the superstructure of the game and — this will sound peculiar — is largely concealed underneath everything else. It’s trick-taking as negotiation, as modulation, as a deep abstraction of a stellar empire’s ability to navigate the many contingencies that prevent it from doing what it wants. Decades back, I wrote a piece, now defunct, about how civilization games always presume total control over their kingdoms and empires, a leisure every historical potentate has coveted but never attained. In Arcs, the cards one draws, their suits and ranks, the fact that you will inevitably draw a bunch of junk that doesn’t construct cities in peacetime or launch laser-bearing vessels at your enemy when war is upon you, speaks to the fact that every empire swims upstream against a current of its own making. When a player scoffs at the cards they’ve been dealt, they are a smidgen closer to every leader who has ever placated an auditorium full of yowling detractors.

Which maybe oversells the difficulty of the system. In fact, Wehrle’s trick-taking is largely permissive. Each round begins with the lead player dropping a card and taking the actions printed on it. There are four suits, each with an attached set of options, and the lower the card’s rank, the more actions it permits. The Mobilization suit is about moving things around, whether that’s sending ships catapulting through the void or diplomats sidling onto cards in the market. Construction builds cities and ships or else repairs them after they’ve received a few scrapes. Aggression is not only for battle, but also for securing the aforementioned market cards, provided you’ve accumulated more diplomats on the desired target than any of your rivals. And Administration is for taxation, but also for diplomacy and repair.

There’s some overlap, then, between actions, but that’s not the system’s only point of flexibility. There’s also significant latitude in how other players follow that initial card. In proper trick-taking fashion, anyone can play a card of the same suit. Provided their rank is higher, this allows them to take the full number of actions printed on the card. But for those who aren’t holding the right stuff, there are other options. They can copy the lead card, playing their own card face-down to mimic the lead card, albeit for only a single action. Or they can pivot, playing any other suit. Again, this only lets them take a single action.

Trick-taking. Sorta.

As trick-taking goes, it’s a flimsy comparison, more a starting point than a true blood relative of, say, Schadenfreude. Either way, the system quickly establishes itself, burrowing into the game’s ear and taking up residence.

In fine trick-taking fashion, the identity of the lead player is a question for the ages. This is the person who’s setting the tone for the entire hand, after all. Here, though, there’s some wiggle room. Under normal circumstances, whomever played the highest card of the led suit takes the initiative and becomes the leader of the next hand. But that can be disrupted. Notably, it’s possible to toss out a card entirely. This reduces the number of cards in your hand, a considerable sacrifice that will prevent you from taking part in every trick, but also steals the initiative outright. This means that a single discard could be the difference between taking a series of minor actions or seizing control of the pacing. It’s a literal king move, a sweeping exchange that can pay off big, but might fill your mouth with ashes if you don’t capitalize on it right away.

For instance, by declaring an ambition. Ambitions are the game’s scoring objectives, five categories that, once announced, anyone can pursue. You might declare that this round will award points to those who have amassed a collection of trophies, the burnt-out husks of defeated rival warships and cities. Or perhaps you’re more economically minded, so you declare that everyone will compete for a healthy storehouse of fuel and construction materials. Whatever the objective, only three can be declared per round — and yes, the same one might be declared multiple times, amassing more points for the winners of those categories and depriving the round of other avenues for scoring. If your preferred ambition isn’t declared, you’re as dead as a solar sail in deep space.

Except this is another opportunity for Wehrle to exhibit his design chops. Declaring an ambition can only be done by the lead player, but there are restrictions. For one thing, your card ranks determine which ambitions can be selected at all. It’s entirely possible that a warlord won’t be holding the right cards to declare that trophies will score this round, or that the player who’s been imprisoning everybody else’s diplomats will be able to exchange their captives for a heap of points. As before, strong leaders know how to bend with the wind.

That’s not all. Declaring an ambition also drops your played card’s rank to zero. Which means it’s now trivial for somebody else to seize the initiative. This produces a crucial ebb and flow to the round. One player claims the initiative, uses it to declare an ambition, and therefore loses the initiative to one of their rivals. Later, someone tosses out a card, probably something they didn’t want in the first place, to seize the initiative for themself. It’s fluid in a way that a hidebound clockwise procession could never be. You’re rarely assured of what the next round will look like, which scoring goals will be emphasized, which forces an improvisational attitude to the whole thing. Around it goes, a dynamic dance whose steps are written underfoot.

