A New Kit!
about 1 year ago – Thu, Mar 30, 2023 at 10:14:26 AM

Hello Backers!

Today, we’ve got a brand-new TTS kit for you all. The design is very, very close to final and this version includes the two-player mode that we talked about earlier this month.

This is our last major version of the base game that we’ll be releasing publicly. From here on out, we will continue to keep this kit updated with any changes that final development brings. We’ll be periodically dropping in new art as we get it. 

You can find the kit here.

Some Adjustments

In the last update I talked about a few of the adjustments we had been working on over the winter including the improved scoring system (with second place and ambition scaling) as well as the new features of the combat system that reward the defender.

In addition, we’ve also fleshed out the tyrant ambition. Previously it checked to see who controlled the most enemy buildings. Now, the tyrant condition works a little like the warlord condition. Each player has a box on their player board where they will put tyrant pieces. These pieces are gained by taxing enemy cities and securing cards. It encourages a lot of player entanglement and intimidation strategies.

We’ve also improved the setup procedure and have introduced lots of starting powers and plenty of new guild and lore cards--including a few with final art!

If you’d like to see the current rules, you can find them here.

Things that Remain

With the base game largely locked, we’re moving to a big graphics overhaul. You can see parts of that overhaul in things like the Action Cards, Guild Cards and some of the Lore cards which are very close to being done. Other elements such as the player boards and the board itself are only now getting serious attention. I’ll admit that this is a little backwards from how we normally work (Root’s board, for instance, was finished pretty early on in the process), but this game has demanded that we wait to really get into the graphical weeds until the rest of the design was pretty much finished. We also didn't want to seriously work on the map until we know exactly what the campaign game would demand. Now that we have the vast majority of the campaign content design, we are ready.

In the coming weeks we’ll be pushing on the board and cleaning up the whole presentation of the game to better harmonize with the elements that are in a higher state of finish. We’ll probably write up a separate update about the board since it is such a tricky asset, and there’s a lot to talk about there. It’s also worth noting that the board will inform a lot of other elements of the game. For instance, right now have triangular building pieces. It’s possible the board necessitates that their shape and look changes. We’ll see!

Speaking of the board, you’ll notice that the board is quite a bit bigger. This is because we’re planning on just putting the campaign-compatible board in the base game along with some “path” markers that players will use to make the board small enough so that it works with the smaller scope of the base game as well as lower player counts.

What’s Coming Next

In a couple weeks (April 11th), we’ll be hosting a design stream and talking about some of these changes. I’m hoping to stream a 2p game that week as well—maybe even an act from a 2p campaign.

Internally, we’re continuing to make a lot of progress on campaign game. We’re going to start the next wave of testing on the campaign within in a couple of weeks, and I’d like to have it ready to show you all by the end of April or early May. Like Oath, we’d like to put the campaign in something like “Early Access” so anyone who’s interested in the game can take it for a spin. Then, you'll all be able to follow along as we slowly fill the game with art and polish the remaining parts of the design. We'll have details about how to test the campaign in the next update.

Support Questions

Finally, as always, if you have any questions, feel free to write to us at [email protected].

A Spring Surprise and Today's Design Stream
about 1 year ago – Tue, Mar 14, 2023 at 08:15:24 AM

Dear Backers,

Over the past few months, we’ve made a ton of progress on Arcs. Today, I want to bring you all up-to-date about the game's development. I also want to highlight some specific elements of the design, an exciting new feature, and write about what’s next for the game. This will be a rather long update. If you just want the short version, know that the game is continuing at a good pace and it looks like we're going to be able to include one of our most-requested features.

Overall Design Progress

In my last update, I wrote about how the core game had largely solidified last November. With it firming up, I moved over to the campaign and spent the better part of November and December rebuilding all a complete vertical slice of the game’s content.  This means that there was enough content to see all of the campaign's core features in motion. 

Then, starting in late December, the development team and I got to work punching everything up. We played our first campaign game of the new version right as we were leaving for Christmas break and the game was largely feature complete by the middle of January. In the two months since, I made my way through the remaining content and we continued to revise and improve the campaign.

We opened up the campaign to our broader circle of testers a few weeks ago and are beginning to collect game reports. We’re getting a lot of great feedback and, with every new version, the game is getting better and better. Mostly, we’re trying to make sure the game is providing great storytelling beats while also offering a lot of depth of play.

With that testing underway, most of my design time has been spent working on secondary systems and fleshing out the remaining game content. There’s still a lot of work to do, but the full project is really coming into view. We’re getting a very good sense of the wide range of the core system and what sorts of features it can support. Speaking of which…

A Spring Surprise: Two-Player Mode!

