Boom. That’s the article. Mic drop…
You can’t come in with clickbait like that and not justify it!
Alright, fair enough. I’ve keenly followed the discourse around Cole Wehrle's space opera Arcs over the past few months, observing who loves it, who hates it and why. The more I’ve researched it both through reading and playing, the more something has struck me: the core of the commentary on some of Arcs’s most contentious elements are almost all true of Snowdonia too! Today I’d like to dig into that similarity. We’ll also continue the work of making you a better Snowdonia player, naturally.
How is a game about running a star empire remotely the same as a game about building a railway up Snowdon in 1895?
Here’s a list of some of the things that they share:
- a limited supply of resources players compete over;
- a possibility something you put a lot of time into will be worth no points without supplementary action;
- turn order is so important that it can decide who wins;
- a shared river of cards that can be taken from, offering additional abilities and scoring opportunities;
- paying keen attention to your opponents’ actions and board state is incredibly important for high-skill play;
- space for possible kingmaking (though Snowdonia obfuscates this by making it very arduous to calculate an opponent’s score);
- they will both (soon!) have an expansion that adds a campaign mode.
I’m keen to explore these but today I’m most interested in a bigger, fundamental quality at the core of them both. A quality that I think makes them experientially much closer than one might initially think.
Okay, I’ll admit that’s more than I was expecting… and what’s this even bigger similarity?
Let’s frame it by looking at some common comments the games get. The biggest single controversy around Arcs is that it’s hard to do what you want to do and it consequently feels random. In Arcs, the actions you can take and how effective they are is determined by a random hand of 6 cards each granting 1 to 4 uses of an action. You might want to go attack a neighbour’s fleet but you can’t because your cards are focused on construction and diplomacy. You can flex outside these limitations, but if you do you’ll only get 1 use of an action which is much weaker but sometimes the right answer.
Snowdonia similarly doesn’t always let you do what you want to do. You might want to excavate the station space ahead to claim its points, but rain has reduced the work rate (notably also rated 1 to 4) so low that you can’t. You might want to lay track but there is none available, want to build but there’s not stone in the stock yard etc.
This difficulty in execution marks them as deeply tactical games.
But isn’t that quite frustrating?
It is! Frustration is at the heart of both titles. People complain of difficult hands in Arcs just as they’ve bemoaned the weather and events in Snowdonia “unfairly” ruining their plans. But I would argue that that mindset focuses on the frustration and thus misses all the joy these games offer. I see the pleasure and skill of tactical games like a surfing competition. You must keep your balance on a wobbling surfboard by any means necessary as the sea’s uncaring motions threaten to throw you off. In surfing, you have to feel out the movements of the water beneath you and adapt, with every wave being different. Your tools for this are your body and to a limited extent the surfboard.
This is important because in a competitive environment, though peoples’ bodies, boards and technique might be different, the sea is the same for all of them. All participants are, broadly speaking, subject to the same forces as each other. Hence why nobody in surfing is arguing the ocean is “too random”. It’s affecting all competitors equally, ergo it is just another element of the challenge. The nature of a surfing competition is not who can perform best in a fixed environment but who can best adapt to surf in that day’s conditions.
This is the lens that Snowdonia and Arcs have to be viewed through to embrace success... or at the very least that’s how I look at it. Those work rates are the same for everyone and those events have a fixed order and hit the same central board that everyone’s playing on. For Arcs, I think its fans’ favourite adage that “every hand is a bad hand” speaks for itself. So stop thinking about the specific way you want to play and start listening to what the game is offering you.
How do I practically apply that to winning Snowdonia or Arcs?
It’s complex. That is actually going to have to be an article all its own or we will be here all day. I’ve already had to resist an extended rant about how this philosophy ties into the entire genre of roguelite games (Slay the Spire the board game being a fantastic recent addition to our industry), so hold tight! Part 2 will delve further into these similarities alongside more concrete play advice.
The suspense! What should I take away from today while I wait?
That any surfer trying to achieve success by controlling the ocean will be sorely disappointed. Listen to the games you play, then find the joy in how you can beat them by engaging with them on their terms. It’s a good feeling when you manage to clutch the winning amount of victory points from a cantankerous box that doesn’t want to give them to you!
While I passionately hold that position, I’d love to know what you think as well. Are there any other games that you feel share this particular quality? Do you prefer another style of game? And if so why?
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Jaya Baldwin
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