Arcs is a fast-playing science fiction game from Cole Wehrle, Kyle Ferrin, and the award-winning team that brought you Root and Oath.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Fulfillment Timeline Update
3 days ago
– Tue, Apr 16, 2024 at 09:47:10 AM
Dear Backers,
We know many of you have been eager for news about the game’s fulfillment, and I’m happy to say that we have a little update to share with you all.
Of course, I wish I could tell you that the games had miraculously arrived early, but it looks like things are largely going to schedule. At this moment, the games are still on the water, but they should be arriving in port here in the United States in about four weeks. From there it will take a week or two to get to our fulfillment partner (Quartermaster Logistics). We're estimating that shipping will begin at the start of June. For a project of this size, it usually takes a few weeks to get everything in the mail.
European fulfillment is on a similar schedule, but will likely be running 2 to 3 weeks behind fulfillment here in the US. I want to be clear that this is not because we have any kind of special policy. Sometimes the ships make it to the EU first, sometimes they don’t.
For folks in Asia and the rest of the world, we anticipate that the fulfillment will occur within a similar timeline to the United States, though it may ship a little earlier. Again, it sometimes works out that our backers in Asia get their games first, and sometimes it doesn’t. There are many moving parts to this process and our priority always remains that everyone gets their games as soon as we can manage it.
Other Studio News
Meanwhile, we’re doing our best to keep busy here in the studio. Nick and the Ahoy team have been navigating the new factions through final stages of development. In fact, we’ve got a little surprise that we’ll be showing off today in a studio playthrough.
Work continues on the Oath expansion as well. We’re starting to firm up our plans for the project and will have more to announce soon.
Support Questions
Finally, as always, if you have any questions, feel free to write to us at [email protected].
Production Nears Completion
about 2 months ago
– Fri, Mar 01, 2024 at 09:51:31 AM
Dear Backers,
I hope this finds you well. Today we’ve got a short update about the status of production. All of the copies of Arcs, the Miniatures Pack, and the Leaders & Lore pack have completed production. The Blighted Reach Expansion should be finished within the next three weeks. This is broadly on schedule!
Our MPC (manufacturer’s proof copy) of the Blighted Reach arrived at our doorstep a few weeks ago. We were able to go through and double check everything just to make sure it lined up with the final changes we made after reviewing the pre-production copy back in December. I’m happy to report that the MPC passed with flying colors. It’s wonderful!
As soon as production is complete, we’ll be updating you all with our finalized timeline for fulfillment. I imagine that will be the next update we’ll be sending out on the campaign. In the meantime, we are starting to air-freight out a few copies to videographers, content creators, and photographers so they have time to work with the game before its release.
Even though this project has taken a long time, this last stage always feels the longest. We want nothing more than to get you these games as soon as possible, and I cannot wait for you to explore this game with your friends and family.
I'll add that internally we've been finishing up our team debriefs on Arcs. As part of this process, I've been reviewing my project journal, Slack conversations, and notes that we took throughout the making of the game. A couple of days ago, I stumbled onto this image:
This is from just over a year ago. I was in the process of reworking the campaign content and was measuring my progress in TTS (the little triangle blocks indicate plotlines that hadn't been completed yet). And now, a year later, here are the 24 the plotlines in all their glory.
Support Questions
Finally, as always, if you have any questions, feel free to write to us at [email protected].
Production Updates, Pre-Release Tournaments, and Late Pledges Closing Soon
3 months ago
– Wed, Jan 24, 2024 at 12:50:34 PM
Dear Backers,
Today we’ve got a bunch of little updates for you all. In short, everything is going smoothly on our end as we begin to wrap up the campaign.
Production Update
As I mentioned last month, we’ve submitted all of the files to the factory, and we’re happy to report that they were approved shortly thereafter. All four of the products relating to this crowdfunding campaign are now fully in production:
Arcs: Collapse and Conflict in the Reach (the base game)
Arcs: Leaders and Lore Pack
Arcs: Miniatures Pack
Arcs: The Blighted Reach Expansion
The final production copies of Arcs, the Leaders and Lore Pack, and the Miniatures Pack.
