Arcs: Beyond the Reach

Final Print-and-Play, Coin Chat, and Tomorrow's AMA
5 months ago – Mon, Apr 20, 2026 at 02:47:20 PM

Dear Backers,

Today we’re releasing the last major part of the Fated Leaders and Lost Vaults expansion: the fifth player! As with the other kits, this one is a pretty easy build. If you’ve got a copy of the Blighted Reach expansion, you can proxy the ship pieces using imperial ships along with the free cities and starports. 

The Fifth Player

The rules for the fifth player mode are simple enough that I can fit them easily in this update.

When using the fifth player, use the 5-player setup cards and the new ambition markers. These ambition markers increase the number of points in the game and help compensate for the fact that ties are going to be more common. You play to the same threshold used in the 4 player game.

The biggest mechanical difference can be found with the new action card: the Mandate card. There is one for each player. When drawing cards each chapter, draw 5 cards from the action deck and take your mandate card into your hand. Mandate cards give players the ability to use all actions of the lead card. This introduces some of the action drafting I talked about in last week’s designer diary.

You can also lead with a Mandate card. This gives you a wild action and wild ambition declaration. But, be careful, any other card played will surpass a Mandate. If there’s a tie in surpassing cards, the first played of the tied cards will take the initiative.

If you'd like to check it out, click here.

Metal coins

We wanted to provide you with a closer look at the metal resources we’re producing for Arcs. Over the years, we’ve worked on a bunch of different sets of metal coins. Pamir and Oath both used essentially flat designs. For Pamir, this mostly because, frankly, we didn’t have the budget for a sculptor, and a simple slightly beveled edge would be enough to make the coins pile nicely. For Oath, we had the factory engineer teeth so that the coins could stack easily. This also required a mostly flat design.

With John Company, Drew and I hired Cory DeVore to sculpt the coins based on historical coins. We were also aided by Jan Lipiński, who did a lot of John Company’s icon illustrations and who redrew the historical coins so that they would be easy for Cory to interpret. The result was something really lovely that nicely approximated actual period coins.

We had wanted to do metal resources for Arcs from the get-go. At the time, we didn’t have the development or production bandwidth to do them with the first print run. Thankfully, we had the foresight to make sure their storage tray in the campaign box would allow for a hefty coin, the same size as the punchboard resources, but even thicker.

Because, we didn’t half to stack these coins, we once again brought on Cory to sculpt designs based on concept drawings from Kyle. Here’s what those looked like.

They turned out great, but, these designs also indicated a problem. Usually, metal pieces interface with a really simple color system. You pick a finish for the metal (say, silver or gold) and then maybe apply a wash of some kind. This works great when you only have a few basic denominations and can also use size and thickness to indicate value.

But, with Arcs, we have to rely on color. Kyle had designed the whole color space in Arcs around double-colored resources. Certainly you can use colors when you do coins. You do this by applying hard enamels and you can get very high color fidelity that can match the Pantone color system. However, hard enamels tend to flatten the design, and we didn't want to undo all of the good sculpting work that Cory had done. 

To this end, we explored using clear enamels. You can see some pictured below (along with hard enamels).

Pay special attention at how the clear enamels preserve a sense of depth and texture on the coin compared to the hard enamel that you see on the center hexagon coin. 

However, clear enamels have some drawbacks. Instead of having the full range of Pantone colors, you have to use a very limited range. Here our wonderful production specialist Cardner suggested a novel solution--if we changed the finish on the coin we could combined that color with clear enamel to produce the desired color in aggregate. You can see this effect a little in the example above with the way the clear enamel combines with the different finishes.

With this in mind, Kyle worked up a color guide that used the coin sample book from our factory. And Cory then did some renders approximating the effect. 

It will be a couple months before we get the next batch of samples from the factory, but we're confident we can produce a spectacular set of resource tokens for you all. These are one of the most handled elements in all of Arcs, and we wanted to make sure to do them right! 

Reddit AMA Tomorrow

We’re heading to Reddit tomorrow for a company-wide AMA (Ask Me Anything). Come with all of your questions for the team here at Buried Giant Studios. We’re happy to answer your questions about anything from graphic design process to our favorite way to spend a summer afternoon. We’ll get started at 11am Central US time over on r/boardgames.

