Arcane Academy Review – Eric Lang’s Magic Miniature-Free Marvel

Eric Lang and Kevin Wilson are best known for their larger-than-life miniature games like Ankh: Gods of Egypt, and Cosmic Encounter. Sometime in 2016, they took a break from all that plastic and densely packed rulebooks, to create Arcane Academy. An amazing family board game that almost no one’s heard of.

Transporting you back to school, Arcane Academy challenges you to earn the most prestige by completing assignments. Either by trading in rare magical shards, or giving off part of your will.

Assignments come in two flavours (spells and items) and together they turn Arcane Academy from a rather rudimentary board game into one that’s dynamic and interactive. Spells are a one-time use that gets activated immediately when bought. Meanwhile, items can be used multiple times, but require you to use actions to do so.

Actions in Arcane Academy work a little differently than in other games. On your turn, you can either place an exhaustion cube on one of the tiles on your player board and carry out its action. Or rest, and clean your board of all existing exhaustion tokens.

Most tiles, when placed carefully, can be linked to other tiles. Tiles immediately linked to the tile you placed the exhaustion cube on, activate after you carry out that tile’s action. Allowing you to take multiple actions per turn.

These actions can include: gaining resources, using items, completing assignments, or adding a new tile to your board.

Continue taking turns placing exhaustion cubes, or resting until one player reaches eight completed assignments. Then everyone takes one last turn before counting up their final prestige, with whoever has the most at the end winning the game.

Arcane Academy put a spell on me

Since Arcane Academy is a lighter game, there’s a limit to how far your thinking can go. So the game moves quickly from one turn to the next. But because of the way you build your player board and cast spells, it’s equally as satisfying as some deeper board games.

Within a few turns, you can have your board set up to perform multiple actions each time you place a cube. This provides the same feeling as the excellent engine-building game Jump Drive. Except it’s easier to pick up and understand, and kinder to new players.

However, unlike Jump Drive, Arcane Academy is hyper interactive with most of the spells and items you buy directly affecting your opponents. This can be as simple as taking some resources, or as powerful as forcing them to remove a tile from their board.

Of course, these spells are balanced by their cost, with more impactful spells taking multiple turns and planning to purchase. However, when you do execute them, they’re powerful enough to tip the game in your favour. As such, each game is exciting in its unpredictability, as you never know how it’s going to play out.

The chaos these spells create is a wonderful foil to an otherwise very strategic tile-laying and action-selection board game. Where neither just casting spells nor creating a perfectly tiled player board, will lead you to victory. Only the one who can effectively, and efficiently use both will finish on top.

The prestige

Speaking of tile-laying and action selection, you’re going to have a fascinating time with the tiles in Arcane Academy. Not only in their placement, and linking them together, but figuring out which tile to activate on your turn.

Because you can only activate a tile once before it’s exhausted, you often get caught between choosing one big multi-tile activation, or multiple little activations. For example, if you have four tiles linked to a central tile. You must choose between activating and exhausting that central tile and activating the four surrounding tiles. Or activate and exhaust the satellite tiles, one at a time, getting both their action plus the central tile action. Which might be better in the long run.

There’s no right answer for this decision, and that’s what makes puzzling it out so fun. As turn after turn, your board gets gummed up by exhaustion tokens, changing the actions you can perform. Also, putting a premium on taking that rest action.

With Arcane Academy, someone can swiftly complete eight assignments. So resting feels like taking a break in the middle of a running race. Thankfully, there are lots of spells that can help unexhaust your board, but considering them is yet another clever mechanic within the game.

All in all, Arcane Academy is an excellent addition to family game night. The tile placement aspect is wonderfully clever. When combined with its spellcasting, makes for a family-friendly experience that is simply magical.