Egizia: Shifting Sands - How To Play

[Music] hi there and welcome to watch it played my name is Rodney Smith and in this video we're going to learn the 2 to 4 player game agiza shifting sands published by stronghold games well sponsor this video this is a new version of the original agiza with updates to the production and the rules that was made possible through a Kickstarter project though what I have here is the retail version and in this game you're a builder and you're taking your crew down the Nile so they can contribute to the construction of Egypt's most famous monuments so join me at the table and let's learn how to play to set up place the game board in the center of the play area and if you have the kicks there addition your board will be a little different so check the rules for adjustments related to that for the setup but for the retail version one side is for the two-player game and this one is for three and four players will be setting up a three player game in this video find and separate the cards with these backs and shuffle them each into their own facedown decks beside the board here we have what are known as the Nile tiles find the ones labeled as two player here at the bottom and return them to the box the rest you'll set by the board with these colonnades reminder tokens nearby as well these are the statue cards and you'll separate them by the A or B listed on their front side shuffling each separately you then place an a statue on this space a random B statue on this space mixing the rest of them together and putting a third one on this space the remaining cards you'll then return to the box this is the irrigation ring and you'll set it over the middle circle of these three just like this each player now takes one of these tableaus and one of each type of crew token the purple one is your leader and it goes into position two the rest are known as basic crew and they start in the first position everyone now picks a color and collects and keeps near their board the related bricks and ships along with a starting quarry and field card these are double sided but you'll keep the side labelled face up at the beginning of the game these three areas are known as the building zones and you should always have one fewer space available than the number of players so in a three player game block the leftmost space using one of the unused player colors now you take as many of these sequence tiles as the number of players so in a three player game will return this one to the box and then you randomly deal one to each person to put face-up in front of them the person who receives the number one let's say the blue player they put one of their bricks to the far right of this zero space on the victory point track the player with the number two goes behind them and so on the players will keep these markers in front of them but they should set these additional scoring markers by the score track everyone also places one of their bricks on the bottom space of this green and stone market each player also starts with one more stone than the value of their sequence token and you show how much stone you have by placing one of your bricks on this stone reserve track so the first player would put it onto their number two space well for example the player holding the number three sequence token would put it on their number four space finally shuffle these Sphinx cards into a facedown deck onto the board here and then deal two of them to each player everyone must now pick one which they'll keep secret from the other players shuffling their unchosen card back into the deck and we'll learn more about these a little bit later but otherwise that's the setup in Aggies iya shifting sands players will be traveling down the Nile establishing new fields to feed their workers new queries to gather stone and other benefits so they can work on the construction of famous Egyptian monuments all in an effort to score the most points by the end of the game now the game is played over the course of five rounds and every round is broken into six phases each starting with the river setup phase this starts by filling in all of these spaces here with cards drawn from the top of the Nile deck that shows the current round so in round one you'll take from here you'll also use this deck round to bat the starter of round 3 you'll use this one and so on during round 1 it will look something like this when you're done also for round 1 you'll keep these circular Nile tile spaces empty but in future rounds during this phase you'll gather all of these tiles and then shuffle and randomly fill in these spaces from top to bottom with these tokens face-up keeping any unused ones nearby so during round 2 the spaces would be filled in like this that said we are currently in round 1 and as I mentioned that means we will not use these tokens now it's the placement phase where players will take turns putting a single ship from their supply onto the Nile starting with the person who has the number 1 tile then the player with number 2 goes and then number 3 when you get to the final player at the table after they've finished the number one player it goes again adding a new ship in turns will continue like this so let's go back to the table and we'll see what placing a ship looks like the Nile flows from the top of the board all the way down to the bottom and it branches off at different places where ships can stop when it's your turn you add a ship to a branch with a space for it as long as that space is further down from any previous ships you placed for your first turn that means you can go anywhere and there are three types of spaces cards tiles and building zones each card or tile can hold at most only one ship each building zones allow a ship to be placed in each of its space is there but a player cannot put more than one of their own ships within the same zone let's say for my first turn I go here the next players can also go anywhere they don't have to go further down from my piece only further down from their own pieces this means on my next turn I can go on any empty space below my furthest ship which currently is right here well the next ship I place will have to be further downriver from this piece you may not want to jump too far down the Nile too quickly but you'll often be tempted to especially if you see a spot you really want and you're afraid someone else might try to grab it first if you place a ship on the card space you have me they take that card and put it in front of you and there'll be a variety of different types Summerfield's and they will be either green yellow or red these will provide you with food in the later phase you may also gain quarry's which will