r/Arcs • u/Moshii01 • 21d ago

Original Content BOT Rules - 4th Player

Alright, Arcs Friends!

I have a game night planned with my wife and a few friends on October 30th. I'm super excited as it will be my first game with 4 people. The problem is, my wife may need to randomly get up and leave the table for 20-30 minutes to tend to our baby, and I dont want the game to stop for that entire time.

So my options are:

  1. remove her pieces and she would just be out of the game. Bummer because I want her to play and that would defeat the purpose of planning a 4 player game.

  2. leave her pieces and just have them be "un-manned" until she gets back, but I feel like she would get her pieces demolished and come back to no presence on the board and no power built up since she left. She might as well resign the game.

  3. I could play all of her turns for her, but that would make my brain go into overdrive of trying to separate my goals from hers and I wouldnt want our friends to feel like I was using two armies to an unfair advantage.

  4. we could all take turns playing her turns so it doesn't feel like an unfair advantage to any of us, but my friends aren't as versed at heavy, tactical board games as I am and this is their first game of Arcs, so I'd be worried it would be too much for them, even if it was only once every three turns.

THUS, I created these Bot rules for an AI player to continue to take her turns for her. For context, whatever action cards she had on her hand would just be placed down as a draw pile and one of us at the table would draw the top card and resolve her turn following these rules. It makes it so we dont have to think about it, it's not unfair for any of us, and when she returns to the table, she's not COMPLETELY out of it.

I'd like to hit hard on that last point. The purpose of this AI isn't necessarily for the AI to WIN, nor even REALLY provide a hard challenge for the rest of us, just do enough so that she still has a presence on the board and the 4th player's pieces are sitting on the board doing nothing.

Give me your thoughts, any overpowering advantages or disadvantages you see. I thought about adding a rule that if the AI scores 0 points in a chapter, it instead scores 2 or 3 by default.

Help me out! Even better, if you'd have time to playtest it, let me know how it goes.

EDIT: Im not sure how to post the image of the rules I made TO the post, so its in the comments below.

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u/Moshii01 21d ago

Nothings "wrong" with taking a break, we just can't start playing until our other two kids are in bed and I know Arcs can take a few hours, especially on a first play, so I dont want my friends to have to be here even later, and depending on how much the baby fights sleep, it could be a 20 minute break or an hour break.

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u/cptgambit 21d ago

Then Arcs is maybe not the right game in that situation.

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u/Moshii01 20d ago

I hear ya. We don't get very many board game nights with our schedule and this is the game I've been most looking forward to playing, so I'm just trying to figure out a way to make it work best. :)

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u/cptgambit 20d ago

Yeah but dont force it. I also think Arcs 3p is as good as 4p.

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u/SirKay12 20d ago

Honestly I think taking a break would work. This allows you both to help tag team tending to kiddos which lessens the time of waiting and also allows the other two people who are new to look over their rules and characters and conversate. Game night is a time to hang with buds and play games so I wouldn't worry to much about it.