The American Experiment

The Thirteen Colonies have gone from a restless bunch to a group of independent entities. Throughout the process, a number of documents and other writings have played an integral role in motivating the citizenry and justifying the need for Independence. As a publisher, your goal is collect and publish more parts of these documents than your competitors. Publish a significant portion of a document or series of writings and you will attract Advocates that will boost your score. But beware, there is a heavy price for beginning a collection and under-delivering. Or, will you take the ultimate risk and publish only Loyalist writings?

The object of the game is to gain points by playing cards to different collections of writings. A card played to a collection represents one part of a published writing. But, there is a catch - once you begin publishing to a collection your score in that collection starts negative. You must continue publishing to that collection to achieve a positive score in it. Once to have played three cards to a collection you may also play Advocates to the collection which can double, triple, or quadruple your score.

On a player's turn, a card is played either to a collection or to an appropriate discard pile. Then a card is drawn to replace the played card, either from the deck or from the top of one of the discard piles. Cards played to one of the player's collections must be in ascending order, but not necessarily consecutive. Play continues until the draw pile is exhausted at which point the players scores are tallied.

If a player decides to publish the Loyalist writings, they may only play to the Loyalist collection and no other collections, their initial score is doubly negative, and all cards in the Loyalist suit are double valued. It is a high risk, high reward option.

-description from designer