3 Magi - Official How to Play. Complete, Clear, Concise Board Game Tutorial.
Move your camels through deserts, detours, and divine Google map recalculations to reach Bethlehem because wise men need a little help in Three Magi. And today we'll be teaching you how to play Three Magi game designed by Adrien Adamsu and Cole Smith and published by Bedawin Games. We are using a prototype copy of the game, so the rules and components may not be final.
And do check out the project page. We'll put a link to that in the video description below. And hi everyone, it's Stella and Taran and welcome to Maven University. And hey, if you enjoy this video after watching, like, subscribe, and comments. You know what to do. All right, now let's get to the classroom.
Based on the New Testament Gospel in Three Magi, players play the roles of wise men who with their caravans made their way from the east towards Bethlehem for the birth of Christ. Through the game, players will move their caravans in order to gain resources, craft gifts, trade with merchants, and be guided by the stars.
All in the aim of gaining the most points. Whoever has scored the most points by the time someone has reached Bethlehem will win the game. To set up, lay out the main board and the 19 map tiles. The five blueboarded city tiles must be placed in exactly these positions. The other tiles are placed randomly.
Shuffle and place the five decks of cards. There are the three types of resources, precious metals, spices, and fabrics, the merchants, and the gifts. Deal face up rows of four from each of the merchants and the gifts. Place the round tracker on the first space of this track. Give each player a player board and these player colored pieces.
The board represents the movement of the three celestial bodies, the stars, sun, and moon, which the magi used for navigation. And in setup, you'll place your three celestial body pieces on these spaces at the bottom of your board. Flip these square tokens face down and place them in numerical order starting from the left of your board and going clockwise.
Place these rectangular pieces color side up on these spaces according to their matching tracks. Your other pieces start on the main board. All score markers begin on the score track at zero through the game. Points that you gain immediately are represented by this blue icon and points gained at the end of the game by this orange one.
Then all players three caravan pieces are stacked on the Arabia tile. As reminded here, all players now take starting resource cards, which will be one card per type. Draw them from the tops of their stacks and into your hand. Choose a first player and you're now ready to play. Three Magi is played in rounds and the number of rounds is not fixed.
Each round plays in four phases. Three day phases, then a night phase. Each day phase is played in turns, starting from the first player and going once clockwise around the table. On your turn in the day phase, you'll move one of your caravans and then take the actions at your destination in any order.
After each player has taken one turn in the day phase, you'll move to the next day phase and then do the same continuing with the same first player. After three day phases are complete, you'll move to the night phase where all players will resolve these three steps before you reset for the next round and hand the first player marker one step clockwise.
Continue playing full rounds in this way until the end of the round in which one or more players has reached Bethlehem. Players gain points for any end game scores they've collected and the player with the highest score wins. So now let's look at each phase in detail. Starting with dayphase movement to begin the game.
All three of your caravans will be in Arabia, but after a few turns, they'll be spread out so that they're all on different hex's. During your day movement, you must move exactly one of your caravans. It may move any number of spaces, but it must move forwards in that it must be in a column further to the right of where it started.
It may not finish sharing a hex with another one of your caravans. And it cannot break away from the rest of your caravans, meaning your three caravans must finish your movement adjacent to each other. So, for example, yellow could not move this caravan. Its only legal forward spaces would be here or here.
and that would break up the three caravans. Likewise, this caravan can't legally move forwards without breaking up this one. But this rear caravan has many legal options. It could move to here or here, here, here, or here. All of these wouldn't meet the requirements of moving forward, keeping the caravans together, and not sharing a space with another of that player's caravans.
On yellow's next turn, the player would have the option to move this caravan here, or move this one forward to either here or here. Or this one could move to any one of these three spaces. Opposing players caravans don't interact. So multiple players can share the same hex. The only exception to the standard rules is in Bethlehem.
A player may have multiple of their own caravans present there. After making your legal movement, you may take any or all of the actions in your destination hex in any order. These actions showing you the colored cards allow you to draw resource cards from the top of the relevant deck. Here, for example, I gain a fabrics and a precious metals into my hand.
If the icon shows a rainbow card, take a card from the deck of your choice. There are only six different types of resources. The fabrics deck contains silk and linen. The spices deck contains frankincense and myrrh. and the precious metals deck contains silver and gold. Each deck also contains some wild cards which can count as any of the six resource cards have two different functions.
