Overview

Your goal is to earn the most points by building landscapes and habitats for Animals. Which landscapes and habitats are built using colored tokens in certain arrangements. The more arrangements you have, the more points you can earn.

Tokens can be one of five colors. There are 23 blue tokens (representing water), 23 grey tokens (representing mountains), 21 brown tokens (representing woody trees), 19 green tokens (representing foliage or treetops), 19 yellow tokens (representing fields) and 15 red tokens (representing buildings).

Animals are represented by Animal cards. Each Animal card indicates the habitat pattern you must form within your landscape.

Nature's Spirit Cards can be added to the game and provide additional scoring conditions. When integrated into the game, choose between 2 randomly dealt spirit cards before taking your first turn. Refer to the rule indicated on the card to determine its value in points.

Turns

There are 3 possible actions to take. One is mandatory, two are optional. They can be done in any order.

Mandatory action - Take and place tokens: Choose one set of 3 tokens (out of 5 sets). Place each of the 3 tokens on your board according to the following requirements:

- The token cannot be placed underneath another token.

- The token cannot be placed on top of a spirit cube.

- The token must be either on an empty space or on top of 1-2 previously placed tokens (see diagram).

Optional action - Take an Animal card: The card will be placed in one of 4 available slots. You can only take 1 card per turn.

Each card displays the pattern/arrangement to make to score points, the spirit cubes to earn for making the pattern, and the number of points you can earn for each spirit cube. When all the cubes are used, the card is discarded and you can take a new one.

Optional action - Place an Animal cube. If you have placed a valid pattern on your board, you can place a spirit cube where indicated on its Animal card.

At the end of a turn, the central board of tokens is refilled and the Animal cards are replaced so there are 5.

End of Game

The game ends when either A) there are no tokens left to refill the central board or B) a player has 2 or fewer empty spaces on their board. At that point, the round ends so that all players have completed the same number of turns.

Scoring

Animal Cards

Each player scores points according to the number of points indicated in the topmost space without an Animal cube. A card with all its cubes scores 0.

Landscape

Each player scores points according to the standard patterns for certain landscape features (colors).

Spirit Cards

If playing with Spirit cards, the following changes to the game are made.

Each player chooses 1 of 2 Spirit cards. This card counts toward your 4-card limit and is given a Nature's Spirit cube. These follow the same rules as Animal cards, but have different requirements, such as points for the number of landscapes or groups of connected landscapes of a certain pattern.

At the end of the game, points are scored for Spirit cards just like Animal cards.