Caribe - How to Play. Clear, Concise, Complete Board Game Tutorial
Transcript
Caribbean sea in the 19th century. Let's explore send scientists document and study the land and wildlife in Caribe.
And today we'll be teaching you how to play Caribe, game designed by Orlando Sá and published by Pythagoras.
Yeah, hi everyone. It's Stella.
And Terence, welcome to Meeple University.
And hey, if you enjoy this video after watching, like, subscribe and comments, you know what to do. Now let's get to the classroom.
In Caribe, players are scientists in the early era of exploration of the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean Sea. Round by round, players will choose their actions and their coordinates as players explore the land and the animals of the sea. Then three times per game, they'll get the chance to put their scientific theories into practice, laying down combinations of scientists and animals for points and bonuses. Score the most points by the end of the ninth round to be the winner. To set up, lay out the main board and randomly place the four island quadrants. Each one may be flipped to either side and arranged in any configuration, but not any orientation.
All must be oriented the same direction with these icons right way up. The books at the top of the board represent the universities of Coimbra, London and Paris. Each has a deck of three cards, each representing a different end game objective. Randomly choose one for each and return the rest to the box. Prepare the theory deck by removing any cards which don't correspond to your player account, shuffling and placing beside the board, and dealing out five cards in a row beneath the sails at the bottom of the board. Prepare the animals, turtles, flamingos and dolphins. You'll use eight, 11, or 14 of each in a two, three, or four-player game.
Mix them all up in the bag, and add one to each open sea space which matches your player count. You'll be left with two, which are returned to the box. Place the round marker at one, and the action marker on the left sail. Make central supplies of the two main resources, compasses and coins. Give each player a player board and its matching colored scientist meeples and score markers, which begin at zero. Each player takes three knowledge markers, flora, geology, and fauna, and stacks them all on the one-point step of the knowledge track. Give each player two coins, one compass, and a hand of five theory cards drawn from the deck.
Choose a first player, and you're now ready to play.
Why not mix business with pleasure? Go on cruising while expanding your scientific knowledge.
Well, that is the aim, but first we'll take you through a quick overview of the flow of the game. Karuba plays in a total of nine rounds, broken into three groups of three. In each round, each player will take one turn, starting from the first player, where they'll primarily take actions to place scientists on land spaces, and collect animals from the sea spaces. Once each player has taken a turn in one of these rounds, you advance to the next round. You'll do this three times, and then at the end of every third round, there'll be intermediate scoring. This will be your time to combine the scientists you've placed, the animals you've collected, and the cards in your hand to score victory points and other bonuses.
You'll then pass first player to whoever has the fewest points with ties broken by the next player left of the current first player, and proceed to the next group of three. After nine rounds, three intermediate scorings, and one end game scoring, the player with the highest score will win. As you play, always remember that the blue seal represents victory points gained immediately, and the white seal is scored at the end of the game.
So, first, let's take a look at how to take a standard turn.
Now, we'll take you through the basic mechanics of how to take that turn first, before coming back in the next section to explain how those actions are going to contribute to your points.
Each standard turn is resolved in up to five steps. Choose an action space, set the coordinates, perform actions, perform adjacent actions, and take a card. The first two steps and the last step are mandatory. The other two are optional, although it's almost always going to be in your interest to perform step three, perform actions. First is choose an action space. The action marker will be on one of the five sails from the previous player's turn, or on the first sail in setup. You must now either pay one coin to leave the marker where it is, or move it to any one of the other four.
The icons on the sail you choose will be the actions available for you to take this turn. Your second step is set the coordinates. You must choose one of the five cards from your hand. You cannot choose the cards below the sails at this point. The letter on this card sets your coordinates for the round. Setting the coordinates restricts where you can take your actions. Here I've played the card with the letter B. That means every action that I take on this turn must be either in row or column B. Limiting my access to these 15 squares out of the 64 on the board.
Additionally, you may choose to expand your coordinates by playing one or more compass tokens. When you choose a token, place it in any one row or column. All of its squares are now also available to you as part of your coordinates. You will discard both the card and any compasses played at the end of the turn. Step three is take actions. Optionally take one action for each icon in the sail you've chosen. For a land expedition icon, which could be coastal, volcano, forest, or wild, take one scientist from your supply and place it on a matching land space inside your coordinates.
Multiple players may share the same land space, but the same player can't have more than one on the same space. For a sea observation action, take a single animal token from anywhere inside your coordinates and place it beside your board. This is important. It does not go into these tracks just yet. For now, it's collected beside your board. Step four of your turn is adjacent actions. Adjacent to each sale, there are two adjacent actions. And you may take one or both of them at a cost of one coin each. These are the same kinds of actions letting you take a wild land expedition or do a sea observation, as well as the edge action letting you spend a coin for a compass.
Finally, you must redraw to five cards in hand, taking the card below your chosen action slot for free, or paying one coin to take from an adjacent slot. The card row does not wrap around, so this card is not available here. And likewise, these two cards are off limits. Replenish the empty slot from the top of the deck, discard your chosen card for coordinates and any compasses you played, and play passes to the next player clockwise.
And that's how you take a turn in Carib.
Now, collecting all of those observations and expeditions is great, but how you convert them into points in the scoring phase is the meat of the game. During the action turns, you've been playing and gaining cards and hopefully curating a good hand of theories. Now, in the scoring phase after each third round, you will try to play as many of these theories as you can. This is done by using your placed scientists and collected animals to meet the objectives on the cards. To play an animal theory, lay the card on the table, take that combination of animals from your collection to their slots on the tracks on your board, and immediately gain all of the points covered.
If a placement fills two linked boxes, for example, when this flamingo was placed, you would gain the immediate benefit connected by the two. Gain the rewards at the bottom of the card, which could be a combination of coins and compasses, and one or two steps on your fauna knowledge track. To score an objective of land icons, retrieve any combination of your own scientists from those land spaces, and move them to their matching track, again, from left to right, gaining the immediate points covered. Like the animals, there are points for filling adjacent slots, and note that in all cases, if the track is filled, you simply discard the token for a point.
Land cards give you rewards including coins and compasses, steps of flora or geology knowledge, and they may let you send a scientist to a university. This theory, for example, involved the retrieval of three green scientists for five points, two yellow scientists for three points, triggered two coins from adjacency bonuses, scored two steps of geology knowledge, and let's me pay one coin to send the rightmost scientist from the green track off to the matching colored university. Gain the immediate benefit at the bottom of that book, which in this case is a land expedition anywhere on the board.
The third type of theory is a quadrant theory, requiring you to retrieve that number of scientists from the highlighted quadrant, remember which type of land spaces they are on, and place them on the appropriate tracks. These cards may give you the reward to send a scientist from the rightmost space of the track of your choice to its university, again at the cost of one coin. The final step of playing any theory is that you may join it with a previously played theory into a book. You may do this only at the moment you play the theory. You can't come back to join them later and may do this only if at least one icon joins.
There is no immediate reward for doing this. All of the benefit will come at end-game scoring. Be aware that you begin the game with 24 scientists and as they go on the board, onto these tracks, and to the universities, your supplies may dwindle. If at any point you completely run out of scientists in supply, but need to take an action where you place a scientist, then only in that case you may retrieve the rightmost scientist from the track matching where you'll make the placement. To finish the scoring phase, all players redraw to five cards from the top of the deck, shuffling the discards if necessary, and you proceed to the next round.
After nine rounds, the game is over.
It's time to see who's done the most science.
Or at least the science that's worth the most points. All end-game points are represented by the white seal. You don't directly score the points on the knowledge track. Rather, these serve as a multiplier for the completed icons on your books. Here, I get four points per completed fauna and three points per completed geology and flora icon. Next, score the universities. Each of your scientists in green will score points based on where you are on the depicted knowledge track. This would be 1 * 3 is three points. Each scientist in red scores a point for each scientist on the matching track.
Here we're scoring the green track, so this would be 3 * 4 for 12 points. Yellow scientists score for animals, so here it's flamingos. I'd have 2 * 3 is 6. Finally, leftover coins, compasses, animals that were collected but not placed, and scientists who went on expeditions but were never scored are converted to points at 3 to 1. The player with the highest score wins. And if tied, ties are broken by total complete knowledge icons on your books, then most scientists on the universities, and then most combined scientists and animals on your player board.
If still tied, victory is shared.
Thanks for watching, and if you like this video, maybe you like to watch this next one. Have a great day. Bye.