Ananda

About this board game

Ananda is a 2–4-player tile-laying game with a playing time of about 45 minutes, in which players build a temple and seek balance between construction, meditation, and gaining new building blocks.

Using 63 domino-style tiles, players expand colored areas and place their monks within the growing temple. The larger the colored area, the more karma points it can support. At the start of each turn, a player moves their monk to a new colored area on the board.

Players may then play as many tiles from their hand as they wish, provided that at least one is adjacent to their monk and every placed tile expands the color area. Each tile covers exactly two tiles on the same level, while tiles on different levels can still belong to the same color area.

• Count the squares in the color area to determine its area value.
• Discard meditation cards of that color with a total value up to the area value.
• Draw tiles from the face-down reserve equal to the difference between the area value and meditation value, up to a rack limit of eight tiles.
• If your rack has more tiles than you have cards in hand, draw from your personal deck until the numbers match.

Once all tiles have been built, the player who has scored the most karma points with their played meditation cards wins. Ananda combines spatial tile placement, colored-area growth, and careful management of tiles and cards in a temple-building contest where balance is central.