Arcs, Iliad, Ichor, Heat: Tunnel Vision, Weimar, and more

Week of May 12th, 2025

We finished up our Arcs campaign this week. The third Act saw the Advocate (who had been successful every Act) grinding power while 3 new C Fates were gunning for an instant victory: Redeemer, Survivalist, and Guardian. The Advocate was only slightly ahead on points at the start of the Act, but he had a very strong suite of tableau powers and had locked down the three Artifact worlds so I really felt he was in a position to steamroll on points for the last 4 chapters; I felt I had to switch to a C Fate to get the possible auto-victory rather than sticking with my B Fate (Peacekeeper) and playing for points, even though I was moderately happy with where I was with the Peacekeeper. I just felt like the Advocate was going to have to get clipped for anyone else to win, and as the Peacekeeper that was definitionally going to be a problem. As the Redeemer though (who requires artifacts) I was on a collision course with the Advocate, and we could not reach a detente after I won the first round of battles. I simply had to have his artifacts and he was willing to fight to the death, so that created the space for the Guardian to finish his objectives first. It was crazy close though! All three of the C Fates were very near to their win conditions.

Cole says that Arcs is a table-balancing game, so the game is expected to be somewhat political — you do have to make sure someone doesn’t build up a position that becomes unassailable. It’s easier to say that your game is a table-balancing game than it is to actually make a satisfying one though. While there are plenty of notable successes, like Dune, Republic of Rome, El Grande, The Last Kingdom, and Weimar, there are lot more failures (the whole COIN series comes to mind, but also Blood Rage, Space Empires 4X, Churchill, and many more). The way Arcs works is really interesting. The strength of each player’s position can be extremely difficult to read between a bewildering array of Guild and Lore cards, Fates with wildly different tempos, and the wildcards of the Empire, Edicts, and Blight. Plus different Fates will be in different levels of conflict with each other to achieve their objectives. Making sensible evaluations of where each player is in terms of power and potential is essential to good play, in fact is probably the single most important skill, but it’s also incredibly hard. I think on balance that this is good. Not to pick on COIN too much, but when you can just look at the point track and see more or less exactly where everyone is the game gets a bit silly. You really do need either Arc’s level of complexity or El Grande’s level of constraint to make a game satisfying. It’s possible though that at least in the campaign, Arcs may have gone too far in the direction of evaluation complexity for many gamers. It brings to mind the early days of playing Settlers of Catan where people would drop the Robber on you because you had the most points even though your position was actually weak, and that could be maddening. Arcs is not Catan obviously, it’s got so much going on in the campaign that there are a bunch of ways to find satisfaction in engaging with it. Still, it’s something to bear in mind.

Iliad is half of Bitewing’s latest Kickstarter delivery of Knizia 2-player games. Probably my two favorite 2-player euros of all time are Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation and Blue Moon, so I’m always interested in whatever Knizia is doing in this space. Now, those two games are outliers in his ludography in terms of depth of gameplay and thematic engagement, so my hope that he’ll deliver another one like those is maybe not entirely well-grounded. He’s still the best though.

Of the two new games, Iliad and Ichor, Iliad is the all-new design. Although the game is mechanically fairly unique, it has a lot of tropes of Knizia designs: tactical tile-laying with constrained choices (you have only two tiles in hand and only a small number of spots that are legally playable for much of the game) that nonetheless present a lot of depth. The overall feel is one of risk-taking and push-your-luck; when a row or column completes (which requires three tiles from each player as the board is laid out as a checkerboard and you can only play on your own colors) it is scored, with the high scorer getting their choice of the end-tiles and the other player getting the reject. Like Samurai, you want to avoid placing the second-last tile in a row. Like Great Wall of China, some of the rows will be high-stakes (+10 on one end and -10 on the other) while some will offer little or even no leverage. The scoring tiles come in different suits and you need all 5 suits to win (generally) with only your highest in each suit counting. So like his auction games, it’s all a mix of deciding which rows to fight for and which to concede, and how to manage your tile flow.

