Cryptozoic The Arrival

Ahhh, mythology. I love it. Man did those Greek gods know how to party! And fight. And do a lot of other things that we won’t be discussing in this review. The Roman deities were similar (unsurprisingly given the level of rank plagiarism of their Greek counterparts!) As for Egypt, well they’re almost the originals and are also well represented in board games with Kemet: Blood And Sand. Of course in recent years Norse mythology has been getting a good airing, especially in video games with God Of War, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and God Of War Ragnarok.

With all that said, there’s one culture that doesn’t get nearly enough coverage in popular culture, Celtic (specifically Irish). That’s not completely true in board games with the modern classic Inis covering the area very well back in 2016, but it’s hardly oversubscribed. That’s where Cryptozoic’s The Arrival comes in. It’s a strategy game covering the population of Ireland by humans as well as its invasion by some particularly unpleasant demons called the Fomori and it’s… actually not bad.

The Journey

So how does one go about conquering Erin (the mythological Ireland pre humans) and saving it from Fomori? Strap in folks, the manual’s not terribly good at describing the exact way turns work so I’m having to do a bit of interpretation here.

Each turn is divided into two phases, the Earning phase and the Action phase, all players do one part then the other, rather than one player doing both and then moving on.

In the Earning phase, players take it in turns to draft Earning cards from different stacks which will give them a variety of different resources including Buildings, Swords and Shields as well as special items such as Honour and Tactics Tiles. Once each player has four of these cards, they look at the options and collect their resources in turn. Once all the resources required or available have been shared out, the earnings cards are discarded and it’s on to the action phase where the resources can be spent. There are also some other icons on the cards, but we’ll deal with them later.

During the action phase, players can take two of a possible four actions before play moves onto the next player. The actions available are Build, Repel, Spread and Shield. Build is simple, you can spend some of your Building resources to either build or improve fortifications in or near your territories. In doing this you’re aiming to take provinces and generally control territory so that the Fomori and other players are unable to take it. There are three levels of fortification in the game and each provides a different level of defence from attack. Repel is actually Attack.

The idea being to attack a Fomori stronghold either on Erin or across the sea in their bases. This is done by using the Swords resource and spending enough to defeat the Fomori tokens in a given location. Importantly, players can’t attack each other, combat only occurs between humans and Fomori. This isn’t to say that humans won’t find themselves in conflict, but it will never escalate to out and out war. I’m going to skip the Spread action for now, we’ll come onto that but let’s talk about Shield. Surprise, surprise you use the Shield resource for this.

The idea here is to add shields to provinces to protect them from Fomori attacks. Each province has a maximum possible number of shields and these can be from a mix of Tribes so long as they have fortifications in the province. The more shields in a province, the harder the Fomori will have to work to capture it.

But how do the Fomori attack? They’re not controlled by a single player as in Descent: Journeys In The Dark. Nor are they controlled by a set of rules and priorities like the “AI” in single player Wingspan. The twist that The Arrival throws in and where it both shines and falls down is that the Fomori are controlled by everyone. The principle of this is brilliant. Players are using the Fomori effectively as their own armies, but have to be careful because if the Fomori get too powerful then the game ends. Unfortunately for The Arrival it’s the implementation of this twist that is one of the places where the game falls down. So, let’s see how it works.

The Departure

In the Earning phase, one of the resources that will appear on cards is Fomori/corruption. For each time this appears on your cards, you take a Fomori token and increase your corruption meter (one of the measures to decide when the game ends). In the Action phase you can use these tokens as part of the Spread action and attack your rivals’ fortifications using your Fomori tokens. You might do this to increase corruption or you might then take the Repel action to try and take the fortification for yourself.

This feels like a really clever idea, but the addition of corruption points just when you pick up Fomori tokens rather than simply when Fomori forces attack feels needlessly aggressive, and the way you use Fomori to do your dirty work is almost more cutthroat than if you were simply marching your own army into the province.

The Destination

So, is The Arrival worth getting? That’s a tricky one. The theme is a lot of fun and some of the concepts work really well. But there are a few issues.

The Earnings phase is interesting, but the way you have to block two lines of resources on your cards just to find out what you can keep is needlessly complex. On top of that, the way battles work as a pure numbers game where you just add up forces and decide the winner is a strangely simple approach given the complexity of the Earning phase.

Another resource that appears is Tactics Tiles, these are ok but are not terribly well explained. Some of them also have the feeling of having been added because the designers felt that the central gameplay loop wasn’t quite right.

The result is an uneven experience that is definitely not helped by a manual that feels like it’s been written to obscure the simple bits and really overcomplicate the trickier bits. That said, there is plenty of fun to be had with this game and at the price it is currently, it would be churlish to say not to buy! So yes, there are plenty of better games out there and even covering this topic, but not at this price.