A couple weeks ago we started testing out the two-player game. Arcs was never designed as a two-player game. This was mostly because we wanted to focus on the 3-4 player experience. But, as we continued to refine the design, it became pretty clear to the development team that a two-player mode might actually work. Nick and I started taking it into testing and were pleasantly surprised that the game played very well at that count.

The core adjustments to the game are quite simple and don't require any kind of automa or dummy player. There are basically three modified rules. First, there’s a few small adjustments to the setup of the game, just to constrict the map a little. Second, there is a slight adjustment to how cards are drawn. Now, instead of shuffling all of the cards each round, you have to exhaust the draw deck before reshuffling. This means that you will still move through the full deck even though you’re only using about half of the cards each hand.

Finally, there is a resource pool/scoring barrier called “The Merchant” which starts the game with a pool of resources which the players can use influence to trade in (and out) and which sets thresholds for some of the scoring objectives. This provides a little bit of scoring friction but doesn’t require players to run through something as complicated as a bot.

In fact, right now all of the two-player rules fit on one two-sided card and I aim to keep it roughly at that level of complexity.

Best of all, the two player game will work with all of the campaign content! This may require an additional rule or two, but it’s a very small price to pay for the scope of this feature. We’re still vetting everything, but the development team is fully in agreement that we can implement this feature.

Little Adjustments to the Core System

There have been a few small alterations to the core game that have really helped make the two player game take off (as well as improve the 3-4 game). We’ve made some small adjustments to the raid and battle system which enable some interesting defensive and positional play. Most of these have to do with adjustments to the dice faces and a new die symbol: the building hit. Building hits allow the attacker to damage a building. This is often a good thing; attackers are generally trying to do damage after all! But, destroying a city can alienate your followers so there’s some political hazards there. The bigger hazard, however, is that anytime you damage a building, the defending fleet’s undamaged ships will score bonus hits against you. This means that a defensive fleet can have some real bite! In practice, this encourages players to leave some patrols to guard their buildings and players can create some ingenious traps for a sloppy aggressor.

We’ve also made some small modifications to the victory conditions that have smoothed out the game length and provided a little more of a scoring arc in Arcs. Each round the lowest ambition gets flipped to its higher value side. We've also included a 2nd place scoring, which helps reward those near-miss players and keep them in the game a bit longer. 

We also dropped the Path Guardian condition and made some adjustments to the regency scoring and cities in general. Now, as you build them, they will open up additional hold slots or provide you with a drip of points each hand. There are a few other alterations as well, but we'll save those for the next update.

What’s Coming Next

From here on out, we’ll probably be updating you all on a monthly basis. We’ve got lots of things to talk about including specifics about how the plotlines work, product design, lots of information about the miniatures pack and plenty of new art.

In the shorter term, we are planning on releasing a fresh copy of the base game with all of the updates discussed here (and two-player mode) sometime next month. Then, in the month following, we’re hoping to share a digital kit of the full campaign game for anyone to play and comment on. We did something similar back when we were working on Oath and we think that putting the game into "Early Access" really helped us polish the final design.

Today's Design Stream

At 2pm CDT, Patrick and I will be hosting a little design stream. I'm happy to take any questions you might have about the progress of Arcs. Patrick will also be talking quite a bit about his upcoming open world adventure game. You can find the stream over on our twitch channel here, and it will be posted on YouTube later this week as well.

Support Questions

Finally, as always, if you have any questions, feel free to write to us at [email protected].

Happy Holidays (and a little Dev update!)
over 1 year ago – Sat, Dec 24, 2022 at 01:08:39 AM

Hello everyone,

Outside my window the wind is howling through the treetops. Here in Minnesota, we're in the second (third?) day of a very cold and blustery winter storm. Thankfully, we've been able to more-or-less close the office a bit early, and all hatches are secured battened.

If you follow us on social media, you'll know that our studio will be closed for the next week, so there will be a little break in customer service. Rest assured that we'll get back to your queries after the new year. As always, remember to send any questions you have to [email protected] and we'll answer your messages as soon as we can. 

Before we all take a little rest, we wanted to send you a little note about the progress Arcs is making.

As I mentioned in the last update, we had the good fortune of attending Pax Unplugged earlier this month where we showed Arcs. This was a really important show for the whole team both because it was the official release of Ahoy and because it would give us a chance to see how the broader public would respond to the updated version of Arcs. 

I'm happy to report that the answers to both questions were tremendously heartening. The Arcs kit in First Look was played constantly and Ahoy did great. If you'd like to hear more about how the show went, you can find Patrick and I's discussion here:

As promised, Josh has put together an updated print and play kit that is roughly in line with the current TTS kit.  You can find a link to that here. 

If you'd like your kit to be even more updated, there are a few smallish adjustments that you can find in the Arcs news section over on the Woodland Warriors Discord which will bring your kit in line with what we showed at Unplugged. 

