We
need only lower our gaze from the stellar night skies to the planet
below to see that beauty surrounds us! The biomes of planet Earth are as
diverse and wondrous as the living creatures that populate them, and
ideally you’ll see more than your fair share of them in the strategic
card game Subastral.
In the game, you collect cards that represent your notes on eight
different biomes: subtropical desert, savanna, tropical rainforest,
chaparral, temperate grassland, temperate forest, taiga, and arctic
tundra. You start the game with three random cards in hand; each card
depicts one of the eight biome types and is numbered 1-6. Eight cards
are placed onto six clouds in the center of the table, with the deck to
the left of the #1 cloud and a sun card to the right of #6.
On a turn, play a card from your hand onto the matching numbered cloud, then collect any pile of your choice to the left or right
of the pile on which you played. If you choose a cloud to the left
toward the deck, you add the cards on that cloud to your hand, then draw
an additional card from the deck and add it to your hand. If you choose
to the right toward the sun, you add those cards to your “journal”,
which is your collection of cards. Cards from the same biome go in the
same pile, and you build piles from left to right in your journal as you
collect cards from new biomes, with those piles being numbered 1-8. To
end your turn, you draw a card from the deck to fill the empty cloud
space.
When you hit the “game end” card in the deck, complete the round,
then play one additional round. Each player then scores for their
journal in two ways: Score for your two biomes that have the most cards,
with each card in those biomes worth as many points as the number of
the pile. (In other words, whatever two biomes you start collecting
last, you want to collect a lot of them since those cards will be worth
the most points.) Next, you remove one card from each biome left to
right until you hit an empty space or run out of biomes; the set is
worth 1-36 points depending on the number of cards in it. Then you
create another set collecting cards from left to right, etc. until your
leftmost biome is empty. Whoever has scored the most points wins!
Will your journal of research notes on the planet’s biomes be deep and diverse enough to stand out amongst your peers?