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That's all for now, we'll see you all tomorrow over at the AMA!

Fated Leaders Print-and-Play and an Upcoming Dev Stream
6 months ago – Mon, Apr 13, 2026 at 01:38:24 PM

Dear Backers,

Today we’re releasing a whole heap of leaders. We haven't settled on exactly the leader count for the expansion, but I'm hoping that we'll be able to double the total number of leaders in Arcs. Today we're releasing 12 of those leaders, so you should get a sense of how much wider the world of Arcs is becoming.

For this kit, we've included an even split of both regular leaders and fated leaders. One of my golden rules for new game content in general is that we should try to stay roughly neutral in complexity compared to the base game. You can see this at work in Josh's wonderful new court deck and you'll find it at work in the leaders too. For instance, in the pair shown below, you’ll see a fairly straightforward Imperator coupled with the Oracle whose punchy power hides a ton of room for subtle play. 

We’re also releasing the first batch of fated leaders. With this you’ll see a selection between those that are fairly lightweight (in terms of rules) such as the Firebrand with the more dizzying God’s Hand. 

We’re still in the experimentation stage of this portion of the design, so you’ll see a fairly wide range of design approaches. The Profiteer is a great example of this. There are a few different working cuts of this interpretation of the Magnate, some of which lean on monopolies, others on Summit-style negotiations, and some on the actual thematic endpoint of fate. While the Blighted Reach campaign allows room for any and all of these options to emerge organically, the confines of the single-session game forces us to choose one area. For this release, we’re spotlighting the Magnate’s future as a war profiteer, but it’s anyone’s guess where this particular fated leader will land by the end of testing.

As with our other kits, you can find everything you need to play here.

This past weekend, I had a blast showing off these new leaders at Circle DC. We decided to play with everything I had with me, sowe coupled the leaders with lost vaults, the new court deck, and the fifth player. It was a great play that I think gave a good sense of just how dramatically strange and wonderful the single-session can become.

You'll be able to see that for yourself next week when we post our staff game. In the meantime, I hope you look forward to Josh and I's upcoming design and development livestream over on the BGS YouTube channel. Come with your questions this Wednesday at 2pm Central US. We hope to see you there! 

A Week of Lost Vaults and Some Big Videos
6 months ago – Fri, Apr 10, 2026 at 10:04:14 AM

Dear Backers

We’re winding up a very strong second week of the campaign and feeling good here at Buried Giant. Everyone has been doing such wonderful work, and it’s been so nice to see you all in the comments. 

This weekend, Drew and I are on the road. We spent yesterday in Philadelphia at an 18th century studies  conference showing off Molly House and John Company, and today we’re heading to Circle DC where we will be demoing Arcs: Lost Vaults and Fated Leaders as well as the upcoming edition of An Infamous Traffic. 

A few days ago we released the Lost Vaults, Arcs’s new setup system. You can find everything you need to play here. Like our first kit, it’s pretty simple to assemble a copy or you can easily import it into the digital tabletop of your choice. 

Then, on Tuesday, Kyle and Pati held a really lovely art stream over on our YouTube. If you’re interested in learning more about the work that goes into the illustrations and graphic design in our games, it’s a perfect starting place.

We also released a pair of design diaries. I wrote a long essay, “On Expansions” which you can find here. This essay has been in the works for awhile, and it felt right to finally release it during the campaign. We paired it with a talk that I gave in the spring (which is itself an adaptation of the presentation that Josh and I gave at last year’s GDC). I’m so glad that Matt brought his camera along and that we were able to capture it! 

Meanwhile, the operations team has been busy on the back-end of the campaign. We’ve been able to lower our shipping rates to Canada and we’re hard at work on hammering out some of the production details for the metal resources which will really be spectacular. We’ll have more to say on that next week.

Thanks again for all of your support and happy playing!

