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Locals and tourists in Maui are heading to the beach for a chance to find a nice spot to lay their towels and enjoy the amazing view of the Hawaiian ocean. In Maui, you want to find and place beachgoers on your sand so that they create pleasing patterns, while also placing their towels close to the ocean or under the shade of trees or umbrellas to earn the most points. However, getting too close to either of these areas is risky and might ruin their plans!
In the game, you have your own beach board with room for 13 towels, the board has seven rows in which towels can be placed, and during set-up, you randomly place eight umbrellas in designated locations on your board. Each player places one random towel in the left most column of their board; each towel has three different patterns on it. Place six random tiles in the two rows of the market and one sand dollar in each row.
On a turn, either take all the sand dollars from either row of the market or take a towel from the market; towels cost 0, 1, or 2 sand dollars, with those dollars being placed in the market row. When you place a towel, you must match at least one pattern with the towel that's rightmost on your beach board and you want to match as many patterns as possible. For each match you make, you advance that pattern's scoring marker 1-3 spaces on the score board; the closer to the ocean or the shade the more points you score, but if you place part of a towel outside the play area, you're penalized.
If you cover an umbrella, you receive its bonus, whether that's advancing a pattern's scoring marker or receiving one of two types of pearls.
When someone places a towel in the final column of their beach board, you complete the round, then see who's scored the most points from patterns, pearls, and leftover sand dollars, which are each worth a point. Instead of playing with umbrellas, you can flip your beach board to find a septet of sand crabs. Whenever you cover a crab with a towel, the crab crawls onto that portion of the towel, costing you both that pattern and a few points.
Maui - LIVE Playthrough Board Game & Giveaway
- It's a quick, approachable drafting/placement game
- Strong color palette and production values
- Language independent and family-friendly
- Tropical beach theme with intuitive mechanics
- Board can feel quite thin in places
- Crab mechanic can be punishing and potentially harsh on scoring
- Giveaway is restricted to Australia and New Zealand
- tile drafting and pattern matching using towel motifs and shoreline elements
- tropical beach island environment with towels, water and pearl tokens
- Azul
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Board variants — A double-sided board variant exists: one side includes crabs that punish towels; the other side removes the crabs for a longer game.
- end-of-round and end-of-game — The game ends when someone fills all 12 columns; scoring tallies pearls and steps, with leftovers giving additional points.
- pearls and steps scoring — Points come from matching towels (steps on tracks) and pearls; some bonuses grant extra steps.
- placement and matching — Tiles are placed in columns and you must match at least one towel from the previous tile to advance on towel color tracks; more matches yield more advancement.
- Resource Management — Sand dollars are used to purchase towels; they are collected from two piles to fund tile acquisition.
- special actions and penalties — There are negative points for placing towels near water or brush; a 'bathtub' tile acts as a 'get out of jail free' option for a bad turn.
- tile drafting — On your turn you can either take a towel tile (costing 0, 1, or 2 sand dollars) and place it into your next column.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- it's a really quick drafting tile placement game which you'll see
- I love the color palette of this gig
- it's language independent and coralu's niece could play it I think young audience family is all fine
- this is a new game by Plan B games who brought out Azul