Arcs: Beyond the Reach

A Week of Lost Vaults and Some Big Videos
2 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
2 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!
2 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.

First Print and Play + A New Diary!
2 months ago – Wed, Apr 01, 2026 at 07:57:51 AM

Hi, I’m Josh! In case you don't know me, I was co-lead developer with Cole on Arcs, and I'm a designer on the Arcs expansions. Today, we're releasing the first Print and Play of the campaign—the new Court deck! To play with it, just print out the new cards and use it in place of the original Court deck in the base game. We've also included a Tabletop Simulator object so that you can pull it right into your game.

Alongside it, I've written a nice big designer diary that talks through the design principles of the Court deck! Basically, what does a Court deck need to do, and how does this new deck do it?

As always with us, this is a work-in-progress, and we appreciate any feedback you want to share after playing with it. If you need to find players, please check our our Discord server, and feel free to post a session report once you've played in #arcs-session-reports!

An Incredible First Day
2 months ago – Tue, Mar 31, 2026 at 04:48:31 PM

Dear Backers,

My goodness, what a first day this has been. In the days before each crowdfunding campaign, we make all sorts of guesses about how a campaign is going to do and spend a lot of time sorting out our various contingency plans. What if no one showed up? What if another global crisis emerged? We’re Midwesterners by birth or inclination here and tend to look down at our toes when we start thinking that things might just go well. Still, we try to be hopeful. We knew that this campaign would tell us more than anything else about the wisdom of our new venture. At the same time, we weren’t afraid. We chose this path because we trusted in each other and ourselves. We were hopeful about what we could build together.

Over the past three months, we've been working on each other's dining room tables and late into the night. We’ve been rebuilding some processes from scratch and finding new ways to approach old problems. It’s staggering to consider how new this all is. Just a few months ago Buried Giant Studios was barely an idea. The Arcs expansion was a list of names on a piece of paper. There were no social media accounts or marketing graphics. Heck, we didn’t even have a proper group chat!

And yet, none of that really mattered. Over the past decade, you’ve been living in the wonderful worlds that sprung from Kyle’s pen and that are so carefully arrayed by Pati and Megan. You’ve handled components that first came to life when Cardner prototyped them with spare cardboard or considered strategies that were fretted over by Josh or I or Drew or Matt or any number of dozens of testers in long weekend chats. You got your copies because Drew and Ted know their work and what it takes to get a box to move across an ocean. You very likely ordered that copy on a gorgeous website that Blake built from scratch in record time. You followed along with my winding design diaries or watched Matt’s videos and learned about the work of game-making. All of these things and more brought you here.

I guess this is all just a long way of saying that it’s good to see you all again. Your enthusiasm is infectious. It lifts us up when we run into some snag and will keep us going through the work before us. I know this isn’t the only way to make games, but it’s certainly the way we prefer.

Over the coming days we have a lot to tell you about our plans. Tomorrow, Josh will be sharing some really neat pieces of design he’s done for Arcs that you’ll be able to play with just a few minutes with a printer and a pair of scissors (and some card sleeves, perhaps!). We’ve got lots of ground to cover, a universe really, and we can’t wait to get underway.

We are at the start of an incredible new chapter in the life of Arcs. Thanks for being there with us.