Circle the Wagons

To set up Circle the Wagons, shuffle the deck of cards and arrange them in a circle face-up around the three scenario or scoring cards placed in the center. Each player starts with one card to begin their boomtown, and a marker or starting player indicator is set.

The main objective is to build the highest-scoring boomtown by strategically acquiring and overlapping cards to create the largest contiguous groups of various territory types, while maximizing points from the three central bonus cards.

On your turn, you can choose the next card in the line, or you can skip one or more cards to take a later one, passing any skipped cards to your opponent. Cards taken are added to your boomtown by overlapping them with existing cards to build your layout.

Scoring happens at the end. First, you score one point per territory in the largest group of each territory type (such as mountains, forests, water, and plains). Then, you add points based on the three bonus scoring cards in the center, which reward specific setups like adjacent wagons or cow counts.

The game ends once all cards in the circle have been claimed by the players. Everyone then tallies up their territory group sizes and bonus card points to determine the final score and winner.