presentation
Scarabya
Excavate Scarabs
All over the world, a mysterious scarab symbol appears, and archeologists want to collect as many as possible. Every player has twelve camp tiles, four tiles and a frame for an archeological site plus a set of eight rocks. The starting player places his four archeological site tiles into his frame, and all other players imitate this set up within their frame with their tiles.
For each round, one of twelve mission cards is revealed; it determines the camp tile that is placed in this round – every placer takes this tile from his stock and puts it on his site board: The first camp tile must cover at least one of the four middle cases; all other tiles must always be placed to another one, with at least one adjacent side. Rocks are obstacles that cannot be covered; each camp tile must always cover five squares on the board and camp tiles cannot overlap. You may cover up scarab symbols on the site board. If you can enclose an excavation area of four squares or less with your tiles – the frame and rocks also work as borders for such an area – you receive a scarab marker for each scarab that is visible in the excavation area, the value of the marker equals the number of enclosed squares. After twelve rounds you win with most points.
In a variant, two players share an archeological site and reveal one mission card per player in each turn to place the respective tile. In the solo version you must place a tile if possible and win if all twelve tiles are placed.
This is a very beautiful game with cleverly used standard mechanisms and a very good solo version. Remember, as in all games of that kind, imitating others is not a winning strategy.
Players: 1-4
Age: 8+
Time: 20+
Designer: Bruno Cathala, Ludovic Maublanc
Artist: Sylvain Aublin
Price: ca. 27 Euro
Publisher: Blue Orange Games 2018
Genre: Tile placement
Users: For families
Special: 1 player
Version: multi
Rules: de en es fr it nl pt ru + cn pl
In-game text: no
Comments:
Identical set-up for all
Planning ahead is limited
Imitation of others is not the road to winning
Compares to:
Take it easy, Karuba
Other editions:
2 Pionki (pl), One Moment Games (cn)
Chance (pink): 1
Tactic (turquoise): 3
Strategy (blue): 0
Creativity (dark blue): 0
Knowledge (yellow): 0
Memory (orange): 0
Communication (red): 0
Interaction (brown): 0
Dexterity (green): 2
Action (dark green): 0