A Spring Surprise and Today's Design Stream
about 3 years 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 3 years 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 3 years 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 3 years 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.

Design Update, Print and Play Delayed, and Design Stream Today
over 3 years ago – Thu, Sep 29, 2022 at 07:44:47 AM

Dear Backers,

Hello! It’s been a bit. Sorry about that. Normally, we wait a few months post-campaign before we start doing regular campaign updates. That’s mostly because the work immediately after a Kickstarter tends to be more mundane. This period was a little more extended in Arcs’s case because we had to negotiate a very big office move which took the better part of July and that bled into a busy month of travel in August (Gen Con). This has put us a little behind in our general schedule on Arcs, but it’s nothing dramatic and is indeed already accounted for in our back end planning.

The good news is that Arcs is moving along really nicely. The base game box is nearing design lock. There will be some months of development and fine-tuning ahead for us, but it’s stabilizing nicely. While this is happening, we’ve also been spending a lot of time getting the game's art and graphics up to our standards and making sure we attend to every little detail. For instance, as the game’s setting has become more fully realized, we’ve been adjusting the aesthetic cues on the different game elements.

For instance, we’ve done a pretty big stylistic shift on the action cards:

In some cases, these adjustments are limited to changes in artwork. At other times, we’ve been looking at making larger modifications to the game’s physical production. These changes are more complex, since they involve re-quoting parts of the project with our printers and potentially seeing if we can put even more things in the box for you all. As an example, we’ve been exploring the possibility of swapping out the game’s punchboard buildings for wood. We haven’t finalized this decision yet—at lot will depend on the cost of the added wood, but it is something we are seriously considering.

And of course the design is being subject to the same rigors as the rest of the project! For the past few months, we’ve been working very hard on making the core engine of Arcs as robust as possible. Arcs has been an interesting project to work on for a lot of reasons, but one of the strangest things about it is the degree to which the campaign and single session game rely on one another. Generally, I will build out part of the campaign and then find that in practice the core system doesn’t quite allow for parts of it to work the way I want. So, I’ll go back to the core game and try to build out its expressiveness. This in turn will give me ideas for new plotlines, which I’ll then sew in when I go back to the campaign.

This can all feel a little circular, but there’s a ton of progress being made and the game is in the best shape it’s ever been in. As I mentioned at the start, I think there’s a good chance that the core engine is very close to feature-complete and that the work that remains is mostly development and content generation for the remaining few plotlines.

I think you’ll all see what I mean when you get a chance to play it. I had really hoped that we’d be able to share a new playtesting kit with you all, but we aren’t quite ready. There are just a few things that I want to vet a bit more and a couple of pieces of art and layout which, when you see them, I think will really give you a sense of how wonderful this thing is going to look.

By way of apology, I’ll be doing a design live stream today on the Leder Games twitch channel (2pm central US time) where I will talk through the current game and offer a pretty comprehensive look at everything that’s changed. I’m also happy to take your questions.

Then, within a week or two we’ll be updating the TTS mod and releasing a new print-and-play kit. I cannot wait for you to all play this thing. I’m sorry it’s taken so long to get to this point, but I think the wait will be worth it.

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.