Played The Board Game Arcs For The First Time Yesterday! There Are A Lot Of Good Things To Say About

Played the board game Arcs for the first time yesterday! There are a lot of good things to say about this game's design. The turns are snappy, the trick-taking action system is genius, and declaring/scoring ambitions makes you think long and hard on the hand of cards you're given. But I wanted to draw attention to one specific design choice that likely went unnoticed by many, but is invaluable in my eyes.

The design choice in question is the way which HP is tracked on buildings and units! For those of you who have never played a war game before, HP can be a pain to track for individual units, and Arc's entire design philosophy is to deliver the war game experience while minimizing the busywork. And when you have up to a dozen individual pieces on the board per-faction, that can become a real problem.

How Arcs solves this is to use the geometry of the game pieces. Every ship can either be upright (2 HP), on its side (1 HP), or removed from the board (0 HP).

Likewise, every building token is double sided, having both "healthy" and "damaged" sides which you can flip over when taking damage. This also simplifies the math in the game to mere counting. No need to use a calculator here!

Choices like this, while not particularly impactful with how players interact with the rules of the game, are vital to how players interact with the experience of the game.

Simply put, when making a game, keep in mind the physical space your players will be playing in. It might alert you to some problems, and if you're wise, might even offer you some solutions!

What if there was a TTRPG where you're only a part-time adventurer? So all of your abilities and toolkit are specific to your mundane job and you need to find ways as the player to apply them to dungeon crawling.

BotW? Nah, I'm on that CotW shit

Chicken

Of

The

Woods

I made tacos :)

They were very tasty

Ever since I learned about the concept of the Philosopher King during a greek philosophy class I took in college, I've implemented something adjacent to my worldbuilding on multiple occasions. It doesn't pan out exactly like the original concept of a Philosopher King, but normally it goes like this:

The Players meet the beaurocratic leader of a people.This leader has a scholarly background, usually having been mentored by a missing/deceased/retired great thinker in their youth. The leader demonstrates this background by introducing the Players to an ethical or philosophical dilemma that they are both familiar with, asking the Player Characters how the problem ought to be solved. The Philosopher King then shares their own insights, revealing either a different, but respectable perspective or a cunning and tricky solution.

Throughout the story, the Philosopher King acts as a mostly benevolent wild card character. Sometimes I'll pit the Philosopher King against a BBEG counterpart, typically a generically evil monarch. When I do this, the Philosopher King runs circles around the monarch with their wit, but there are always a few quirks about their philosophy that concern the Players.

This might manifest into the Players questioning who is truly the "good guy" in the scenario, or whether or not they can actually trust the Philosopher King to not betray them in service of themselves, their people, or some other value made clearly important to the Philosopher King.

I'm sure this "niche trope" might just be a sub-category of an already well-documented one, but I think the ethical/philosophical angle adds an interesting dimension in TTRPGs. Because of Player Agency, Players can really sink their teeth into the implications of said philosophy in ways that a passive audience member cannot.

So I just discovered that elephants can communicate via seismics!

And now I want to design a fantasy proboscidea species for my world that are intelligent, nonverbal, and communicate with said seismic waves. Maybe they can even harness magic this way!