Summary
👥 A game for 1 – 4 players
⏳ Playing time is 30 – 60 minutes
🏢 Publisher is Arcane Wonders
Introduction
In Aquatica you dive into the ocean as one of the mighty sea rulers, determined to lead your empire to eternal glory. Conquer mysterious locations, recruit extraordinary ocean creatures and let your strategy rule the waves. Combine cards cleverly and unleash impressive chain reactions 🐙⚓️.
Will you have the most prosperous realm of the sea and become greatest ruler of the Geat Kingsdom of Aquatica?
Let’s get in on the table
Place the main board in the middle of the table
Shuffle the 2 decks, one with the Ocean Characters and the other with the Location cards. Place the Ocean Characters at the bottom of the main board and place 6 cards open on the board. Place the Location cards in the middle row of the board and also place 6 cards open.
Place all the wild Mantas, with their effect side up, in the middle of the table, so everyone can reach them.
You can use the printed goals or select 4 new goals and place the tiles on the printed icons.
Every player now receive a player board, a set of character cards and 4 trained Mantas with their icon, corresponding with the icon on the character cards.
Give a King cards with number 1 to the first player, number 2 to the second player and so on.
Everyone takes the character and King cards in their hand and we’re ready to start playing Aqautica.
Let’s play
Players will take turns in clockwise order.
During your turn you must do 1 Main action and you can perform an unlimited amount of additional actions.
The Main action is that you play a Character cards from your hand perform the effects shown on the cards. After you’ve played the card you must perform all the effects that you can. When you can’t perform all the effects, you just perform what you can do. After you’ve played the cards, just put it into your personal discard pile.
Hereby a sort explanation for the additional actions. You can perform an action in 2 ways;
1) Flipping Mantas;
Use a ready Manta to perform the effect on the Manta, when you do this, you immediately resolve the effect and flip the Manta to its tired side.
2) Exploiting Location’s Depth;
Each location has a number of Depths which you can exploit, shown on the left side of the card.
Within the Depths of Locations and on your Mantas you can find Resources (coins and power) or Effects that you can use before or after your main action.
Resources are gain form a Depth during your main action, you can use it to recruit characters, conquer or buy new locations. You can also activate some effects.
Effects can only exploit the top Depth that is showing on a location cards. To gain a resource or activate an effect. You must slide location up 1 Depth. This will cause the top Depth to be covered by your player board and give you acces to new Depts. Some Depths are empty, they just can’t be used for any purpose and are blocked, you can only exploited these when you use the raise effect.
Effects
Let’s get into more detail of the effects.
Recruit; during you reign the ocean, you will encounter different characters. If you recruit them they will join your realm and help you along your way. Choose 1 character card from the board and pay the amount of coins shown below the card, now put it into your hand. Slide all the other cards to the left to close the gap and reveal a new cards on the rightmost space.
Buy a location
You can buy the locations from the tribes that are living there. When you’ve chosen a location that you want to buy, you just pay the number of coins on top of the card to buy that location. After you’ve bought the location, you insert this card into an empty slot of your player board so that the top Depth appears in the circle.
Conquer a location
When you want to buy a location but you don’t have enough gold, you can also conquer it. Next to the gold icon you see a power icon and this shows how much power cost to conquer it. When you have enough power, just add it to your player board just like when you’ve bought it.
Raise a location
As a king you want to bring prosperity to your realm and exploit the locations that you’ve discovered. When you exploit locations, you just raise resources from it to your Kingdom. When you raise a location, choose any location from your player board and move it up to the by the number of Depths indicated by the effect icon on the character card, Manta or from another location card.
When a location is fully risen, this means all the Depth icons are covered. You immediately receive the Wild Manta that is indicated by the icon at the bottom of the location card from the reserve. This Manta is direct ready and you can use its effect at the same turn.
Score
When a location is fully risen, you can score its Prosperity points, just transfer the location card to the scoring pile using the score action. Take the location card from your player board and place it at the scoring pile. At the end of the game you score the number of points shown in the bottom-left corner of every location in your scoring pile.
Scout
Scouting allows you to explore the ocean and find new locations for the players.
When you want to scout follow these steps.
Step 1) move every location to the top location row and place them in the discard pile
Step 2) move every location from the bottom row to the top row, when there are more then 4 cards in the bottom row, discard the extra locations of your choice.
Step 3) refill the bottom row with 6 new location from the deck.
Goals
On the top are 4 goals that you can complete on your turn. Every goal gives you Points at the end of the game but you have to hurry, the faster you complete a goals, the more points you get.
Each game has 4 goals and can be totally different.
When you have fulfilled the requirements, place one of your Mantas on the first available spot. You can’t complete the same goal more than once.
Advanced Mode
You can spice up you game a bit, replace the basic goals with the goal tokens and place them randomly on the board.
Instead of handing out the King cards based on turn order, you can also shuffle as many cards as there are players + 1 and give all of them to the last player in turn order. That player chooses a King card and add it to their hand. Then give the rest of the King cards to the player next and so one.
The Game Ends
The game ends when one of the 3 game end conditions is triggered. When this happens all the players take 1 final turn and then the game ends.
The 3 game end conditions are;
1) One player has accomplished all 4 goals and placed the 4 Mantas on the goals
2) The location deck runs out
3) The Ocean Character deck runs out
You score points for the following;
– Prosperity Points for each character card in your hand, not the ones in your discard pile.
– The number of Prosperity Points above your Mantas on the goals tracks.
– the total number of Prosperity Points shown on the locations in your scoring pile, you don’t score points for the location cards on your player board.
The player with the most Prosperity Points is the winner of this game of Aquatica.
Conclusie & eindscore
Difficulty: 2.31/ 5
Re-playability: 7
Our score: 8 out of 10 dice
Those Mantas look really cool, that makes this game what it needs. Aquatica is a fun, surprising game with recognizable parts and therefore you can play this game quickly. The artwork is very well done, actions may seem like a lot but it’s not that bad in the end.
You can always perform one of your actions during your turn, sometimes you will only have to choose which one you want to do when because you are still resting the Manta you just want to use. You can try various strategies and the advantage is also that the game runs pretty well. With 2 players but also with multiple players we had a fun gaming experience.
There is a good insert in the box, there is enough space to store everything neatly and you can also see that there is still enough space for the extensions. The Mantas are really looking great, the are really nice quality.
Aquatica is a fast family game, but actually this is quickly a bit more of an entry-level expert game. We like it and will certainly come to the table more often. We are also very curious what the extensions will add.
Thanks to Arcane Wonders for this review copy and the opportunity to write about this game.