Simpler things, like the Leaders and Lore Pack will be completed first with the miniatures and the base game shortly thereafter. The most complex production, The Blighted Reach expansion, will probably finish up sometime shortly after Lunar New Year. This means we have a bit longer to wait to get the project's final MPC (mass production copy, or manufacturer's proof copy), but the approval process should go quickly once we have it in hand.
Because this is a part of the schedule that is largely out of our hands, we won’t have much to report about the project’s overall timeline until the campaign expansion’s production is close to complete. At that point we’ll share our final fulfillment timeline.
Speaking of which, we certainly did get MPCs for the other products! Check out the recent Studio Chat if you want to see us take a look at the new stuff.
Pre-Release Tournament
Here’s a first for Leder Games. About 60 players have joined a community-organized pre-release tournament for Arcs! Kudos to John Keller (snoopymate25 on Discrod) for organizing the tournament.
If you’d like to follow along, folks have been posting their games to YouTube and you can also view the discussion threads over on the Woodland Warriors discord.
Orders Locking Down, Cards Charged, and Late-Pledges Close Soon
On January 31st, Backerkit orders will be locking down, meaning you can no longer edit your order contents without emailing our support team for manual assistance. When orders lock down, we will also be charging credit cards on file for shipping costs, VAT fees, additional items added, and any late pledges, so please ensure all details on your Backerkit order are correct and up to date.
The pre-order store for late pledges will also close on this date as we finalize our inventory numbers.
Please note order lockdown does not include address lock–which we’ll be doing a month or two before fulfillment begins. So addresses may still be freely edited until then.
Studio Update
With Arcs complete, most of the creative team behind the game are moving to other projects. Cole is working on a potential expansion for Oath and Josh is looking into some new Root factions. Nick has nearly finished the development of the new Ahoy factions and Kyle is back to drawing charming fishy pirates. Pati has been catching up on a million other pieces of graphic design work which piled up while she finished Arcs.
In addition, we’re very proud to be able to welcome a new member to our team, Matt Martens! You might know Matt as the co-host of Space Cats Peace Turtles and Old Gamer’s Almanac. He’ll be joining us as our community manager and event coordinator. Already he’s hit the ground running, and is planning some pretty exciting stuff for Arcs at Gen Con 2024. Stay tuned!
Support Questions
Finally, as always, if you have any questions, feel free to write to us at [email protected].
Files Submitted!
4 months ago
– Fri, Dec 15, 2023 at 01:47:47 PM
Dear Backers,
We’ve just got a short update for you all today. All of the remaining files for the campaign expansion have now been sent to the factory. Next week we’ll likely be approving the digital proofs and mass production for the final elements of the game will begin shortly thereafter. We'll know more about our precise fulfillment timeline in the coming months, and will of course keep you updated. Broadly, we have been meeting our internal production deadlines and we're not expecting any additional delays.
If you'd like to see us take a look through the pre-production copy of the expansion, check out our recent design stream.
As a reminder, late pledges will be closing at the end of January. I can't wait for you all to see this thing in person.
Support Questions
Finally, as always, if you have any questions, feel free to write to us at [email protected].
Pre-Production Copies!
5 months ago
– Wed, Nov 08, 2023 at 12:13:04 PM
Dear Backers,
I hope fall is treating you all well. Here in Minnesota our leaves have turned, and we’ve even had our first snow! Thankfully it’s already melted, and we can hope for at least a few more weeks of autumn before winter begins in earnest.
In the studio, things are busy as ever. We’ve been approving various factory samples and squaring away the last few details around Arcs. In this update, we want to share a bit about our progress through the pre-production process and what the next few weeks hold.
Pre-Production Copies
Last week we got the final pre-production copy of the game in the mail. We spent a few hours pouring over the production and making sure that every little detail was right. I’m happy to report that there were no major issues, and, outside of putting in a variety of color adjustments and the edits from the final balance and copy-editing pass, no major changes were required.
Pre-production copies! Note these use the muted color covers which have since been fixed (check the last update for more info about that).
We spent a lot of time making sure that the wood, punchboard, and playerboards all harmonized with each other across each of the four player colors. We also opted to boost the color on the map.
We looked at samples for a couple different wash variants before deciding on this pigment. It really brings out the details nicely!
