First Print and Play + A New Diary!
6 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
6 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.