I enjoyed it; it’s a very classic Knizia middleweight, more substantial than Lost Cities (and there is more to Lost Cities than it seems!) but not as deep or with as much thematic payload as Blue Moon or Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation. Since the Iliad and Greek history and mythology generally are near to my heart I wish it had done a little more with the setting; the Iliad is a such a rich story and he’s done it before with Lord of the Rings and Beowulf. But it’s ok. And it’s a good game.

Ichor is the other game in the pair. It’s a continued evolution of two of Knizia’s older games, Tiku (1993) and Battle for Olympus (2009). I have never played either, but it seems very close to Battle for Olympus — just a much improved physical design and additional characters. It’s a classic tactical game of maneuver and placement. You have 6 or 7 characters (depending on whether you play the 6x6 or 7x7 game) with unique one-off powers and your goal is to place all of your tokens. Characters move like Chess rooks and drop off tokens (and remove your opponent’s tokens) in the spaces they pass over. In flavor and tempo it reminds me a bit of Kenjutsu: an early subtle positioning game followed by a sudden flurry of action and a decisive strike. Although the box says the game is 40 minutes, I think you’re going to need some significant skill for it to take that long — our games were like 10. With the wide range of piece powers it was easy to pull something decisive and unexpected. I do think once you reach a certain familiarity with the game and mastery level though it would become more considered.

This sort of game is not really in my sweet spot, it’s actually a bit complex compared to the open-information abstracts that I enjoy like YINSH or LYNGK. With all the powers — all different — the number of possibilities is a bit daunting at first. Like Iliad, the Greek theme isn’t nothing but it isn’t deep either. It’s Knizia, so it’s a clever, engaging game. Am I going to get to play it enough to really enjoy its nuances? Probably not, unfortunately.

I got the deluxe editions of both games, and they both look really great on the table and are much more pleasing to play with than the cardboard versions. Honestly though, if I had it to do again I’d just get the cardboard. Knizia’s games often surprise me in the long run, so maybe I’ll change my mind, but first impression is they’re not going to get to the 20+ plays required quickly enough to justify the deluxe version for me.

We played a really interesting game of Molly House at the Guildhouse. We had 5 players, a first for me, and while I do think 4 is the sweet spot 5 worked well. The player dynamics were really different from any previous game I have played! Early on people would try to throw parties and they’d say “look, I’m inviting a bunch of cops so we have to keep it low-key”. A couple of constables would show up but then people just would not be able to resist going for the points. So while we were able to neutralize a couple rogues, every single constable collected plenty of evidence. It was very clear to me early that this was never going to work out and I needed to figure out how to turn state’s evidence, but as the game explainer and facilitator I didn’t really have the mindshare to figure it out. One of our players did though and managed to score the first informer win I’ve seen (I have to say, he played a brilliant game of misdirection).

It was nice that the game was pretty robust against a group that had trouble cooperating, and still gave the players a lot of levers to work to try to win. I don’t think you’d want to play this way regularly, I do think you want to buy in to the premise, but these games with a cooperative element often just fail if the players can’t manage it to some degree (Nemesis, or even Weimar, coming up later). Molly House does not.

I was also very gratified by how much folks seemed to enjoy the game. I finally got into the zone on the rules explanation and got everyone through it pretty painlessly and in good time. There is a really good new set of aid cards on BGG which I definitely recommend printing out. Our game generated a lot of immersion and friendly banter and camaraderie which is why I’m here. It was a really positive experience for me.

The new Tunnel Vision expansion for Heat: Pedal to the Metal arrived a couple weeks ago but this is the first chance I’ve had to break it out (I managed to snag it through a tariff loophole; I realized I might have made a mistake and thought I might get dinged, but I was not). Initial impression is that I like this better than Heavy Rain. The Spain track is very distinctive, long and windy and only one lap. The Tunnel rules are simple and a little more intuitive than the flooded spaces in Japan. And the new purple Draft upgrade symbol is cool, it can enable some interesting tactical maneuvers. The rules for them are a little tricky so even though they are very easy to state, check the examples closely to make sure you’ve got everything right. Heat has become a recent classic, and I think the expansion is nice. It’s small but it has distinctive new content.

