Arcadia Quest - First Play!

3rd June 2022

We're round Simon's for some Friday night fun.

Apparently, delving into dangerous dungeons in adventuring parties is a hazardous vocation, but in Arcadia Quest, there's loads of them wandering the dungeons!

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What's in a game?

• ​Game tiles: There are 9 of these double-sided game tiles. Each one features a 3x3 grid which displays open areas, corridors, rooms and doors etc. Some of the tiles also feature player starting areas.
  They are put together in certain configurations to create playing areas for each mission in the game' campaign.
• Spawn tile: This tile is 5 spaces long and is used to manage monsters and monster respawns.
• Player boards: These come in player colours and each has 3 spaces for Hero cards and beneath each of those 3 spaces are 4 more spaces for that hero's gear.
• Cards: Arcardia Quest makes use of a lot of cards and I do mean that.
  • Hero cards: These oversized landscape cards depict the game's 12 heroes,  listing their names with a portrait and stats (Defence and hit points.) as well as each hero's individual special ability.
  • Quest cards: Every mission in the Arcadia Quest card will have a number of quest cards associated with it. They form the objectives that players must complete in order to win the game.
    There are numerous types of quest, including PvE and PvP, additionally, some provide bonuses for completing them first.
  • Upgrade cards: These represent equipment that heroes may acquire during the campaign. Upgrade cards actually also include starter cards.
    Finally, upgrade cards are divided into several types such as a attack cards, special effects, permanent effect, etc.
  • Monster cards: Monsters are a staple of fantasy themed games and Arcadia Quest is no different!
    You'll find goblins, orcs, trolls and all the typical foes here. Each card lists quite a bit of info about its pertinent monster. Including level, life/over kill value, type and strength of attack and defence, any special abilities and reward for defeating.
  • Death curse cards: Unsurprisingly, these can be bad news for players. They only come into play during campaign play though.
• Tokens: As with cards, Arcadia Quest makes use of a lot of types of token. These are typically made of card.
  • Guild tokens: These small, round cornered tokens come in the colours of the game's 4 player guilds. They are used to track exhaustion.
  • Wound tokens: Illustrated with red hearts and used to track wounds and damage.
  • Death tokens: For when things get worse than wounds!
  • Door tokens: These oblong double sided tokens are used to mark whether doors are open or closed!
  • Exploration tokens: Used in quests, these usually contain rewards for whoever finds them by errr... exploring, although there can be a surprise in these tokens.
  • Spawn tokens: As the name suggests, these rounded oblong tokens are  marked with icons identical to the attack dice and are used to manage enemy respawning.
  • Portal Tokens: For when you absolutely, positively need to teleport somewhere!
• Models: Arcadia Quest comes with quite a few plastic minis. These include 12 hero figures as well as about 2 dozen monster and enemies.
• Dice: The dice used are not the usual six-siders, instead they are split into 2 types. Black attack dice and white defence dice.
  Attack dice: The black dice contain a mixture of 3 symbols, melee hits, ranged hits and critical hits.
  Defence dice: ​Meanwhile the white dice contain a mix of blank spaces and shield icons.
• Campaign sheet: This is used only for campaigns and tracks each player's guild performance over the course of the campaign.

It's hard to fault the component quality in Arcadia Quest and nothing feels cheap. It comes with a generous amount of minis
 
The game utilises a chibi art style throughout, this extends to the hero and monster cards as well as the miniatures. The illustrations on the cards and boards is colourful and has a lot of character.
Arcadia is a fairly miniatures heavy game and they're the components that I would say are the the most eye-catching. They're all good quality sculpts and while it's all part of the game's art direction and charm; I have to say I'm a bit ambivalent towards the chibi styling personally.
As an aside; figures are supplied unpainted but haven a paint job.

The game also contains a a fair amount of iconography but it never felt unintuitive.

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How's it play?
Setup
​Arcadia Quest can be played as a traditional board game but is clearly meant to be played as a series of linked scenarios, thus the Campaign book will determine the specific setup required, although it will generally involve the following:

• Game area: Set out the the game tiles as determined in the campaign book, this will include adding door, exploration, quest and spawn tokens.
  Each scenario will also employ certain enemies, the miniatures and cards for these will need to be put out as well.
  Quests: A game called Arcadia Quest wouldn't be much without quests.
  Again, the campaign book will determine which quest cards are set out.
• Heroes: Each player should be given 3 hero cards and their 5 starting gear cards. All of which should be placed on their player board.
  Finally, give each player the guild tokens in their colour.
  The heroes should be put out their starting spaces.

On to play
Arcadia Quest follows the typical turn structure with the active player taking their turn, then the player to the their left acting next.
During their turn, the active player has 2 basic options they can choose from.

• ​Rest: The active player may rest all their heroes, this has several potential benefits.
  • Unexhaust cards: During the usual course of their actions, players will exhaust the cards on their personal board, this means they can no longer be used. This action removes exhaustion from cards.
    More on exhaustion below.
  • Rearrange gear cards: When resting, the active player may choose to re-arrange any and all the gear cards in their personal board between their heroes.
  • Resurrection: If any of the active player's heroes were 'killed' they will reappear on their guild's starting spaces.
• Activate hero: Instead of resting all their heroes, the active player may choose to activate exactly one of their heroes. This will result in the active hero performing the following 2 actions in any order they see fit.
  • Move: The active hero may be moved up to 3 spaces orthogonally along the game tiles. Heroes can also 'spend' movement to open doors or use teleporters.
  • Attack: The active hero may attack a monster or even other players' heroes. Heroes have no default attack in Arcadia Quest per se; instead, all attacks come from using the gear/cards they have equipped for that hero and when a card is used in this way it becomes 'exhausted', a token is then placed on the card to indicate this. Thus each of a hero's cards can be used once only until they are rested.
    As well as attacks, gear cards may also provide other or bonus actions.