Resources are used to complete ambitions or take additional actions.

If the trick-taking is the scaffolding, the ground floor is the stuff on the map, the warships and cities and starports and upgrade cards and everything else.

The map of Arcs is a ring, a circle that permits no corners or easily defended vectors. It’s a minor statement but an important one, stripping away the genre’s tendencies toward turtling and defensive lines. This is outer space. If someone erects a fortified zone, there’s no stopping you from going around it. This puts everybody on equal footing; there are no positions that are inherently superior to the others, and everyone can go on the offensive with ease or be approached from at least two directions. It’s a distinct approach to warfare compared to something like Root, and much like the trick-taking portion of the game encourages a certain limberness.

Consider the game’s approach to resources. In the original prototype from two years ago, Wehrle fell for the ingrained assumption that things had to cost resources. To build a starport, one needed to expend building materials; to move around, ships required fuel; conducting clandestine research consumed relics and psionics. The result was a game with too many bottlenecks, a series of filters that threatened to extinguish any prospective stellar empires.

These assumptions have been jettisoned, and good riddance. In Arcs, nothing costs anything other than action points. As long as you can play a Construction card and have ships or cities in reserve, you can build. As long as you have something on the board, you can move it. Provided you have the manpower, you can bid on upgrades. Resources still represent a major concern, but their function has been shifted away from essential expenditures to troves that must be taxed, stolen, and hoarded to accomplish ambitions or else spent to amplify the effectiveness of one’s turn. These are the game’s most readily available source of “preludes,” actions that occur at the beginning of one’s turn. Fuel can be spent to launch your ships even when you don’t have a Mobilization card handy, weapons enable combat without the Aggression suit, and so forth.

But these resources should never be spent frivolously. There’s only a limited pool of each, and these tend to dry up soon after the corresponding ambition has been declared. This prompts an entire battery of considerations. Let’s say somebody has declared the ambition for holding the most relics, but you’re trailing by a couple. There’s one still available, but that will only secure you second place, and you haven’t settled on a relic planet anyway.

Okay, go. This is the sort of question Arcs thrives on. If you’re holding the right suits, it might work to settle a neighboring relic world and tax the population. But that will consume precious turns, time in which a rival might snag the remaining relic out from under you — not to mention there’s the opportunity cost of chasing second place in an ambition that doesn’t wholly mesh with your goals. Maybe you could bully the market, seeking guild cards that count as relics and earning a tidy bonus ability on the side. Or the nuclear option: set sail directly for the relic-hoarding bastard, warm up the laser batteries, and raid their vaults for the good stuff. It’s risky, prone to scuttling your fleet and burning a relationship that hasn’t yet degenerated into hostility, but you might just swing the ambition completely into your favor.

Is it even a board game without a market?

There’s a lot going on in those preceding paragraphs. Enough to lend the impression that Arcs is somehow complicated or burdened with corner cases the way Oath was. To be sure, there are nuances. It’s important to understand how regular moves differ from catapults, or that taxing a rival also imprisons one of their diplomats, or the ramifications of razing a city and therefore permanently marring the effectiveness of the corresponding resource type.

In a contest of approachable rulesets, though, Arcs fares well in the contest against its elder kin, both Root and Oath alike. The addition of leaders and lore cards adds some of the former’s asymmetry, but only a taste, hardly the system-bending factional differences that make it such a bear to teach. As for the latter… well, Arcs, in its base format at least, doesn’t strive for the same rearrangement of player priorities that marked Oath. On the whole, the actions themselves are individually simple, letting players get down to the more complex business of stringing them together.

Despite this ease of access, pretty much every activity in Arcs has fangs, no matter how small it might seem. I’ll give two examples.

The first is the card market, positioned off to the side of the map. This is where you’ll deploy diplomats to bid on upgrades or powerful single-use effects. But while the market operates as a straightforward auction, the bidding can have long-term ramifications. The cards, of course, are a big part of this. There are silver-tongued attorneys that can swipe opposing goods outright, prison wardens that transform captives into resources, cartels that award every resource of a certain type to the holder of the card when assessing an ambition. Mass uprisings can populate remote clusters with your ships while manufactured outrage robs a resource of its prelude action for everyone at the table.

