Review: Arcadia (APE Games)

Confession time: I always wanted to run an amusement park. Granted, it’s not going to happen, but a guy can still dream.

Well, now there’s Arcadia, a delightful little card game (with an extra-small price) that lets me combine rides, shows, midway attractions, and more into an amusement park to call my own. Oh yeah, I’m in.

Let’s dive into the five key things you need to know about Arcadia.

Some Assembly Required

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Before playing Arcadia for the first time, you need to do a little bit of assembly work. The publisher apparently had some printing errors in the game’s initial run, so they included a small pack of replacements with instructions to exchange these cards with others in your decks.

This step won’t take long, plus you only need to do it once. I highly recommend having a trash bag handy and literally throwing away the bad cards as you find them in the game.

Pay close attention to the instruction card that comes with the replacements. The card reads a little like a logic problem — swap these with those, add this but don’t remove that, and so on. Take it slow and focus on what you’re doing. You’ll be fine.

Learning the Lingo

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After fixing your game and exiling the bad cards to your recycling bin, you’ll have four decks with varying numbers of cards.

The Attractions deck includes all of the cool things you can build in your park like roller coasters, that water gun race game that I never win, cool acrobatic shows, and the ever-popular mascot restaurant. Each card tells you the type and name of the attraction, the attraction’s level, the which icons you need to build it, the number of victory points it’s worth, and possibly some special ability.

Jobs and Experts represent the employees in your park. The biggest deck, Jobs, are the everyday staff members who work for you. In addition to a clever picture and a job title, these cards also have one or two icons in the upper left corner. You use these icons as currency to build attractions. Some of these cards also have special text along the bottom that say you can only use them to build specific kinds of attractions.

Experts are highly skilled employees who either have 3-4 mixed icons or identical ones. Like the Job cards, almost every Expert card has attraction-specific text at the bottom. (After all, they’re experts.)

Finally, there are the Review cards. These become your personal (and secret) victory point conditions. You start the game with three, then you pick two to keep. The Review cards grant bonus victory points depending on what you build in your park.

People First, then Attractions

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You need people before you can build stuff in your park. Start by collecting Jobs and Experts with a variety of icons. When you collect the right combination to match a Level 1 attraction, buy it and you’re on your way.

The available attraction cards change constantly, so don’t be disappointed if you miss something that you wanted. It’ll be available again in the next round of play. Just make sure you have the right icons to buy it that time!

A Pair of Hidden Rules

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The Arcadia rules do a good job of explaining most everything, but two specific rules aren’t terribly obvious.

The first involves converting three-of-a-kind icons into one of any other icon — turning a trio of balloons, for example, into a circus tent. When using icons this way, you can ignore attraction-specific game text on the job or expert cards.

For example, Rosie Graham has four tent icons on her card along with a note limiting the icons to food attractions only. But if you want trade in three of Rosie’s tent icons for something else, you can ignore the food-only limitation. This only works when trading the icons. If you aren’t trading, then Rosie only helps you build food attractions.

The other hidden rule has to do with attraction types and levels. As you build your park, pay attention to the Level 1 attraction types in it (ride, show, midway game, food). To add a Level 2 attraction to your park, you need a Level 1 attraction of the same type. You can’t build a Level 2 ride on top of a Level 1 food attraction.

You also build attractions in sets of four. The attraction type must match for all four cards (all rides or shows, for example). If you want to build two Level 2 shows then you need two Level 1 shows first.

Closing the Box

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Here’s one quick tip before we close — well, close the box, that is. The Arcadia box is almost square but not quite. If you force it closed with a short side matched to a long side, then your box is almost impossible to open. (Not that this happened to me, goodness knows.)

Fix the problem by matching the artwork on the box top and bottom. If both parts show the same picture (like the mascot bear with balloons, for example), then your box is lined up and ready for closure. And more importantly, you can open it again without destroying it.

Verdict

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If you ever dreamed of owning your very own an amusement park or if you just like set-collecting games with a bit of a twist, then Arcadia deserves a spot on your shelf.

With a retail price of just $15, even your budget will enjoy adding it to your collection.