As long as I’m talking about the game, I should say that we use a house rule that I like a lot. Instead of the standard “snake” draft for upgrades, we do a 7 Wonders-style draft: deal everyone 5 upgrades, keep one and pass to the left until you have 4, then throw one away. I think the snake draft somewhat unfairly punishes the player in the pole position, so I find the balance better, and it’s fun that you won’t really know what upgrades anyone has until they play them. The snake draft is still better for introducing players to the upgrades, but once have a feel for them I really think the simultaneous draft is a better experience.

Arcs at the beginning of the week, Weimar: The Fight for Democracy at the end, and a similar throughline in my mind for both games. Like Arcs, Weimar is a table-balancing game, although more explicitly political as befits its subject material. As I’ve mentioned before, the situation tends towards chaos — the Weimar Republic will fly apart unless some effort is made to keep it together. The relationships between the factions are so much more intricate than the government/insurgent dichotomy of COIN, which seems glaringly simplistic in comparison. The leftists (governing SPD and radical communist SPD) start with some modest advantages over their right-wing counterparts (the governing Zentrum and reactionary DNVP). The DNVP can have pretty explosive growth later, while the communist KPD tends to fade (slightly) over time. Zentrum and SPD face an uphill battle throughout. The Republic is very fragile early, vulnerable to both external shocks and internal chaos, so the rightists have to be careful about giving their leftist counterparts too much leeway too early because if the Republic collapses it will likely be because KPD gave it a victorious push, or SPD will win on points (or certainly beat Zentrum anyway, and KDP will beat DNVP). There is a real temptation for Zentrum to try to bring the DNVP into government to beat the left (or for SPD to bring in KPD to beat the right), and while that can work, it’s very, very risky and you have to really know what you’re doing (it turned out quite badly historically of course). And all this is why I say the game is so inherently political, somewhat moreso than Arcs and far moreso than COIN or Root. You’ve got to know what your faction needs and be willing to give to get it, you have people you need to cooperate with, and you also need to be able to judge the political situation well. Outside of some strange outlier cases SPD and Zentrum particularly are not going to win unless the game goes to turn 6, and they need to forge some kind of working relationship even if it’s wary. All of these relationships are complex, as they were historically; and all these complexities are what makes Weimar such a great game, but also treacherous.

For the first time I heard a player make the argument that losing because someone else won, and losing because the NSDAP took over and you were their worst enabler, really wasn’t very different. I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to this. Technically, in a narrow game sense, it might be true. People have to choose how they play games, and in the vast majority of games playing for first or nothing, or putting value on place ranking, are both legitimate choices (within certain boundaries of the social contract around sporting play). Weimar isn’t as sensitive to this as Republic of Rome, where if everyone doesn’t clearly value a loss where the Republic survives over a loss where it falls the game just doesn’t function very well. I think Weimar is more robust simply because if players aren’t scared of the Nazis, they will take over and everyone will lose and the game will have made its point. Doing that more than very occasionally though won’t be that fun and you’ll probably want to find a different game. Ultimately in both cases, I think you just really need to buy in to the game’s premise — as you do for virtually any thematic game.

I played A Gest of Robin Hood twice more, and Robin was savagely beaten again in both games. I don’t know what to think. The internet consensus is that the Sheriff is favored nontrivially and Robin Hood has a much more considerable learning curve, but after 5 games my impression is that the balance is fairly brutal. It’s not just that Robin has never won, it’s that he’s never been remotely competitive. I am mindful of my recent experience with In the Shadows which initially struck me as totally unbalanced but it turned out the balance was just wildly dependent on card flow. I may well be wrong on this one; someone on the Geek dug up some BGA statistics and found the Sheriff “only” won about 60% of the time there. For me, 60-40 balance is pushing right up against the line but is tolerable if the game is good enough (spoiler: this probably is not). But alarms are going off loudly in my head and while my optimistic heart still believes the game has potential, in truth the actual experience of playing it hasn’t been very good. So caveat emptor.

Coda

In a few weeks I’ll be heading off to a summer bass clarinet intensive at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Jon Russell and Jeff Anderle will be teachers, so I thought I’d share one of my favorite of Jon’s compositions performed by Jeff. This performance is by the wonderful local Left Coast Chamber Ensemble.

That’s all! See you next week!