Eriantys - A Board Game How to Play

hi it's terence and stella from meeple university today we'll be teaching you how to play ariantis coming up let's learn to play eriantis game designed by leo culvini and published by creations this game is a re-implementation of the 2000 game carolus magnus and if you find value from this video later please hit that like button subscribe to us and hit the bell and leave your feedback in the comments for others to find for now let's get to the table the 12 mystical floating islands of ariantis are in need of reuniting and the players representing the different magical schools will compete against each other to take control through this process from their schools players will send students out to the islands hold students back to fight for the influence of the five professors and will control the movement of mother nature around the board aiming to claim control of the islands and unite them for their own benefits the first player to get all of their towers onto the islands wins the game ariantis can be played competitively at either two or three players and can be played with four players in a 2vs2 team mode there is also an advanced mode which adds some extra action cards into the game in this video we'll be teaching you the rules through the two player version of the game and then going through the differences at three and four players and finally the advanced variant to set up the game lay out the 12 floating island boards making sure there is a gap between each tile place the mother nature pawn onto any one of the tiles take two student discs of each colour mix them up in a bag and then place one student from that bag onto each of the island tiles except for mother nature's tile and the one directly opposite all remaining student tokens are now mixed up in the bag each player takes a player board a set of 10 turn order cards which will have a matching back and eight towers in their color either black or white each player then draws seven students at random from the bag and places them in the entrance hall to their school randomly choose a first player for the first round of the game keep the five hexagonal professor tokens and two of the cloud tokens set to the two and four player sides nearby ready for use and you're ready to play in arianes the two players are racing to be the first to get their 8 towers out onto the floating islands the first player to achieve this or the player who has the most towers on the islands after 10 rounds when the deck of turn order cards will be empty wins the game each round plays in the following steps first new students are brought onto the cloud tiles ready for drafting later in the round then players will conduct an open bid for this round's turn order then in turn order each player takes a turn which comprises three steps firstly moving three students either into their dining halls to try to control the professors or inter-ariantis to try to control the islands then move mother nature resolving control and possibly placing towers at the destination island and thirdly drafting a new cloud of students to add to their entry hall once both players have taken a turn in this way play passes to the next round so now let's look at each phase in detail the first step is filling the two cloud tiles and this is done at random with students drawn from the bag each tile will have three students and these will be randomly distributed among the five colors in the game next comes the turn order bit in the first round of the game this will start from the player who was randomly selected as first player but in all subsequent rounds of the game this will begin with the player who played the lower numbered card in the previous round when a player bids the player chooses any one card from those remaining in hand and then plays it face up onto the top of their discard pile a player may not bid a card that is the same as one that another player has already bid earlier in the round each card must be unique the exception to this is if the player has no other options in hand after both bids are made the player who bid the lower number will go first in this round if there did happen to be a tie then the player who played the card first would go earlier in turn order these cards range between 1 and 10 and each is single use in the game so you need to make sure you're determining the right tactical times to use your lowest or highest numbers once turn order is determined now it's time for each player to take a turn the first step of your turn is to move students you must move three students from your entrance to one of two locations and you move these students one at a time and may split where you move them the first option is to move a student to the left most open space of the matching colored dining hall on your player board after each movement is complete check for control of the matching colored professor if you now have the most students of that color in a dining hall then you claim the matching colored professor if not then the professor stays where it is so here adding one student to this dining hall does not result in a change of ownership but adding a second student like so would result in the black player claiming the green professor in the basic game there is no other effect when moving a student ignore these coin icons which are used in the advanced variant we'll discuss later your other option to move a student is to place it onto an island you may place it onto any of the 12 islands without restriction but there is no other immediate effect when you place a student on an island once you've moved three students you must then move the mother nature pawn clockwise around the islands the distance that mother nature moves is any number of spaces of your choice up to the number showing in the top right corner of your turn order card this round here for example you could move mother nature either one or two spaces around the board the turn order cards are set up such that the earlier you go in turn order the less flexibility you're going to have on mother nature's movement for example a one and a two only allows you to move one space whereas a 9 or a 10 will let you move any number up to 5.