PnP Kit #2, an Art Stream, and Good News for Canadian Backers
6 months ago – Tue, Apr 07, 2026 at 10:37:53 AM

Dear Backers,

Yesterday we passed a critical milestone, perhaps the most critical milestone: the Arcs campaign found its 10,000th backer. While this is a little less flashy than crossing a funding goal, it’s a far better indicator of the core health of the audience and the future of the game. I can't tell you all how relieved we are to have such a powerful backwind as we head into the campaign's second week.

Second Print and Play

On Monday we released the second print-and-play kit for Arcs. This kit introduces a new setup system to Arcs, called the Lost Vaults, that replaces the randomized setup cards and the leader/lore draft from the base game. This may seem like a pretty small update, but there’s a reason we gave the setup adjustment title-billing. It’s got quite a punch!

For a game like Arcs, the primary goal of an advanced setup is generate interesting challenges for players and allow them to interact with the vast amount of design content in the game organically. When going into this design, I also wanted to make sure the setup felt thematically coherent. While I’ve played more than my share of Leaders and Lore (and do like the draft quite a bit!) I’ve always felt a little queasy about asking players to choose a lore card before they have a leader. Who exactly is picking that lore card? I also felt that it sometimes produced a little too much asymmetry. If we were playing on setup card: Mix Up #1, then were all equally mixed up. What if some of us had coherent territories and others were scattered to the winds? What if my coherent territory meant I had less lore? It seems like there should be room in Arcs for these kinds of setup variations.

So the new system is all about producing that difference. It does this by using the couple of location dice that are used in the campaign game (there will be a set in Fated Leaders and Lost Vaults as well), and by mixing in two new kinds of cards: Floating Edifices and Artifacts. Both of these cards open up a lot of new design space for Arcs and work with the Lost Vaults system to produce some compelling setup decisions for players. My hope is that it feels less like a setup draft and more like a proper prologue for the coming contest.

Today’s Art Stream

At 2pm today (Central US time), Kyle and Pati will be hosting an art stream over on our YouTube channel. Come with your questions about process or Arcs or anything else.

Shipping and Fulfillment

Hey all! Drew here with a quick micro-update on shipping rates for our international backers. Canadian backers, I have good news! We will be working with a Canadian warehouse to receive the freight and ship domestically, which means we were able to lower the shipping rates dramatically. The packages will still likely be processed via Canada Post and the heavier ones likely through FedEx. I've adjusted a few other rates in the EU like Ireland and Finland to a lower rate since launch, but otherwise all other rates are looking correct. 

For the folks that haven't backed one of our projects before on Kickstarter, this is a reminder that we will be using BackerKit as our pledge manager. About a month after the campaign ends, you will get an email with your BackerKit survey and all of your pledge information. We use this to confirm all of the items in your pledge as well as collect addresses and shipping payment. If you ever have questions about your pledge, feel free to leave a comment here during the campaign or place a support request here: 

Alright, that's all for now. Later this week we'll have a big video and essay to share. Till then, from all of us here at Buried Giant, thanks again for your support! 

First Friday Recap!
6 months ago – Fri, Apr 03, 2026 at 12:53:54 PM

Dear Backers

What a week it has been! We wanted to send you all a little end-of-week update to just highlight all of the work we’ve been doing and celebrate the first few days of the campaign.

After we got things launched on Tuesday, Josh posted a lovely new deck of Court cards. He also wrote about them at length here. 

Then, on Thursday Matt posted the next video in our first series about Buried Giant and how we approach our work. 

Actually, I should mention that we have a whole YouTube channel full of videos. We'll be hosting all sorts of stuff there eventually, from panels and recorded lectures to playthroughs and process documentaries. If you like this kind of stuff, I'd encourage you to subscribe.

We're also preparing a bunch of things for next week. Matt is hard at work editing a longer video of a talk I gave earlier this year, Josh and I are working on the next Print-and-Play kits, and Kyle is preparing for his upcoming art stream. In addition, Drew and I will be heading to Philadelphia to present at a conference and then take the train to Circle DC right afterwards where we'll be showing off some new Arcs stuff and An Infamous Traffic.

It's hard to convey how much your support means to us, and what it will enable us to do in the coming months and years. We'll have a lot more to say about that later in the campaign, but, for now, thank you again for everything.