Carcata

About this board game

Carcata is a light strategy game for 2–4 players, with play time of about 40 minutes, in which tribes send five warriors to a volcano island for the Great Challenge.

Players roll five dice on their turns, seeking the actions that best fit their strategy. However, turtle symbols cannot be rerolled, making every attempt to improve a result more risky. Dice can provide movement, lava flow, statues, volcanic eruptions, or turtles.

• Movement: Move meeples up and down the island and collect gems.
• Lava flow: Kill opposing meeples, close territories, and destroy gems.
• Statues: Protect meeples from lava flows.
• Volcanic eruption: Place a gem on top of the volcano and catapult it onto the board, either attacking opponents or landing near your own meeples for later collection.

The ancestral turtle advances one space along its path for each turtle symbol remaining at the end of a turn. If it swims twice around the island, the island wins and every player loses. The game also ends when the last member of a tribe is killed.

Scoring rewards both positioning and gem collection. Each meeple scores the value of the square where it ends: level 1 is worth 1 point, level 2 is worth 2 points, and so on. Collected gems score according to their type—an Emerald is worth 1, a Ruby 2, a Saphir 3, and a Diamond 5.

Players can also score gems left on the ground when they have meeples in the same enclosed area. In Carcata, these areas are formed between two lava flows that begin at the volcano and reach the sea.