Confronting Uncertainty Through Play

I don’t do great with uncertainty. The last few years I’ve been dealing with a lot of that, especially when it comes to finding direction and a vocation in life. My instinctive response to a lot of uncertainty is a desire to eliminate it, and replace it with certainty. Certainty is comforting and easy. I want to have a simple, clear answer that doesn’t require failure and discomfort and friction, and to be able to act on that perfectly, on the first try. But life is full of uncertainties that make chasing optimization and perfection impossible.

I have found one therapeutic tool in getting myself more comfortable with uncertainty in an unexpected place: a board game called Arcs. Created by designer Cole Wehrle, it is a tense and brutal game of political and military conflict in space. It’s a game that Wehrle has stated was intentionally created in conversation with the “space game”, a fuzzy sort-of-genre of board games heavily influenced by “4x”¹ and grand strategy video games, especially the most iconic of them: Twilight Imperium. These games are usually intricate yet vast, placing you as the leader of a powerful stellar empire or polity. There are massive maps and obscene amounts of plastic spaceships for you to live out a power fantasy of galactic conquest. (They are often incredibly fun experiences of excess that only a tactile, physical board game could provide).

Arcs refines that feeling into two versions: the “Blighted Reach” campaign set across three “acts”, where players begin as the regents of a brittle, failing empire, seeking ways to expand their own power; and the standalone base game, with an even smaller scope of being effectively warlords or insurgents. All of these are built around core mechanics that strip away much of the agency commonly expected of a “space game.” Your turns will not be made of unilateral acts, but in managing what choices wind up being viable or relevant.

Each session of Arcs is played in sections called “chapters,” where players are dealt a hand of 6 cards and proceed through rounds of play where one player leads with a card and the others follow. The lead player will set the suit for each round, and players will try to play to the same suit or “pivot” to a different suit (at the cost of doing less on that turn). If another player was able to play on suit with a higher-valued card (or discard one of their very few action cards to “seize the initiative,” they’ll lead off the next hand of play. It’s a modified version of trick-taking, for those familiar with those sorts of card games. These turns are how you attempt to pursue your goals and accumulate enough power to rule the Reach. (For the best overview of the rest of the game, Shut Up & Sit Down’s 2-part review is absolutely marvelous).

The friction and limitations on player agency in Arcs have caused countless debates in the broader board game community. Forums for discussion like r/boardgames or Board Game Geek have had all sorts of threads and conversations with people who hate the way the action cards work, often proposing ways it could be “fixed.” Some board game players experience Arcs and conclude that this must have been an error of some kind, that Cole Wehrle set out to make a “proper” space game and must have gotten lost along the way. It feels wrong to them that a game about space politics would leave you feeling cornered and on the back foot.

I am not one of those players. I genuinely love the experience of the game’s ever-shifting chaos in a way I’d never have expected to. In a game of Arcs, there is a sort of thrill to trying to salvage a hand of action cards you thought were useless. Some of my favorite experiences in the game are when it feels like the scene in Dune Part 2 where Paul has finally unlocked his ability to perceive the future:

I can see a narrow way through via the cards and resources I have, and I can try to pull an insane gambit. I will never be certain if it is the truly optimal move, but what matters is trying it. Whether it succeeded or failed, I learned something. The game’s uncertainty makes it a game that is hard to optimize, and playing it makes me a little more okay with not playing perfectly. Each chapter gives me another chance to take risks and act without perfect knowledge, and get more comfortable for when I have to do the same in my day to day life. 

Arcs has taught me, in small ways, to be less of a perfectionist and more comfortable sitting with uncertainty. It’s a board game that inspires me to write, and work through the frictions and imperfection of developing a process and starting over when things don’t pan out (fun fact; this is my third version of this post) so that I can express how it made me feel, and what it means to me. There is something compelling in embracing tangled and unoptimizable problems, especially when contrasted with the paradigm of “perfect frictionless-ness” or "constant self-optimization" promoted by many in the tech space. We can’t control the cards that have been dealt to us at this moment, but we can at least try to use them, and be surprised by what we can do when we take those risks.

1. “4x” is a common term for a certain genre of strategy board or video game, best codified by the Civilization series. The term stands for “Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate.” (yes, those all begin with “E”, but gamers like the letter “X” for some reason). 4x games typically involve leading an entire nation or civilization, developing its logistics, industry, political goals, and engaging in conflict with rival powers.