Since locking in this new version of the core game back in early November, we've been hard at work on the campaign game. I'm happy to report that it's going really, really well. There's a lot of work that remains to be done, but every single playtest is pushing us closer to a completed game.  We just wrapped up a campaign in the office--the first full one that we've played in awhile--and it just got me so amped up to explore the system further. In fact, rather than cutting out a little early, I'm probably going to spend my afternoon working on one of the new plotlines. 

We're still a few months away from being able to release a public playtesting kit of the campaign game, but it is coming! We're also making a lot of progress on the game's physical presentation. I'll stop myself from sharing anything on that front this month, but keep an eye on your inboxes this January! 

For all of us at Leder Games, thank you again for all of your support. It's been a real honor to work on this project and I cannot wait for you to see what we've been cooking up.

Development Update and Arcs at Pax Unplugged!
over 1 year ago – Wed, Nov 30, 2022 at 10:44:02 PM

Hi everyone!

Development Update

We've been hard at work on Arcs since the release of our updated print-and-play kit in October. I'm so happy so many of you have been able to try the updated game, and it's been fun to follow the discussion here and on the Woodland Warriors discord. 

Since then, we've continued to tune the core game. Specifically, we've been spending a fair amount of time working through some of the finer points of movement, combat, and testing new special powers and effects. We hope to release a proper print-and-play kit for those of you who want to construct a physical in December. (We'll probably also update our digital kit too.) 

For the past few weeks, the vast majority of our attention has been on the campaign game. At this point nearly all of the campaign's content has been outlined and nearly every element is in some state of design or development. The biggest job ahead of us is making sure that all of the work on the campaign we did over the past year and be folded into the improved core game.  Happily, this process is going pretty well, and the parts that are giving me trouble generally needed scrapped anyway.  I'll have more to share about the campaign game in the next Kickstarter update. 

And, I'll add that we're making some big improvements to the game's physical presentation and the game's final look is really coming together. More on that soon!

Pax Unplugged

Tomorrow most of our staff will be heading to Philadelphia for Pax Unplugged where we'll be finally celebrating the release of Ahoy! If you'd like to say hi, you can find us at booth 2801. 

We won't be doing demos at the booth, BUT we have put together a fresh Arcs kit for the First Look area. If you'd like to play the game, you can swing by and get in a game. The First Look staff is really wonderful and will be on hand if you'd like to learn the game. Josh and I will probably also swing by to play a game or two over the course of the show. 

That's it for now! Thank you again for all of your support. We cannot wait to show you more in the coming weeks.

Questions or other Support Help?

Please email us at [email protected] for any questions or assistance. Please do not use the Kickstarter messaging system to contact us.

A New Kit Arrives!
over 1 year ago – Mon, Oct 17, 2022 at 09:54:13 PM

Hello everyone,

Today we're releasing a major update to Arcs. Initially, we'll have the kit be available as a TTS mod. Then, in a few weeks, we'll follow with a print-and-play kit. 

You can find the rules here. 

You can find the kit here.

For those that haven't followed a Leder Games campaign, I want to say a bit about what this means for a project. Game design requires a lot of iteration.  During development for a game, we generally push a new version at least once a week. However, most of this iteration is only experienced internally--that is, with our staff and our core playtesters. 

During that process, we will occasionally dust off the design and try to make it presentable to the wider public. We call these releases "kits." These kits can have a lot of different levels of polish. For instance, our Launch Kit (the one you might have played for the KS) was something that we actually took through usability trials to make sure that it was as accessible as possible, despite the fact that it was far from being finished.

Since the funding period ended, we've been hard at work on the game's core design. Our design and development strategy has been pretty straightforward for this project. Basically, we've oscillated between working on the campaign and the core game. The campaign will teach us things about what the core game needs to do and the core game will highlight problems and opportunities in the campaign design. Despite being a lot of work, this is a virtuous circle, and it's making both game modes better.

I'm now happy to say that the core game is very close to design-complete. There are still a few outstanding questions, but mostly it's time to head back to the campaign mode and finish building out the game's content. However, before diving into the remaining work, we thought this would be a good time to get a new kit ready for you all.

This kit showcases the game's new victory and market systems, as well as making a dozen or so tweaks to core systems. Some of these tweaks are small ergonomic adjustments, like moving the resources from cards to punchboard tokens. Others seem small but have dramatic implications--like the new rule that only counts undamaged pieces for control. 

We've also been making lots of progress on the game's graphic design, illustration, and physical presentation. We're experimenting, for instance, with wooden buildings--though we're not 100% sure we'll be able to include them yet. We've also got an updated mock up of the game's board which is much more dramatic and evocative. It's still a long way from final art, but we're making good progress!

Questions or other Support Help?

Please email us at [email protected] for any questions or assistance. Please do not use the Kickstarter messaging system to contact us.