produce stones later and some are both a field and a quarry there are several other cards which are not fields or quarries and some of these might be labeled as permanent and if so then you gain its printed benefit for the rest of the game while one labeled as anytime can only be used once anytime you like unless it specifies a certain phase and once used you gain its benefit and then you discard it if a card is labeled as immediate then you gain the printed effect as soon as you collect it and then you return it to the box the exception is if there's an immediate effect paired with some other effect for example this here is a red field the printed immediate effect you would gain as soon as you collect this card but you would not discard it because although you will then ignore the immediate effect for the rest of the game this will continue to exist in front of you as a red field we won't go over how each individual card works in this video though we will take a moment here and discuss the symbols that you'll see on them but if you're ever unsure of how a card works you can look each one up in more detail here in the rulebook if necessary if you ever see this symbol it represents your crew tokens when a white arrow is with it you then pick any one of your crew and move it one space to the right if you see two arrows like we would resolve on this Nile tile you can choose to move the same crew two spaces or two different crews one space each sometimes is in the case of this Nile tile you'll see specific crews shown with an arrow and in those cases those specific crews are adjusted in this case both blue and green would advance by one space if you see a red arrow like we have here you move the related token one space to the left these are the symbols for the grain and stone market the grain market is here you can see it has its matching symbol and this is the quarry which also has its own symbol each arrow beside those related symbols will allow you to move your that number of spaces if you see the irrigation ring symbol even though the arrow with it will be pointing up you are always allowed to move the irrigation ring either up or down as many times as the number of arrows and this symbol here is for victory points so if you were to activate this Nile tile you would gain two victory points and also get to move the irrigation ring anytime you gain victory points in the game you move your related marker that number of spaces along the victory point track with the symbols that you might encounter understood let's go back to placing ships if you add one to a circular Nile tile area nothing is removed from the board just resolve the symbols there and in later rounds when a tile is in that space again you just resolve its symbols leaving the token in place if you go to a building zone you can put your ship on any one of its empty spaces in later phases this will let you contribute to the building of some of Egypt's most incredible monuments now if all the spaces within a building zone are occupied a player may put a ship next to that area this one is considered to be speculating and it means that it may or may not be able to do the action later so it's a bit of a risk so those are all of the places to add ships and eventually a player may not be able to place one or may just choose not to place a ship they'll pass and then they're skipped over for the rest of this phase and once everyone has passed you'll go to the mining phase here add together all the values on your quarries even if they share a card with a field that didn't produce food that round which we'll learn about later in this case our total is two plus three plus one or six you then gain that total value from your quarries as stone in your reserve which you'll track by moving your marker here at most you can have 25 stone and he would gain above that are ignored now it's time for the feeding phase which is completed in turn order based again on these sequence tokens and on your turn you'll check and see how much grain your fields produced and then you'll feed your crew the catch is that fields produce grain based on where this irrigation ring is located it will show green yellow and green or red yellow and green only fields that match the colors within the ring will produce so in this case only green and yellow fields are counted meaning I produced a total of 10 grain if the ring was here and I would have only produced 6 grain either way you then check the total strength of your crew and a crew strength is the value of the space its token is in so here we have a total strength of 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 for a total of 5 now if you have more grain than your crews strength that's good but if you have less grain you figure out the difference let's say that I had a total crews strength of 12 but had only produced 10 grain that's a difference of 2 you then check your marker in the grain market here and multiply that difference of 2 in this case by the value beside your markers level so minus 3 here 2 times minus 3 is minus 6 and that's how many points you now lose now I should mention it is possible to have fewer than 0 victory points so if I lost 6 when I was here I would go backwards 1 2 3 4 5 6 so just keep in mind I don't have 45 points here I have minus 5 now it's time to move on to the building phase where players who put ships in the three buildings owns will activate them and get to work on constructing Egypt's great monuments you'll start at the topmost zone and then work your way down through all of them within a zone if there's more than one player ship the one closest to the Nile goes first and then the next closest and so on but if a player can't or decides not to build when their ship would activate their ship is instead removed and all other ships there move one space closer to the Nile if a speculating ship have been placed in this area and remember these are ones that are added to a building zone when there are no spaces there for them to go into then this ship will be placed into the open space where it will get a turn to build during this phase but if a ship had been speculating and another forego their opportunity to build in this zone then this speculating ship will not get to do anything here that's what we said earlier a speculating ship has a bit of risk but this also means that another player can't just put their ship into a building zone in order to block somebody else out when they have no intention of actually using this space they either use it or they lose it each of these zones will give you a certain number of monuments that you can work on here you can work on the obelisk and the colonnade here you can work on the statues and