Game Overview: Mandala Stones, or Going in Circles, Yet Staying in Place

Filip Głowacz's Mandala Stones from Board&Dice is a 2-4 player game that follows a familiar two-step model: Players pick up stuff in one manner, then score said stuff in a different manner. The conflict between those two manners complicates your efforts to maximize your score, and you need to resolve that conflict better than anyone else in order to win.

That definition could also serve as a short take on competitive games in general: Resolve artificially-defined conflicts better than others to win. Whee, fun!

Let's look at those two manners in a bit more detail:

1. Pick up stuff: In the image above, you'll notice four black cylinders, which the game calls "artists". On a turn, you move any artist to any open circle on this shared game board, then collect all of the matching stones adjacent to the just-moved artist that aren't also adjacent to another artist, then you place that stack of stones on an empty space on your player board.

2. Score stuff: Instead of picking up stones, you can score stones from your player board. You can score the top stone from as many stacks as you wish for 1 point each (which is a terrible option but sometimes necessary), or you can choose a color, then score all the stones of that color, with the points for each such stone ranging from 1-6 depending on where the stone is located.

In the image above, for example, I could score the two yellow stones, earning 2 points for the stone on the left because I have stacks of two different heights on my board and 4 points for the stone on the right because it's the third stone from the bottom — and 6 points for two stones is far better than 5 points for five stones.

Alternatively, I could score the two purple stones, earning 2 points for the left one and 3 points for the right one because I have stones of two different colors in it. Doing that would open a yellow stone on the far right stack, so I could then score yellow stones and receive 8 points (instead of 6), and I'd open up a location for me to place stones again following a pick action.

Collectively we place scored stones on a path that occasionally has spaces that grant an additional 1 or 2 points, and when we reach a certain distance on the path based on the player count, we finish the round, then see whether we score one of our two starting bonus cards. Whoever then has the most points wins.

Brownie not included

Everything sounds straightforward — and it is, for the most part — but over eight games played on a review copy from Board&Dice at all player counts, we kept having situations like the one above in which someone would place an artist, pick stones, then four stones of the same type would be revealed. (The image above actually has two such locations: middle left and middle right.)

When that would happen, no one would want to move the artist from that spot since you'd typically pick up only 1-2 stones while leaving behind a spot that would give the next player 3-4 stones. Yes, in the example above you could move the artist on the left down one spot, which would then place two artists adjacent to the golden open spot — but if you're not aiming to score yellow or blue in the future, then you wouldn't make that initial move and the logjam would continue.

Here's how one of our four-player games ended, for example:

One-third of the board was pretty much untouched because none of us wanted to give a sweet stack to the next player, which meant that we almost never had stacks four-high, which meant that the scoring was much flatter than first appearances suggested since we never had more than three colors in the rightmost stack and almost never scored 6 points for a single stone.

I discuss this issue and others — such as the uneven pace of the game, the problem with picking up stones, and the seeming arbitrariness of the bonus cards — in this overview video: