Mishler Captures First Arcs Championship!

Arcs made an impressive debut at WBC with 38 players competing across three Heats, a Semifinal and a tense Final. Overall, 16 games were played and below I will note some of the trends that were observed:

First, as the tournament used the Leaders and Lore “expansion” (it is included in the base game) I was tracking the Leaders picked. Of the available Leaders the Feastbringer was selected the most often (9 times). Two of those times that player won the game. In second place was the Mystic, being chosen five times and winning three times.

Second, games tended to either go all five Chapters or close to all five. And in the earlier Chapters the tendency was for low scores bunched fairly tightly together. Then a player or two would surge out to win. What this was showing was a tendency for cagey play.

Third, games had a fairly significant amount of combat. This is interesting in light of the cagey play but the game system explains it as combat can be a longer range reward strategy.

Fourth, out of 16 games played it was necessary to adjudicate five due to time running out. This is a fairly strong indication that the three hour slot was a bit too short. I plan to ask for a 3.5 hour slot for 2026.

The Final game was interesting as it defied some of the trends I listed. For example, the scores at the end were pretty close, with Dennis Mishler’s Archivist winning with a score of 27 and Bailey Burdett only 5 points behind (in ARCS being down 5 is not large) with the Fuel Drinker. Nicholas Chepaitis finished third with the Corsair (a fun Leader) and Sam’s Burdett’s Agitator finished Fourth.

My experience as a GM was a mix of excellent and overloaded.

The excellent parts were the games and the players. All the players were friendly and fairly easygoing, which aligned with the tone I was trying to set. The game is a quality game and the small number of rules questions bore that out. I answered one question incorrectly (due to overthinking) in a Heat game but corrected for the next Heat and the misunderstanding did not affect the game in progress.

The overload part was a mix of my having an injured hip which made getting places agonizing and the now apparent need for an actual full time Assistant GM as opposed to the two players named when the GM plays to handle questions in that game. This also will be addressed in 2026.

I want to thank everyone who played and made this a great experience; see you in 2026!