Button Shy is proud to announce that the next game to hit Kickstarter in our Wallet Games series is Seasons of Rice, a 2 player game designed by Corry Damey. Seasons of Rice is an 18-card game where players will be Cambodian farmers expanding their rice paddies to ensure the most bountiful of harvests. Players will be drafting cards and placing them into their expanding Landscape area to close off Paddies in order to score the most points by the end of the game.

CHOOSE YOUR ANCESTOR WISELY

The very first thing you get to decide in a game of Seasons of Rice is who to use as your Ancestor, which will provide unique scoring conditions for the game. With 18 of them in the game - of which you choose between two each game - there are a lot of variations on how you might decide to build your Rice Paddies. For example, choosing Pally as your Ancestor will let you score double the points when closing a Paddy that has nothing inside of its boundaries. On the other hand Chantrea would provide 2 points per farmer located in an open Paddy at the end of the game. Those two choices could lead you to draft and place cards in very different ways. The other card is used to being the player’s Landscape.

DRAFTING IN THE WET SEASON

 

Players will each get 7 cards dealt to their hand for the Wet Season. Then two cards are simultaneously chosen by each player, one to go into their Landscape and one to go into the common area of Dry Season cards. After this section, players pass their hand to their opponent and the process is repeated until both players have one card left in their hand.

EXPANDING YOUR LANDSCAPE

 

As cards are built into the Landscape, attention must be paid to the solid brown lines (Paths) that form the borders for Paddies. Cards must always be placed orthogonally adjacent to at least one other card in their Landscape, and there are dark lines (Furroughs) which break each card into grid-like sections. These Furroughs allow cards to be built off-center from an adjacent card if desired, so long as at least one Furrough is orthogonally adjacent to an existing Furrough.

 

Whenever a Paddy is closed off (in other words, a completed Path encloses an area completely), the player will score points for the completed Paddy. It scores points based on size, with the best sizes being 3-5 squares, and also gains points per buffalo in the Paddy and for a set of Farmers enclosed within the Paddy. Ancestor Cards may provide additional scoring conditions during these scoring opportunities. However, if there is a gap inside the Paddy then it will always be considered as Open, even if it is closed off through traditional means.

AFTER WET COMES THE DRY PHASE

The next set of drafting comes during the Dry Season, which is the final phase before the end scoring on the game. Whoever is behind in points gets first selection of a card from the six that were placed in the communal Dry Season set of cards, and players then alternate taking a card from there and placing it in their Landscape. Once all of the cards have been selected and placed from here, the game moves into the Final Scoring.

WRINGING OUT THOSE FINAL POINTS

Most of the points in the game have already been accounted for by this point, but there are three key scoring triggers that happen at the end of the game. First, players gain a point for every closed Paddy in their Landscape. Second, players lose one point for every buffalo that is not inside a closed Paddy. Finally, players will score via any conditions that are end-game scoring from their Ancestors. The player with the most points has the honor of being the most successful at navigating through the Seasons of Rice. In the event of a tie, the player with the most Farmers is the winner.

HARVEST YOUR FIELDS

Seasons of Rice is launching on Kickstarter July 9th and will be priced as low as $10 plus shipping and will come packaged in our standard vinyl wallet for maximum portability. Sharpen your hoes and get ready to compete head-to-head with one other person to prove once and for all who is better at managing the planting of rice in Seasons of Rice.