wherever mother nature finishes you must now resolve control of that island if the island has no towers then each player's influence is equal to the number of students representing professors that that player controls here white controls the blue professor and has two influence and black controls a green professor and has one influence as such white controls this island and places a tower onto it if the influence values are tied then neither player gets to place a tower if the island being resolved already has a tower on it then you will check to see whether the other player conquers that island or not calculate influence the same way except any existing towers add an additional influence so here white still holds an influence advantage of four to three and therefore defends the island the island is likewise defended if the influence count is even and when the island is defended the player's towers simply remain in place no new towers are at it however if the defending player now has a lower influence than the other then the island is conquered any towers on it are returned to the owner and replaced with towers of the conquering player after checking for control it's now time to see whether any islands are unified and this will occur for any adjacent island tiles containing the same color of tower unified islands count as a single island for the rest of the game so in this situation eriantis now contains only 11 islands mother nature's next movement step will be directly to here and all eight students on these two islands will be considered part of the same influence battle next time mother nature lands there conquering a unified island can result in a very big swing in towers later in the game here for example white holds six influence with these students and black holds four influence with these two students and the two towers as such white conquers the unified island replacing both black towers with white towers a four tower swing in one action as the game progresses islands will unify into even larger clusters containing even more towers making such islands particularly decisive in the final battle to finish off their turn the player drafts one of the two clouds taking the three students that are on it and adding them to their entrance hall to return to seven students when a player places their eighth tower on the board then the game ends immediately and that player is the winner the game can also end in two other ways firstly if ariantis is reduced to three or fewer islands or at the end of the tenth round at which point no players will have any turnover cards remaining in hand in these cases whoever has the most towers on the islands is the winner in the event of a tie whoever controls the most professors breaks the tie when playing with three players eriantis plays under much the same rules but with different numbers of pieces involved in the game you will be playing black versus white versus grey and each player will start with six towers instead of eight each player will also start with nine students in their entrance instead of seven on each turn players will draft turn order as usual but then on their turn a player will move four students to their dining room or island instead of three they'll then replenish those four students from the 3 player side of the cloud tiles players will still hold a hand of 10 turn order cards but the game will end after 8 rounds which is the round in which there won't be enough students left in the bag to refill the cloud tiles the four player game is a two versus two team game and once again it will be black versus white with each side trying to place eight towers the towers are shared between team mates with free access so it doesn't matter whose player board they sit on and each player now is once again back to having only 7 students in their entrance and 3 on each cloud in this team game you are still competing individually to control the professors so for example if this player played this student here although the white team now has more blue students than the black team this black player still controls the most blue students and therefore the blue professor but when an island is being resolved then the two teammates will pull their professors together so here for example four influence to black being enough to conquer three from white players may decide at the start of a team game how much table talk they're willing to allow between teammates finally the expert variant of the game introduces the character cards and the coins to set up deal out three character cards face up for all players to see and give each player one coin players will gain an additional coin each time they cover a coin icon in their dining hall once per turn a player may pay for one of these characters spending the cost in the top left corner in order to utilize its game breaking effect here for example you could pay one coin to get an extra two movement range on mother nature or here you could pay three coins in order to resolve an island as if mother nature were there in addition to the normal mother nature movement i won't go through all of these effects i'll leave you to read them from the rule book the first time someone pays a cost for one of the characters place one of the coins that's paid onto the character card the cost for any player to use this character from this point forward in the game is increased by one this only happens once per game so on subsequent uses no further coins are added the game comes with a total of 12 different characters which if you use them most strategically can really swing the game in your favor and that's how to play eriantis we hope that you enjoyed this video we do have a review video as well for arianzas and we'll put a link to that in the description below and if you enjoy this video please help us by hitting the like button subscribe to us you can also hit the bible in the corner to do so and hit the bell so you'll 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