I enjoy Torres, especially the stacking tower pieces, so was swayed into getting Arkadia, but Arkadia is more than just Torres II. The spatial placement of the buildings, in addition to placing people, plus the strategy of timing involved in playing your limited cash-out flags in relation to the ever-changing array of tiles, gives Arkadia added dimension.

You can choose where to place your center tile, which allows for variation of the starting board. There are buildings of different shapes and sizes that are placed much like you would for Blokus (but orthagonally adjacent to existing pieces), and people that help you fill empty spaces (necessary to complete a building) and score bonus tokens. Once you accumulate colored tokens, you must decide when to use a flag to cash them out into gold, but their value changes constantly as the tiles on the top level of the castle changes.

You can play Arkadia in a take-the-next-best-move-even-if-the-other-person-did-all-the-work-to-set-it-up way, or a give-each-other-space way. It depends on the personalities and gaming styles involved.

The tower pieces are textured, which is a nice detail, and using the gold scoring tokens takes away the awkwardness of the scoring track in Torres. If the tents and flags were of different material (they have nice artwork but are flimsy cardstock), and the pieces were easier to put away in the box, it would make my little heart happy. Sometimes I think getting the buildings to fit back in the tray is the hardest part of the game. A tray where each building's spot was obvious, and could maybe even be used for game play to lessen setup time, would be divine.

Overall, I recommend Arkadia and have been very happy with it.