Arcadia Quest Pets

The first of the Big Box expansions to Arcadia Quest and is by far my favourite out of the two that I have played (the other being Arcadia Quest Riders). It adds a whole new campaign and includes rules to include Pets in your base game of Arcadia Quest and Arcadia Quest Inferno. It therefore adds a lot of replay value and with very little added complexity.

We are at the point not that we include Pets in the majority of our games of Arcadia Quest as they fit in so seamlessly. I even think that it would be easy to include Pets whilst learning or teaching Arcadia Quest for the first time.

Gameplay

The main focus of the expansion is giving your guilds the ability to tame and acquire pet allies throughout your campaign. Each pet comes with its own special ability in the same way that the heroes do. The added benefit with the pets is that during the upgrade phase you can level up your pet which increases their ability and makes it more powerful.

At the beginning of the campaign, each player chooses a pet to start with alongside their heroes. Each guild can accommodate 2 pets and one of those pets also has a item slot which can be filled with either cards that have been earnt throughout the campaign or purchased during upgrade phases between scenarios.

When it comes to your turn, all your heroes are classed as owners of the pets. During your activation phase, in addition to their heroes activation there is now a pet activation. Each player will choose which of their pets they want to activate. The pets can move, use portals and open doors but cannot attack or collect exploration tokens. They also do not trigger guard reactions or count towards the two figure limit. So as you can see, they can be pretty sneaky! You can start to see how simple the pets are to incorporate into your guilds and your turn.

The campaign also creates innovative ways in including the pets into adjectives throughout the game as well as including wild pets in the scenarios for you to either fight or tame. I won’t spoil the campaign for you but it is enjoyable to work through and is not just something that feels bolted on.

What Is There To Like?

If you love Arcadia Quest, then this expansion feels very much the same and does not diet from the core game. You can utilise the pets as much or as little as you want to which means not everyone needs to like it to be able to use it. Fundamentally though, if you don’t like Arcadia Quest then Arcadia Quest Pets is not going to change your opinion of the game.

Everything there is to love from the original game is kept and some of the niggles are also still there. For me, this is the kind of expansion that I love. It adds more content without making any changes to the core concept of the game. I don’t purchase expansions hoping it will change the game, I purchase them in order to add more of what I already love about it and that is exactly what Arcadia Quest Pets does!

What Is There To Dislike?

As an expansion, I struggle to find anything that I don’t like about this expansion. The only thing that I think could be an issue for players is the added activation. In my review of Arcadia Quest, I made mention that controlling three heroes can sometimes feel like a bit much. For those of you out there who do struggle with this then potentially adding two pets on top of the three heroes may be enough to push you over the edge. This also sustains the issues with set up and tear down time as well as keeping the somewhat clunky enemy activations.

In Short

As I have already mentioned, this is not going to change your perception of Arcadia Quest if you did not like it as it is very much more of the same. If you do love Arcadia Quest then I think this is almost a must have expansion. With the addition of the pets, a new campaign and a new way to play your existing campaign I don’t think that you can go wrong with it. One of my favourite expansions of all time.