Aquatica

To set up, place the game board in the center of the play area. Shuffle the location cards into a face-down deck and deal six face-up into their designated spaces. Separate the ocean character cards into two groups: those with symbols in their top right corners (starting characters) and those with crown symbols (kings, used in advanced mode). Shuffle the remaining ocean character cards into a face-down deck and deal six face-up into the character row. Separate the manta tokens by color; the purple ones (with a specific symbol on their back) go into a general supply with their effect side face-up. Each player then takes a player board, one of the four sets of starting character cards, and four matching trained manta tokens (with their effect side face-up). Any unused character cards or manta tokens are returned to the box. The person who most recently dived into the sea goes first, or choose randomly.

In Aquatica, players lead their people deep into the ocean to explore hidden worlds and civilizations. The primary objective is to gain the most prosperity points by the end of the game. This is achieved by strategically using character cards and manta tokens to explore new locations, recruit new characters, conquer territories, and complete various goals. The player who most successfully establishes their new-found territory and accumulates the highest prosperity points will win the game.

The game is played over a series of turns, starting with the first player and proceeding clockwise. On your turn, you must perform one main action by playing any character card from your hand and resolving its effects. You can also perform any number of additional actions before and after your main action. Main actions include recruiting new characters from the character row (paying the coin cost shown beneath them), buying locations from the main board (paying the coin cost shown at the top of the location card), conquering locations (paying the power cost shown at the top of the location card), or scouting (discarding all locations from the top row, moving locations from the bottom row to the top, and revealing new locations for the bottom row). Additional actions include exploiting depths on your player board to gain coins, power, or other specific effects, raising locations on your player board to reveal new depth effects, or scoring fully raised locations to add them to your scoring pile. After all actions are completed, your turn ends, and play passes to the next player.

At the end of the game, prosperity points are tallied as follows: gain one point for every character card remaining in your hand (including any King cards, but not cards in your discard pile). Add the prosperity points shown above your mantas on the goal tracks. Finally, total all prosperity points shown on the locations in your scoring pile; locations still in the slots of your player board do not give any prosperity points. The player with the most prosperity points wins the game. In case of a tie, the tied player with the most mantas in their reserve wins. If there is still a tie, the tied player with the lowest number written on their King card wins (if playing with Kings). Otherwise, the last player in turn order wins the game.

The game ends immediately when one of three conditions is met: a player has accomplished all four basic goals (and placed their mantas on them), the location deck runs out, or the ocean character deck runs out. When any of these conditions are triggered, the current turn is completed, and then every player, including the one who triggered the end-game condition, takes one final turn. After all players have taken their final turn, prosperity points are counted to determine the winner.