Arcana

Arcana is a card driven struggle to gain influence in the city of Cadwallon for your guild. Players pit their agents against the other player’s agents in an effort to convince new personalities to join your guild, or acquire new artifacts, or gain the control of a region of the city. The game employs some card drafting mechanics to accomplish this end; players play cards next to a Stake and at the end of the round the values of the cards are compared and the player meeting or exceeding the required value of the Stake adds that card to his deck. Each Stake card is also worth victory points at the end of the game.

Each turn players only draw 4 cards, and there can be as many as 5 stakes available per turn, so each turn you must carefully decide what you want and what you think you can win. The game is setup such that each player has the opportunity to play their agents face down for 2 of the stakes, and the rest of the stakes they must play face up, with only one stake in the game where all players play face up. This leads to a delicious bit of tension for one player will know who is winning a stake but the other(s) will not. Players may also bribe personalities by playing an artifact, thereby immediately winning over the personality, adding even more tension. Some location cards the players will win allow them to directly interact with other players, such as having them discard an agent, re-locate an agent, or immediately resolve the conflict for a Stake.