But that’s not all. These cards are desirable, spurring everybody to send their diplomats to claim them. But whenever a card is secured, everybody else’s diplomats on that card are captured. There’s an ambition for holding the most captives, but that might be the least of your worries. Lose too many of your people and you simply won’t have enough to place any significant bids. The result is an auction system that presents opportunities and risks even beyond all the cool stuff you’re bidding on. In Arcs, even diplomatic activities are spring-loaded.

Or there’s combat, one of the finest and fastest ways to resolve a battle that I’ve seen in a board game. The gist is that you roll dice equal to your attacking vessels. Which dice you choose, however, is a big deal. There are three types, each with their own perils. Skirmish dice inflict damage. Easy. Except they also tend to miss, resulting in big flubbed rolls that leave your target warmed up for a broadside of their own. Assault dice are more effective, but sometimes return damage to your own fleet. The most dynamic of the trio are raid dice. These puppies might allow you to swipe resources or even guild cards from your target. They’re also the most dangerous to roll, both injuring your ships and potentially inflicting collateral damage on the opposing city below — a decidedly negative thing, stripping your tableau of any resources or cards that match that planet type.

What’s so cool about these dice is that you can mix and match them as you please. Battles are wholly one-sided in terms of decision-making; only the attacker selects who receives damage and all that. There’s no back-and-forth, which keeps things pacey. But because battles tend to damage both combatants, they feel alive and participatory even though only one player is actually doing anything. The result is a blazing fast system that nevertheless produces a whole lot of drama. It isn’t uncommon for the whole table to cajole an aggressor into using nastier dice, spreading damage between fleets and leaving both sides open to attacks from their predatory friends.

The big ships only roll out in the campaign.

As I made clear when I wrote those dueling previews, Arcs is really two very different games. There’s the base game, no slouch in its own right, a two-hour contest of wills that feels properly self-contained, and then there’s the campaign found in The Blighted Reach expansion, three separate sessions strung together by evolving interests and player roles. It’s in this latter campaign where the comparisons to Oath are at their strongest. This is also where Arcs goes from excellent to perhaps one of the finest board games ever crafted.

Picture this. Along some remote frontier, a fading stellar empire has installed a handful of regents to oversee its administrative duties. Imperial vessels safeguard the Reach, preventing any one regent from directly attacking another. But the throne’s control is loosely distributed and fails to suppress the fungal blight that poisons the sector. This far from home, shown evidence of imperial ineptitude, it isn’t long before our protagonists see the opportunity to pursue their own agendas.

Right away, Arcs sets the tone by providing every player with a role. There are eight to choose from, seeded at random among players, and they provide everybody with a selection of starting powers. Perhaps somebody will be the Founder, determined to carve something fresh and new from the dead wood of the empire’s periphery. Another might be the Admiral, an ambitious boot-licker determined to spread those purple imperial ships far and wide. Those are the more straight-laced options; there’s also the Believer, determined to replace the ordinary trick-taking cards with an entirely new suit, a Caretaker on a mission to revivify ancient golems, Magnates and Partisans and Stewards, all with their own cards, components, and above all, objectives.

This is where things get interesting. Everyone remains bound together by the connective tissue of the base game’s ambitions, but you’re also pursuing your own goals. These objectives are worth pursuing. On a basal level, failing to make progress toward them will subtract from your score when the session ends. More than that, they also award benefits to the factions that accomplish them. Along the way, your diplomatic standing with the empire and your fellow regents is always in flux. Perhaps you hide in the shadow of those imperial ships, traveling with escorts and leveraging the empire’s presence to prevent other regents from attacking you. Maybe you declare independence and strike out into the unsettled portions of the map. More often, you’ll settle somewhere in the middle, an opportunist riding the currents.

If this sounds close to Oath’s jockeying between Chancellor, Citizen, and Exile, you’re on the right track. Regents are prohibited from attacking one another, but only under the watchful supervision of the empire’s ships. On the flipside of Caesar’s coin, becoming an outlaw affords more latitude — and shrugs off that damnable imperial tax — but also leaves one friendless and vulnerable. Both have their merits and obligations.

