Initially, we had planned on building Arcs like Oath. The idea was that it would probably be a big box game, with tons of cards and a pretty hefty price point—likely around $130 dollars or more. The game was designed initially as primarily a campaign game, and I didn’t want to present it without that mode. However, over the past several months we have decided to split the game into essentially two product lines.

In general, my designs tend to have a lot of thematic overlap but very little mechanical overlap. Arcs is a little different. In this design, I consciously built on mechanical elements from both Root and Oath. I wanted the game to be easily to teach and learn for players with some passing familiarity of our games and to serve as a good entry point into our other titles. I also didn’t want to innovate in a space where innovation wasn’t warranted. For instance, Oath had presented some very interesting design challenges when it came to movement and demanded a novel solution. However, for Arcs, it was pretty obvious early in the process that the game would have pieces coexisting and moving in a manner very similar to Root. It seemed obvious that Root’s general movement system would work just fine within Arcs.

One of the earliest goals of the design of Arcs was to have a fully emergent asymmetry that went beyond what the positional differences in Oath could do. I wanted players to start in roughly similar positions. However, by the end of the campaign, I hoped that those positions would be as different as any two factions in Root or two roles in Vast. I saw this as a way of approaching an essential problem in asymmetric design.