Corto

About this board game

Corto is a card-based adventure game for 2–4 players, playable in about 40 minutes, where tactics and luck guide your journey through four chosen quests.

Enter the magical world of Corto Maltese and pursue adventures such as attacking a Russian gold train, researching the four aces of whale bones, or meeting the leopard-men. To begin, choose four of the six quests and place their boards together, each with its own deck of character and object cards.

On your turn, either refresh your hand to four cards or play between one and four cards. Character cards join the quest board in spaces of the matching color, while tokens mark your influence. Depending on a character’s border, adjacent cards may gain your token or lose an opponent’s token. Objects add further effects, including long-range abilities that affect characters in the same row or column.

• Recruit and position characters to build connected groups across the quest boards.
• Use objects and special movement to influence neighboring characters, block spaces, claim gold, or eliminate characters.
• Compete for quest treasures, from the aces of the Fortune Royale to valuable train-car tokens and leopard-men markers.

Corto and Rasputin can also move directly, bringing another way to disrupt plans and shape the board. Characters without tokens can be removed and count as gold at the end of the game, making every contested space potentially valuable.

The game ends when two quests are fully occupied or the players run out of cards. Players score collected gold and treasures, then gain additional gold for their largest connected group and smaller groups of characters. In Corto, the player with the most gold wins.