pyramid and here the Sphinx within your zone you can contribute to either of its monuments but let's start with the obelisk and see how it works first to help build this structure you'll be adding bricks to it starting from the lowest empty space and the cost to add a brick to a space is shown inside of it so to add the first brick costs one it costs another one to add the next brick and then two for the third and so on and when you're taking your action here you can complete as many sections as you can afford just add them together so let's say I did want to complete the first three spaces that would cost me one plus one plus two for a total of four but for what well that's a good question whether it's the obelisk or any of the other structures we'll see you'll always have costs like this and they are always paid the same way with that number of stone from your reserve and that amount of strength from your crew so let's go back to the table and I'll show you what I mean for the obelisk the three bricks I wanted to add had a total cost of four so that means I need to spend four stone from my reserve which I have and to spend stone you just move your marker that many spaces to the left but there is a catch you can only spend as much stone on a monument as you have strength in crew to carry that stone and within any single building zone I can only spend a single basic crew which again are these three here right now I have a crew with a strength of two and then two others with a strength of one each and since I can only spend one of them it appears I can't afford the total cost of four but I also have this leader a leader can never be used by itself instead you pair it with one of your basic crew totalling their strength value so if I did that I could create a total strength of four by using let's say this basic crew and this leader and anytime you use crew or leaders you flip their tokens over to show they cannot be used again this round if you end up spending more true strength than necessary any extra amount is lost each section of the obelisk that you construct is then covered with bricks in your color and you also score victory points equal to the total amount of stone you spent so for in this case and you also gain a bonus as shown by the symbols here adding bricks to this lower section lets you advance your token one space up on either the grain or stone market if you added bricks to any of these upper spaces you get to go up one space on both the grain and stone market but no matter how many stones you added to the obelisk at once you'll only gain one of these bonuses per round the important thing to understand is that while all of the monuments on the board are a little different in how they work they will all have a cost and the way you pay those costs works just as we saw on the obelisk that is to say you'll have to spend a certain amount of stone and then an equal amount of crew strength but with the obelisk understood let's now discuss the particulars of the colonnade here there is room for each player to add a single brick to each of these columns and when you build here you go from left to right starting with the first column that doesn't already have one of your bricks paying the cost shown beneath that column if you want to pay for several at once you can for each column you construct you then add one of your bricks to the columns matching colored space and I should mention if you ever run out of bricks at any time in the game just use a suitable replacement that said we still have enough bricks for now after building any number of columns that you want to and can you then gain a number of points equal to the stone you spent so if I have built these three columns at once I would gain one two three four points as soon as a player has constructed the third column they gain the bonus shown here for the rest of the game so at this time blue would get this bonus if yellow later builds to this column as well then they will also have access to this bonus once a player has built to the fifth column they collect one of these reminder tokens keeping it with this side face up and then they gain access to this once per round or once per game ability as shown above the fifth column now whenever you would use this ability you flip your reminder token over to show that you can't use it again this round we won't go over all of the gold and purple bonus tokens in this video but you'll find them explained here in the rulebook if you have any questions when playing another important thing to understand about these buildings zones is that you can work on both of the monuments associated with it within a single turn just total the cost of all the spaces you want to work on and then pay that total in stone and crew strength but remember at most within a single zone you can only use one of your basic crew or one basic crew and your leader for example if I wanted to add one brick to the obelisk and three bricks to the colonnades that's a total cost of 1 2 3 4 5 so I'd spend 5 stones and then flip over my leader and this basic crew I would also gain 5 points for the stone that I just spent now though let's move on to the next zone will find the statues and the pyramid each of the statues has three different levels as shown here and you can work on these in any order but you must always fill in the spaces on a particular statue from bottom to top though you can add to more than one statue per around as long as you pay the cost and the costs are shown in their related spaces but you cannot add more than one brick to the same statue within the same round any number of players can build on these just back their bricks on top of any that are already there but unlike the previous monuments you do not earn points for the stones that you spend here instead at the end of the game you'll score the points showing to the left of the highest level you built within a statue that you satisfy for example this one is for how many bricks you've added to the obelisk as the blue player if at the end of the game aya constructed bricks up to here and then I had at least three or more bricks on the obelisk I would score five points now I actually have one two three four five six total bricks here which is four or more and that would score me ten points but I did not construct a brick to this top space so I did not get the benefit of being able to earn these ten points instead if you're curious about the various statue goals you'll find them explained in the rulebook here the pyramid shows its costs on each of its spaces and when adding bricks here there's only room for one brick on each space and these will be filled in from left to right however you can add a brick to a