That's it for basic player choices, there is of course quite a lot more to Arcadia Quest, below are some more details.

• Attacks: Attacks may be melee or ranged and are performed using a number of black dice as specified by the card being utilised to undertake the attack.
  Melee: This requires the target to be adjacent to the active hero. The player rolls the required number of black dice and every die that comes up with a sword is a point of damage to the target.
  The CRIT result also inflicts damage but additionally, allows the attacker to roll an extra black die, it's possible to string together a number of critical hits.
  Ranged: An attack at range requires line-of-sight and functionally is identical to a melee attack except bow results are required instead of swords. Critical results work the same as with melee.
  Defence: It's not all attack in Arcadia Quest and heroes will need to defend from monster attacks and the aggression of other players.
  Heroes may have a default defence value, they may also have defence values on their gear cards, these are all added to together to give them a total defence score. Even if a gear card is exhausted, it's defence value still always contributes to the hero's defence.
  The defending player rolls white dice equal to the total defence value, each shield result, prevents a point of damage.
• Death: When a hero or monster goes to 0 hit points, it's not good news.
  Monster: Reducing a monster's hit points to 0 defeats it and earns the victorious player money.
  Hero: When a hero reaches 0 hit points, they are also dead! Furthermore, all other players earn coins! There's also some good news/bad news!
  The good news is the next time a player rests their guild, the dead hero will respawn at their guild's starting spot. The bad news though, is that respawned heroes get a 'death token', more on these later.
• Monsters: Monsters are essentially reactive in Arcadia Quest and do nothing when left alone. However, when a hero attacks a monster, it will immediately retaliate after that attack if it can. Additionally, if a hero wanders too close to a monster, it will provoke an attack from that monster. Mechanically, attacking and defending for monsters is identical to heroes.
  Hit points work a little differently though. Monsters have a hit point total and a overkill value. Even when a monster loses all its hit points and is killed; it can still counter attack. However, if an attack deals more damage to a monster than it's overkill value, it is insta-killed and does not counterattack. Thus, getting overkills on monsters is a good tactic.
• Spawns: When a monster is dispatched, its miniature is placed on to the spawn tile. When this tile is filled with monsters, they are all potentially respawned on to the spawn tokens on the game tiles. Rolling a pair of attack dice is used to determine where each monster will respawn, although there's a possibility they won't be respawned at all.
• Villains: Basically, villains are tougher versions of monsters.

There's more that goes on in a game than I've explained above but some of it will be specific to certain scenarios and I'm not going to write about it here. But suffice to say, that's the gist of it.

Endgame
Depending on player count, the first player to complete 2/3 quests wins the game, provided at least 1 of those completed quests is a PvE quest. It's not possible to win by just fighting other players.

Campaign
Hang on, there's some more rules-talk after the endgame! When a scenario is completed, players earn rewards as per the scenario, quest cards and other successes in the scenario. These can be used to purchase more cards for the heroes, providing them a route to upgrade or 'level-up'.
If a hero accumulated 1 or more death tokens during the scenario, then that hero will randomly acquire a death curse card, which inflicts some sort of penalty on the hero in the next scenario. Once that next scenario is completed, the death curse card is discarded. If the hero was unfortunate to die again, they would acquire a new randomly drawn death curse card.

Campaign endgame
If players are going through the campaign, then at the end of each scenario, each player's results are recorded on the campaign sheet and they will earn points for events that occurred in the scenario.
The player who has the best overall results at the end of the campaign, wins the campaign!

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Overall
It's tricky to describe Arcadia Quest. Mechanically it's a pretty straightforward, player's use the fairly obvious actions on their cards, looking for ways to sync or combo effectively until they need to be refreshed.
Different scenarios will present players with different options, opportunities and objectives. Objectives are always a mixture of PvE and PvP goals and players will need to be aware of retaliation from monsters as well as attacks from other players.

This brings me to something I consider a bit of a bugbear. I'm not a fan of games that mix PvE and PvP elements together, particularly in a game that aspires to be 'RPG-adjacent'.
As someone who's played a lot of traditional RPGs, I find it grates a little because it's not something I want from a RPG. Having said that, the other players who don't have any RPG experience found it all enjoyable, so maybe I'm the outlier,

Otherwise, I found Arcadia Quest sort of average, it plays well enough but I found nothing really engaging about it. It never felt like there was a clever strategy I could employ and there was a kind of inevitability to the gameplay.

You spend your action to fight a monster or fight a player and doing one often meant the other could happen to you. I mean if one of you're heroes has been wounded by battling a monster, what better time for another play to target?
I think this is why completing a PvE quest is mandatory to winning, otherwise the game would descend into total PvP combat. When thinking about it, Arcadia Quest ultimately seems like a mini-heavy, light-strategy skirmish wargame on a board with the veneer of RPG-adjacent gameplay. And truth be told; if I'm after a skirmish game, I feel there's plenty of better alternatives out there.

There's nothing really wrong with Arcadia Quest and if you want a light strategy game (Which let me emphasise is no bad thing.) with accessible rules then it's worth a look. But it's not for me.