Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Setting everything out on the table, I could feel the excitement bubbling up. It had been a couple of months since I’d played a round of Arcs, 2024’s hottest release. When I finally sat down for my first game of campaign expansion The Blighted Reach, I couldn’t wait to dive back in. I would have told you that I like Arcs without quite tipping over into loving it, but I don’t often feel that sense of anticipation when setting a game up. I was thrilled to be back.
It took a while to get The Blighted Reach to the table because of the animosity several in my gaming group(s) feel towards the base game. The players most likely to show up at 9:00 am on a Sunday to game until 20:00 are also, by and large, the most Arcs-averse. The tweaky, tactile decision space that characterizes the game is a big part of why I like it, but it can rub more intentionally-minded players the wrong way. Arcs isn’t a game that rewards having a plan half as much as it rewards the willingness to ditch your plan and all who sail in her. That isn’t for everybody.
The Blighted Reach is still largely the same game, though it adds just enough small tweaks to the rules to make the overall experience hard to grasp. People keep debating over whether or not you should jump into The Blighted Reach without having played Arcs at all, with many people saying the expansion is simply too heavy to take on all at once. I think I disagree, to the point where I’d argue first-time players have an easier time remembering the rules as they exist. They aren’t adjusting something they already know, thereby constantly making mistakes.
A full Blight plays out across three sessions, a deeply responsible number. You may die well before you and your friends ever finish Gloomhaven, but you can reliably find six or so hours total over a month to get in three games of Arcs. It’s also easy to take breaks in between games. Everything packs nicely into a pair of trays, making it a cinch to dole out the board as it was when last you played. Leder Games has done a wonderful job making this campaign as user-friendly as possible.
Each player starts out by getting assigned a Fate, which is roughly analogous to a role or a faction. These Fates can give you access to unique abilities or components, drastically changing the ways in which you interact with the game, but the most important part of each Fate is its Objective. Objectives shape and mold what suits your interests, guiding the strategies each player pursues. Maybe you want to become First Regent, or become an Outlaw, or grow the Imperial Fleet. Each Fate has a narrative attached to it, implied with only a pinch of flavor text. This is impressive and phenomenal work.
The Fates also occasionally change the rules. With the wide variety of Fates available—there are a total of 24, though you’ll never see more than half of those in any one campaign—there’s a lot of room for that to get overwhelming. Blighted Reach comes with a small portfolio rules booklet, a series of card sleeves to which players add their Edict, Law, and Summit cards. This is, again, incredibly smart. It makes referencing changes much faster. Everything has been done thoughtfully and with the utmost facilitation in mind.
The energy around the table at that first play only continued to build as we set up and went over the rules. Everything pointed towards a wonderful, if somewhat muddled, first play. Then we started.
Thanks, I Hate It
If Arcs has been somewhat divisive, the campaign has not. I have seen nothing but glowing coverage, heard nothing but enamored responses. Even among the staff at Meeple Mountain, who are not united in their response to the base game, those who’ve sat down to play Arcs: The Blighted Reach are fulsome in their praise. It offers a dynamic, multi-faceted narrative experience. The ways in which different Fates interact over time—you can ditch your Fate between games if you’re not feeling it—is fascinating. The final result of entire campaigns can come down to the results of one or two die rolls. The Blighted Reach manages to be epic and contained all at once. As sure as anything I’ve ever played, the Arcs campaign is a masterpiece.
I hated it.
I hated every second of it.
I never want to play it again.
I like Arcs because it is a wide-open carnival of tactics and pivoting, of seeing openings and wriggling through. My friends who dislike it do so because they approach games by locking into a particular strategy, a particular way forward, and find in Arcs that way constantly thwarted by the luck of the draw or the roll of the dice. I don’t play that way, and so I do not have that problem.
Arcs: The Blighted Reach, however, tips you in that direction. The Objectives tell you to play a certain way. Do they require you to? No, not really. You lose points at the end of each game if you haven’t completed your objective, but it isn’t a requirement. Still, in my first play, I constantly found myself experiencing the frustrations voiced by those who find Arcs too random, too aleatoric, too punishing. Approaching Arcs from that point of view, it is, truly, awful. I worked to shake that frame as I continued my way through The Blighted Reach, but I found it hard to do so completely.
If you can manage not to do that, and you enjoy Arcs, The Blighted Reach is masterful, an unbelievably rich and evocative experience. But boy. I now understand everything people hate about Arcs, in a much more immediate sense than I ever anticipated. Arcs isn’t for everybody. The Blighted Reach isn’t about to change that. But that isn’t a bug; it might even be the design’s biggest strength.
Arcs: The Blighted Reach details
- Designer: Cole Wehrle
- Artists: Kyle Ferrin
- Publishers: Leder Games, Spielworxx
- Release Date: 2024
- Player count : 2 - 4
- Mechanism(s): Area Movement, Campaign / Battle Card Driven, Dice Rolling, Negotiation, Take That, Trick-taking, Turn Order: Claim Action
- BGG Geek Rating: 9.01776 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.5.
- More articles about Arcs: The Blighted Reach.
Utterly baffling review. You hate it with a passion but give it a 5 star review that says you’ll play it every chance you get. You get one thinly outlined reason why you hated it then just end the review. This feels like you just stopped halfway through after realizing you hate it but love it. Maybe the worst review I’ve seen on this site.
Hey Jon,
Sorry you didn’t care for the review! I rated The Blighted Reach 5 stars because I think it is a singular achievement, and I’ve never played anything like it. I feel as though I said as much in the review, though perhaps I could have been clearer. I felt hesitation in giving it the 5 star rating because of the text equivalent, but the rating is correct. Just because *I* hated it doesn’t mean I don’t recognize that it’s excellent, which I believe I did state rather explicitly in the review.