How To Play Arkadia
Arkadia includes some of the more unusual pieces you are likely to see in a game. There are tetris-like cardboard buildings, castle “tiles” complete with parapets, seals that look like coins, coins that look like rectangles, and little builder dudes in five colors. Arkadia is a combination of hand management, worker placement, tile placement, city building, and set collecting games.
You play a card from your hand that corresponds to one of the tetris buildings. Place that building on the game board and lay a seal on it. The color of the seal is determined by the color of the tile shown on the card you played.
Buildings are completed when they are surrounded by other buildings and/or worker dudes. When one is finished, you collect seals based on how many of your workers helped to build it; that is, the number that are surrounding it.
Also, when finishing a building, you add a castle tile to the center of the board. You then have the option of turning in one of your four banners (hanging from your screen). You’ll want to do so when the color of the seals you’ve collected matches a large number of the colors showing on the castle tiles. Multiply the number of seals in a given color by the number of like-colored castle tiles and collect that much in gold coins as shown on the rectangular money pieces.
Since you can only cash in four times (plus once more at the end of the game), you’ll need to time your moves wisely.
Arkadia uses many worker dudes to help build the buildings. Watch for my favorite worker placement game, Agricola, that uses only a few workers (farmers, in fact) in my next post.
Check the price of Arkadia on Amazon.