Moreover, Arcs, like Oath, tasks players with prioritizing their competing interests, and even with asking what constitutes victory. It’s never as prototypical as Oath, never as iconoclastic. There’s a concrete winner and loser, for one thing, and a complete campaign is limited to three sessions rather than ranging toward the infinite. But leading the first or second session in points might not actually prepare you for ultimate victory. It’s entirely possible, for instance, to meet your personal objective but lose the score game, or vice versa.

As before, the combat system is excellent.

Win or lose, the fallout from your performance informs the campaign going forward. I won’t go into the nitty-gritty of the intermission between acts. Suffice it to say that players are given the option to pivot to another role. Eight new identities become available in act two, plus another eight in the final stretch. In each case, the remnants of your past continue along with you, amplifying your faction’s personality going forward.

And it’s quite the process to behold, writing effortless narratives without wholly constraining anybody at the table. Our most recent campaign saw me initially adopting the role of Caretaker. My people were explorers uninterested in wider politics. We struck out on our own, leaving behind the empire’s protective curtain even as we retained our regency. My objective was to awaken the sleeping golems of the Reach, special tokens seeded across the map. Once awakened, everyone could put them to use fixing or destroying ships, catapulting around the map, and hoovering up resources. With each activation, whether by me or one of my rivals, my objective ticked closer to completion.

But when the session ended, I’d spent enough time digging through the dirt. My new role was that of Hegemon, a brutal overlord riding a massive capital ship and roving from planet to planet in a crusade to exterminate the disloyal and plant my banners in their now-vacated skulls. But my past as a golem-grubbing dweeb stuck with me. For one thing, I could store as many of those special tokens as I liked in my golem forge, meaning they weren’t hogging any space in my vaults. These golems paved the way for more than one ferocious victory. Unfortunately, I had seeded the market deck with malfunctions. Every so often, a particular golem would go on the fritz. Since I was the most likely to be storing the things in my golem forge, and thus the one on the receiving end of their periodic rampages, I was forced to engage in stellar politics, sending out diplomats to isolate and repair the problem. Once a nerd, now a conqueror with too many distractions from my beloved ultraviolence.

Along the way, Arcs produces something akin to an ecosystem. It’s not unlike the interlocking interests of a game like Oceans, albeit played out over generations and therefore a smidgen closer to the geologic timescales of history and evolution. Over time, relationships develop. Rivalries. Interdependencies. Confrontations both friendly and unpleasant. Maybe some parasitism or someone off doing their own thing. A faction of pilgrims scours the Reach for their sacred wormhole. Pacifists strive to heal the region while an informed centrist (just asking questions) tries to get everyone to tie at their ambitions. Smelly mushroom-lovers commune with the blight. A survivalist forcibly locks captives in bunkers to weather the fungal apocalypse.

New suits! Pilgrimages! Hive minds!

It feels like a fulfilled promise. Of Wehrle’s critical but overburdened experiments in Oath, sure. But also of civilization games at large. One of my first great loves in this hobby was Philippe Keyaerts’ Small World. In its cartoon depiction of longue durée history, it spoke about the rise and fall of civilizations. It embraced the notion that every triumph and every tragedy were steps in a greater tapestry, that decay was the furnace of creation and rebirth, that some common thread could be woven through disparate peoples, binding them together.

Arcs traces that thread, and does so even more clearly. This is a meditation that checks the entire body: the way we think about success in a board game, the way peoples are the sum of those who came before them, perhaps even how our interpretation of board games informs how we envision tribes and nations and all the rest. If that sounds like a tall order, consider how much of our current thinking about human development is built atop the concept of the tech tree. Arcs has no tech tree. Nor does it require that nations fall and rise in sequence, as Keyaerts did. Instead, its foundations are about relationships. Relationships and traditions and legacies.

But also: those cards! those dice! that trick-taking system! Arcs is best when placed within the structure of its three-act campaign, but it’s one hell of a game even without it. In a format that never fails to surprise me even after all these years, Arcs is one of the tallest peaks I’ve encountered yet.

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Complimentary copies of the base game and the first expansion were provided.