I don’t think the actual rules overhead of the base game is all that bad (see my explanation in the other thread) but I think it still wants to be grokked before you try its longer sibling.
The card play is integral to the game and if you look at a hand of cards you draw in a chapter and have no idea how to achieve anything with it, it probably makes the campaign game seem more stressful than it might otherwise be.
The likelihood of drawing a hand that makes it easy to see what to do with it is small. In my trial all 10 sets of 6 cards that I saw–2 players for 5 chapters–seemed rubbish for the board state of that particular player at first. I can already see my partner sitting there complaining: “And what do I do now? You win. This is never going to work out. These cards are awful.”
But I don’t think they are. There are a lot of options to play around with. No suit is solely tied to a single action. If you have a terrible hand, you can always try to copy the lead suit. You get less actions but maybe just one build action may enable you to carry out a particular plan… and even if not. It is quite likely that everyone else at the table is in a very similarly leaky boat barely staying afloat.
I wish I could convince someone to play this with me in a non-competitive mindset. Just like Oath. But those among my friends who I think would be willing to sit down with me for Arcs are definitely quite competitive. So no chance of that.
The campaign narrative with the fates sounds quite compelling. But I am sure, it will be just like with Oath. A lot of people will end up saying “That’s supposed to be telling a story? I don’t see it.”