Arydia has been relatively well received by the community of BGG, with over 2k ratings and an average of 9.0 out of 10. But while looking at reviews on YouTube, I was left with the impression that it was less well received by some of the people who review board games for a living. The main points of contention by some critics were that the game was fiddly and boring. So in my preparation, I was looking why those critics thought that way, and if there is anything that can be done in preparation to mitigate those problems.

The "boring" point in my opinion is actually a question of genre. Arydia is a game in the low fantasy genre. Our group won't be saving the world this time, as we did in Agemonia or Tidal Blades 2. Instead we are exiles, tasked to help regular people in a region, and collecting squills, a sort of scout badges for good deeds. Some of the stories are rather generic fantasy tropes, like hunting rats in a cellar. We will see how my group likes the stories, but I can see how somebody who is new to roleplaying games in general might have a better time here than a veteran, which would explain why the users rate the game higher than the critics. What interests me about Arydia is that the story allows for a less linear narrative, with a more open world feel, and NPCs and locations that can change in function of your actions. There are no changes caused by the progress of time, and the time limit for the main quest is 88 days, which is very generous, so some people complained about a lack of urgency. To some extent that is the price one has to pay for a more open world structure, because if you need to take an optimal path through a game in order to make it in time, that path becomes increasingly linear.

What I also noticed in the videos of the critics is that they either completely ignored, or mocked the roleplaying system of Arydia. Meanwhile the people who praised the game often expressed that roleplaying was fun. In Arydia, there are 165 NPC cards. The idea is that the player to the left of the active player is the "guide", who plays the NPC. The NPC card gives a description of the NPC, some mannerisms, and a text. Some words in that text are written in bold, and if the player interacting with the NPC asks about these words, the NPC gives a response with more information. Of course some people play this solo and have no other choice, but even some of the people who played in multiplayer just revealed the NPC and directly pointed out the possible keywords, with zero roleplaying. I think it is obvious that if you play a "roleplaying game in a box" and skip all roleplaying aspects, you are missing something. So I'll encourage my group to play this as intended, although different people might put more or less effort into roleplaying those NPCs, or make the keywords more or less obvious. It is clear that the system isn't a full roleplaying system, and can't deal with players asking questions about things other than the keywords. But I don't think that is reason enough to completely dismiss it, especially since talking to NPCs to gather bits of story is making up a major part of the exploration gameplay.

The fact that many of the YouTube critics played the game solo might also explain the "fiddly" complaint. I have heard similar complaints about all games that use boxes full of index cards to create and populate a world, e.g. 7th Continent or Vantage. I happen to be a person who doesn't mind dealing with index cards. But more importantly, if you play a campaign game with multiple players, you can massively decrease the feeling of too much administrative work by distributing the tasks. I think with 4 players, one of us will handle the index cards in the 3 boxes, one of us with handle the 4 boxes of map tiles, one will handle the boxes of figurines and other tokens, and the fourth one will be tasked with taking notes about the bits of information we receive. That should significantly speed up the game, and feel a lot less fiddly than a solo player doing it all.