Description

The Constellars are key counsels to many generals of the Elemental Kings. These prized advisors are sourced for their flair to visualize a cosmic alignment - a strategic placement of worlds that collectively enables massive generation of magical energy crucial in sustaining a significant army.

TKG ARENA: Cosmic Alignments is a game set up for 2 to 4 players.

Components required for this game:

WORLD TILES: 48
OINKS: 13 from each element (Default)
LIFE TOKENS: 33 for each player (Default)

Winning Condition

The first player to achieve a Cosmic Alignment – which is 3 adjacent occupied world tiles bearing the player’s chosen Oinks placed across the playing grid linearly in a vertical, horizontal or diagonal manner wins.

If there are no Cosmic Alignments achieved when the game ends, the player with the most victory points wins. Each player will first total up the number of each type of the elemental insignias on all the world tiles he/she has captured at game end. When the elemental insignia matches the elemental type of the player’s Oink, it scores 2 victory points, otherwise each elemental insignia scores 1 victory point for the player. If there is a tie, the player with more occupied world tiles, followed by the number of LIFE tokens in play (on the grid) wins. If there is a further tie, the players may rejoice in their joint victory.

Ending Condition

The game will end immediately when one of the following happens:

1. A Cosmic Alignment is achieved.
2. All world tiles in the playing grid are fully occupied (with LIFE tokens and/or Oinks).
3. A player has captured 5 world tiles.

Setup

Players are randomly assigned one of the four elements before taking turns to draw 3 world tiles at one time from a stack of shuffled world tiles to place one of them down towards forming a 4 x 4 layout of 16 tiles with the grid sides facing up. The leftover world tiles not placed are reshuffled to form a new world tile stack ready for the game. The schematic below labels each world tile from A to P to facilitate the explanation. Each player takes 13 Oinks and 33 LIFE tokens representing his/her assigned element as his/her personal supply.

A B C D
E F G H
I J K L
M N O P

Within each World Tile (Grid Side)

Within each world tile, we will see that the space is further divided into positions in a 4 X 4 grid and they are labeled from 1 to 16 as seen by the schematic below:

1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16

Game Flow

The youngest player starts first in clockwise order. The first player may place one of his/her LIFE tokens from his/her personal supply in any of the 16 spaces from any of the 16 world tiles.

Let us assume that it is placed on the world tile A, position 12. The next player can then only place his/her LIFE token in a world tile which is macroscopically aligned to the position of this last placement in the bigger grid. In this case, it will be world tile L.

This player decides to place it at position 2 in world tile L, which means the following player will have to place his/her LIFE token in world tile B (which is aligned macroscopically to position 2 in any world tile.).

A player must put down one of his/her LIFE tokens if there is space in the world tile directed by the previous player. If he/she is directed to an unoccupied world but all the spaces within are taken up, he/she may put her LIFE token on any unoccupied space in any world tile.

When a player runs out of LIFE tokens to be put down on a directed world tile, he/she must take one of his/her own played LIFE tokens from the rest of the world tiles to carry out this action. LIFE tokens already placed on the directed world tile cannot be chosen for this purpose.

Whenever an alignment of 3 LIFE tokens of any player is linearly placed across the grid within a world tile in a vertical, horizontal or diagonal manner; or all spaces in a world tile are occupied with LIFE tokens and a player holds the majority (in the event of a tie in majority, the player that forms the majority later wins), that player must return all LIFE tokens on it to all players and chooses one of these 2 actions:

1. Flips the world tile over and places one of his/her Oinks on it to occupy it. This world tile is considered occupied. In a subsequent move, if any player is directed to occupied tiles like this one, he/she may choose to place his/her LIFE token on any world tile.

2. Takes the world tile into his/her personal supply for victory point purposes and replaces this world tile with another from the world tile stack with the grid side facing up. This world tile is considered captured.

If a player decides that the state of a world tile is occupied rather than captured, it will remain so till the end of the game and vice versa. These two states are not inter-changeable once decided during the game.

The game continues with the last placement directing the next player to the next world tile till the ending condition is met.