Description

Sandships was initially offered as the Looney Christmas surprise for 2016; however, it also has pricing for individual sale.

Description from the packaging:
Set a thousand centuries ago on Mars, Sandships is a conquest game by Andrew Looney. It was designed to be an add-on to Pyramid Arcade, but can be played with any Looney Pyramids and some six-sided dice.

RULES

The goal is to control three cities (circular spaces on board [but not including one's home city]) by arranging a stack of one's pyramids whose pip count is higher than every other players' stack (including dead ones) on that space.

SET UP: Each player gets three trios of pyramids, one color to a player, and pick which corner space to place their starting stack (called a spire, in tree formation) on. Spare pyramids are kept in a bank next to the player. Black pyramids are used to represent dead cities: unused spaces during set up and the remaining spires of players removed from the game. In a four-player game, the central space is a dead city (with its own spire). In two- and three-player games two opposing corners are dead cities.

PLAY: On one's turn roll the three dice and perform the three actions in any order. The options are: Transform: take a piece from one's spire and turn it into a sandship by placing it on its side in a city's port (triangular notch in circle); or, turn or add a sandship into a spire of yours in another city. Build: add a piece (using the smallest pieces first) to your home spire. Unfurl: replace a sandship with the next largest piece. Move: move a sandship to another port, either in the same city, or travel to a port of another city in the same zone. If there is already a sandship there of a smaller size it can be pushed to the next port in that city. Zap: remove a smaller piece from another player's spire using your sandship docked in that city. Wild: choose any of the other actions to perform. If you roll two-of-kind, one is treated as wild. If three-of-kind, two become wild with a bonus wild action. If an action cannot be performed treat the roll as wild.

If a player's home spire is completely zapped away all that player's sandships are removed and any of that person's spires in other cities are replaced with black pyramids.