They can be either spent for crafting gifts or played for their printed abilities. Crafting gifts is done using the hammer icon and this action is available on the city tiles. Choose a gift from the display. Spend the combination of resources required to craft it. Add the card face down to your own collection.
You'll score its points at the end of the game. And replenish the display. Playing a card is done using this downward arrow icon, and you can find this on many of the Desert Hex's. Add one card from your hand face up to your play area. You then resolve two effects, a navigation bonus and the effect printed on the card.
First is navigation. This banner will show sun, star, or moon, and you advance the corresponding celestial body marker one step clockwise around its matching track, gaining any benefit you cross. So here, I would draw a card of my choice. To be clear, advancing on one of these tracks means moving to the next space which shows the tracks icon.
As such, the star track has six spaces, the sun track has five, and the moon track has four. The first time all three of your markers have reached or crossed one of the cardinal positions, immediately flip over the navigation bonus tile and gain its reward. Here it's another step of movement on the track of your choice.
When you cross over one of these three markers for the first time, gain the reward shown and then flip the tile over to its points side. Any subsequent time you pass it, gain those immediate points instead. After resolving navigation, resolve the cards effect. And do note that all cards of the same resource will have the same effect, but at the time of filming, the game was still in development, so the final effect may differ from what you see here.
If the effect is shown in a light colored banner, then you resolve that effect immediately. If the effect is shown in a dark colored banner, then this will resolve in the subsequent night phase and it will represent a way of scoring points based on the cards you've played throughout the day and night phases of this round.
That is, you'll be collecting all of your played cards throughout the round and then scoring their night phase effects at the end. Finally, you can use the play cards action to play a wild card, which lets you gain the navigation advancement of your choice. It has no secondary effect. This red card icon lets you meet a merchant.
Choose and take any one of the four face up merchant cards, replacing it immediately from the deck. If the card shows a green lightning bolt, then resolve its effect right away before discarding the merchant. If the card shows an orange banner, collect it face up. This contains an objective which you'll score at the end of the game.
If the card shows the blue infinite banner, then keep that in front of yourself. There are six of these in the deck, and each of them gives you a discount when crafting gifts. For example, this is a discount of gold. So, I could craft this for one linen and one gold when taking the craft action. You're only allowed to hold two of these infinite types of merchants.
To gain a third, you must discard one of the ones you already had. The last type of action you'll find on the board is to advance on a navigation track, either a specific track or the track of your choice. After three full day phases, you'll move to the night phase, and this is resolved in three steps.
Firstly, in current turn order, each player gets to play one card. This works exactly the same way as if you'd done so from a caravan action. Secondly, in turn order, each player takes one turn to activate all of their navigation bonuses in any order. Remember, that's these markers, which you'll flip over as your celestial bodies make their first lap around your board.
You'll already have gained this effect immediately when you flip it. Now, you get to activate each flipped effect once per night phase, and this will build up your engine, allowing you to take more and more actions as the game goes on. Finally, players score points for any of their nightphase cards.
Any cards with dark banners which you've played now score based on all the cards you played this round. And do note again, the numbers of points on these may have changed between our prototype and your final version. So do check the card you're playing with. Frankincense cards score based on sets of frankincense.
So here I have two frankincense and collectively would score the middle number of points which is four. Silver scores points based on having matching banners. So, this is two points per sun banner played and would be a total of eight. Linen scores based on the number of different resources you've played.
Here, I've got four different resources, so it would score the fourth number of points, which is nine. Adding extra linen cards does not increase these points. This would still count as four types and a total of nine. If you've played any wilds during this round, you can count it as a single resource type and a single banner type for the purposes of scoring.
Once everyone has scored, reset for the next round. Discard all of the cards you played, sorting them and shuffling them back into their respective decks. Now, reset the round marker and hand the first player marker one step clockwise. If at the end of a night phase, one or more players has any caravans in Bethlehem, then the game is over.
To the points they've gained during the game, players add points for any gifts they've crafted. And for any orange banner merchants they've collected. The player with the highest score wins. If tied, whoever has crafted the most gifts breaks the tie and is still tied, victory is shared. Thanks for watching.
And if you like this video, maybe you'd like to watch this next one. Have a great day.