Arcadia Card Game First Impressions

In Arcadia, you build a Theme Park with hired help.

Endlessly cycle through Ride cards…

Step right up to play Arcadia, a card game of theme park construction. Compete with fellow park owners to build the amusement park of your dreams. Hire builders, inspectors, and other professionals to add rides, shows, midway attractions and shows.

Here you have a row of Job Cards, Expert Cards and Ride cards face up.

On your turn you can take either 2 Job cards, 1 Expert card or 1 Ride card. Instead, you can build a Ride either from your hand, or one from the row of available Rides.

Build a Ride

To build, you need to discard Job/Expert cards with the relevant symbols that match the requirements on the Ride. You can only build a level 1 Ride of a type if you don’t have any rides of that type. Then you can build a level 2 next to that level 1 etc up to level 4.

The same applies to taking a ride card into your hand, you can only take a card if you were able to build it.

Refilling the Line

After each player has taken their turn you refill cards taken from the rows. If a Ride wasn’t taken you take the one from the end of the row and put it on the bottom of the deck, shuffle up the cards and turn over a new one.

THIS IS TEDIOUS!

The reason you do this is that on the bottom of the Ride deck is a ‘Year End’ card. When this card is revealed you score for each of your Rides and then play continues with the year-end card placed back on the bottom of the deck.

The game lasts for 4 of these years.

At the beginning of the game, you have some secret end-game scoring cards that give bonus points for certain criteria. After this, most points win.

Arcadia Summary

It’s a nice game, very good-looking and obviously comparable to Splendor. But Splendor is much more simple. It’s easy to see what you have and what you can get. This requires a lot of looking, adding etc You can’t JUST look at the symbols at the top of the cards as some are restricted to which Ride you can spend them on at the bottom of the card.

Also, the cycling of Ride cards is tedious as I mentioned earlier.

Shame, I hoped this would be Splendor+ for me but it was just Splendor–

Jesta ThaRogue