Sumatra

About this board game

Sumatra is a 2020 exploration board game for 2–5 players, with a playing time of about 45 minutes. Players travel across the island, gathering information about its landscapes, wildlife, flowers, inhabitants, crafts, villages, and equipment to create a valuable travel notebook.

Movement revolves around a shared travel notebook token. Depending on whether you are behind, alongside, or ahead of the token, you may catch up, move forward, collect available information, or reveal new tiles from the bag. This creates a shifting rhythm of group research and adventurous exploration.

• Collect information tiles and arrange them in the appropriate rows of your personal notebook.
• Use equipment to explore volcanoes safely and avoid losing collected tiles.
• Build tile combinations to score points and gain access to known information.
• Claim badges for achievements such as collecting flora or combining inhabitants and crafts.

Different kinds of information reward different approaches. Flora and fauna score when paired in a column, with only the higher-valued tile scoring. Villages require enough pairs of reception and GPS tiles, while those pairs can also let you take a tile from the known information pool.

Badges provide another route to victory. Players can claim a badge by being the first to meet specific collection goals, while a diversity badge rewards having tiles across multiple rows of the notebook. Only one diversity badge may be claimed per player, and each claimed threshold can make the next one harder to reach.

In Sumatra, the winner is the player whose travel notebook and badges make the greatest contribution to documenting this rich ecosystem.