Arcadia Quest is a monster of a game that tries to fit the glory of MOBA’s into a board game, and does a great job. The last month or so we secretly had a ‘meeting of the four’ so that we could play Arcadia Quest rather than something else for our board game night in order to push through and finish an entire campaign. Overall I think it was a good time, and it’s certainly a fun game, but a small issue both campaigns I’ve played was runaway leaderism. If you do well in the first scenario, you will be set up to do well in the second, etc. We ended up with two players that had very strong Guilds and two that did not. One of the weak guild players ‘won’ the game by doing the final strike on Lord Fang, but he had zero other medals and got the ‘middling victory’ description at the end.
The scenarios were generally good. Only one broke down into a complete slog as players tried to complete a final PVP quest to win the game. Guilds were able to stay away from each other enough to keep the scenario going long after all the monsters and treasure had been destroyed. That was a late night. The rest of the scenarios were short and fun (unless you were one of the players getting their ass kicked!)
So having played about 10 scenarios, including a full campaign, I have to say the game holds up well. It’s not my favorite game, and the first couple times I played I really didn’t like it at all due to the single activation per turn thing. Arcadia has grown on me but certainly not enough to back the new kickstarter. Like Talisman and Republic of Rome, it’s a good game to pull out every once in awhile, but once you start, you are in for a long, long haul to finish a campaign. It does fulfill a certain Necromunda/Mordheim style itch though…