higher level as soon as the to supporting spaces below it have been filled in and don't forget for each brick you add you gain points equal to how much stone you spent players also score points as soon as a row is completed when this happens pause for a moment and see who has the most bricks in that row in this case it's blue the winner then gains points equal to the number of bricks they have in that row so in this case blue would gain one to three points if there's a tie for the most bricks within a row the tied player with a brick furthest to the right breaks the tie and gains the points remember when resolving this building zone you can work on both statues and the pyramid within the same turn just total the cost from both and ensure you can pay for them in stone and crew strength now though let's talk about the final building zone the Sphinx depending on where you're docked here you'll be able to pay an amount of stone and crew strength up to its printed total and then for each stone paid you draw that number of cards from the top of the deck so let's just say is the blue player I was on this space and I chose to pay for stone I would then draw four of these cards you'll then privately look through them picking one or none of them to secretly keep and the rest you'll return to the bottom of the deck and for each card returned 3 in this case you'll gain a victory point so three points each of these can provide you with the points showing here at the top if you've fulfilled the print of requirements shown below by the end of the game how each of these cards work is explained on them but if you have additional questions they're also explained here in the rule book and those are how each of the three building spaces work but before we move to the next phase I just want to bring your attention back over here to the stone and grain market and talk about them a little bit more when you reach this third space of the stone market you immediately add two stone to your reserve as a one-time bonus and if you reach this top space you get three stone if you would ever advance on this track again once you're already at the top your token doesn't move but you gain three more stone for each time you should have advanced and this benefit here happens only at the end of the game so we'll discuss it then the higher you go on the grain market the less you have to pay if you can't feed all your crew but also if you get to at least this space or higher then during the feeding phase you can convert every three extra grain you produced into one victory point which is beneficial because you can't store grain from round to round now if you hit this topmost space you immediately gain two victory points and from then on every time you would go up on the track again you gained two more victory points with the building phase complete you now move to the cleanup phase here players who worked on the three buildings owns can score cooperation bonus points but instead of scoring these in the sequence order you'll score these bonuses in order based on the current score going from the player with the highest down to the lowest score if you built in any two of the three zones you gained two points and if you built in all three of the zones within a round you score five points just keep in mind if you assign a ship to a space but then decided not to build anything in that zone then that will not count towards that bonus also you'll find a reminder of these cooperation bonus points here on your player board which also gives you a full breakdown of the phases of around now as we mentioned before when you or points the game you move your marker on this track but if you would ever end up in the same space as someone else's token then you place your token to the left of any that are already there you are considered to be behind them which as we saw it can matter when scoring the cooperation bonus which is scored in order based on players scores and this will also matter when adjusting the turn order which is coming up soon with the building's own bonuses assigned you now clear the Nile by returning all ships to their players and you'll also discard any unclaimed Nile cards from the left side of the board here you would also return any unclaimed Nile tiles from the right side of the board and add them to the supply nearby since I had set up the first round of the game we didn't have any tiles in play but in later rounds there might be some left over that you would remove players also flipped there used crews face-up and if they have a colonnade reminder that is facedown it is flipped over as well now the player who has the fewest points gains the sequence one token and remember if two players share the same space the one furthest to the left is considered further behind so blue would get the number one token the next highest player gets token number two and so on and then a new round begins just as before and rounds will continue like this until the end of the fifth round where file scoring happens first check to see which player has the most bricks in the pyramid they'll gain five points as you're reminded of here and if there's a tie and then all tied players with the most bricks in the pyramid will get the 5 point bonus players with Nile cards that have end of game effects resolve those now players who have Sphinx cards check to see if they fulfilled them and if so they score those points also check the statues as we explained earlier players who build on them will now score the highest value they constructed to that they also fulfill finally players who reach the fourth or fifth space of the stone market gain one point for every two stone remaining in their reserve the player with the most points wins and in the case of a tie the tied player with the highest numbered sequence tile wins the only thing we haven't covered in this video are some of the changes for a two-player game which come up during the set up here as well as when you're resolving the pyramid but I'll leave those rules for you to discover on your own otherwise that's everything you need to know to play egg easier shifting sands now if you have any questions but anything you saw here feel free to put them in the comments below and I'll gladly answer them as soon as I get a chance you'll also find forums for discussion pitchers other videos and lots more over on the game's page at BoardGameGeek and I'll put a link to that in the description below and if you found this video helpful please consider giving it a like subscribing and clicking that little bell icon so you get notification anytime we post a new video but until next time thanks for watching [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music]