If you’d like to hear more about the PPC, take a look at this week’s design chat:
The Campaign Game
Over the past few weeks, while Pati was shepherding the base game and the small expansions through the pre-production process, Josh and I have been doing our best to get all of the campaign materials ready for the next step. Josh conducted a massive usability review of pretty much every element of the campaign game while I’ve been spending a lot of my time helping with graphics.
It’s difficult to overstate the size of this project. Speaking for myself, this is easily the largest and most complex project I’ve ever worked on. It’s not that the game itself is that complicated. The base game remains much easier to teach than Root and the full campaign is around Oath’s complexity. But, despite that similarity, Arcs’s campaign offers a significantly more expressive narrative space than either of its older brothers. And, in order to get that space to be as robust and interesting as possible, we’ve had to spend a lot of time making sure the core system is as strong as it is flexible.
The other issue of course is simply the sheer size of the project. When I was first sketching out the details of the project about three years ago, I had a sense that it would take around 24 plotlines for the core promise of the game to be fully realized. This wasn’t a number I pulled out of a hat. I wanted players to always have at least some narrative choice. So, if four players sat down to play the first game of their campaign, each player should get two plotlines and then select one they wanted to follow. This isn’t a huge amount of player agency, but I wanted the game’s asymmetry to distinguish itself from something like Root even before the first card was played. Following that logic and assuming a full table of 4 players, that meant there needed to be 8 plotline choices for each of the game’s three acts or 24 plotlines total.
What I didn’t know at that moment was that plotlines would take a mountain of work. Those 24 plotlines translate to over 300 cards which is about the size of all of the content in Oath. Perhaps now you might see why I balk whenever a player asks me to “just” include a fifth player!
Despite the project’s size, final development is going really well! Basically, all of the campaign materials will be fully submitted within a week. At that point, the factory will begin making a pre-production copy for the campaign game. This usually takes 2 to 3 weeks. During that time, we’ll be doing a bit of development work and finishing the last few bits of graphical polish (and a few art pieces).
In terms of the design, we’re down to basically three or four scenes that still require a bit of balance work and some small content adjustments. By “scenes,” I mean specific acts or chapters within specific plotlines. While punching these up, we’re doing our best to play as many campaigns over the next couple of weeks just to make sure we’ve given all of the content a final pass.
I’ve also been really happy with some of the developments in the last couple months of the project. Sometimes, in the course of game development, the final stage of development mostly sees the design becoming less ambitious as various game elements are proved to be too risky. That simply hasn’t happened with Arcs. Everyone on the Arcs team has gotten a lot better at building content for the game, and we’ve been able to fold in mechanical and thematic elements that we hadn’t dreamed of even just a few months ago. For instance, take a look at this goofy C Plot:
Some of the pieces for the Gate Wraith. As this is one of the last plotlines, we're still missing an art piece for one of its cards (Catapult Overdrive).
The Gate Wraith wins by collapsing the map’s gates into something called the Twisted Passage. This sitches the map together using a new, central gate (where the logo is placed on the map design). In addition to changing how some adjacencies work on the map, the Twisted Passage will also be continuously populated with the ghostly echoes of your fallen fleets. As you might imagine, it offers an off-the wall finale to a campaign.
And, part of what makes Arcs so special is that the same plotline can hit very differently depending on its context. In our most recent campaign game, one player followed the Advocates plotline until the second act where their authority over the guilds was broken by the Partisan. In the third act, she pivoted to the Gate Wraith. But, she still kept some of her guild acolytes along with her as well as her position as First Regent. So now we've got an empire ruled by a disgruntled bureaucrat turned malevolent specter.
Upcoming Travel to Pax Unplugged
Nearly our entire team will be traveling to Philadelphia at the start of December for PAX Unplugged. You can find us at booth #2846.
We’ll have tons of new stuff to show off, including Arcs and the new Ahoy expansion. Speaking of which…
There's More Ahoy on the Horizon
Next Tuesday, we’ll be launching a massive expansion for Ahoy designed by our own Nick Brachmann,a key developer on basically every Root expansion and most every Leder Games game, including Arcs! The expansion offers four new factions which dramatically expand the possible play combinations. If you’d like to follow along with that project, you can sign up here:
