Mandala Stones

Description

Mandala Stones is an abstract strategy game designed by Filip GÅ‚owacz. Publishers Board&Dice have put out many games that feature wonderful components. Mandala Stones continues within this trend. There’s a strong presence of pattern-building and set collection in this game. Mandala Stones is somewhat abstract in nature, comparable to the likes of Azul. There’s a main board where you’ll randomly place the 96 ‘stones’. These are wonderful chunky discs that come in four colours, 48 each in two different patterns. The stones sit stacked into towers four discs high. There’s also four artists (black pillars). The game consists of you claiming stones from these towers. Later on you’ll score your stones, and place them into a communal, spiralling mandala. (This is like a timer for the end-game.) On your turn you either claim stones, or score your stones. Claim stones by moving one of the artists and checking the four towers of stones that surround it. Take all the top stones from those towers that match the artist’s pattern (providing no other artists sit adjacent). You claim the stones in a clockwise order. Then you stack them onto an available space on your own player board. You start the game with five spaces to collect stones like this. The winner is the player with the most points, so you’re taking stones in the first place, with scoring in mind. When it comes to scoring, it’s a case of removing the top stones from one or more of those stacks you collected, earlier. You can remove (same-colour) stones from the top of at least two towers. Remember you had five spaces to collect stones? Each space has a different scoring category, which you score when you remove stones from it. Some reward you for the current height of that tower. Others reward you for having unique stone colours in that tower, and so on. The other way you can score is to remove any number of top stones on your player board. This isn’t as lucrative, since you score a meagre one point per stone you remove. But you might do this to plan ahead, removing certain ‘odd’ stones, leaving same-colour stones in prime locations to score on later turns… Player Count: 2-4 Players Time: 30 minutes Age: 10+