Mining & Manipulation

Mine crystals, fuse them into jewels, and trade things with other players to gather the best collection of popular and valuable Jewels.

On each turn, draw dice and crystals, make an offer and accept bids from the other players ... then use your dice to take actions, such as mining for more crystals, fusing crystals into jewels, and manipulating the jewel popularity market.

In addition to manipulating the market, you can also manipulate your dice, and the offer-and-bid phase on each turn gives you the opportunity to manipulate the other players as well.

Thus the name: Mining & Manipulation!

Overview Video (2.5 minutes)

How-to-Play ...

The game revolves around 3 types of materials -- dice (yellow, red, blue, white), crystals (yellow, red, blue), and jewels (orange, green, purple).

You gain extra dice and crystals on your turns, and through trading with other players. The dice are used to take actions with the crystals, including fusing them into jewels ... and jewels give you points.

The object of the game is to score the most points, and you score points in 3 ways:

• On your turns during the game, when fusing crystals into jewels, you score 1 point for each Jewel created
• At the end of the game, all players score points based on the popularity of the 3 jewel colors ... the most popular jewel scores 2 points/jewel, and the second most popular scores 1 point/jewel
• Finally, each player has a secret scoring card that specifies how many points each type of Jewel is worth to them individually

On your turn, you will:

• Draw crystals & dice from a bag (the draw bag contains both dice and crystals)
• Make an offer, take bids, accept one of the bids and swap materials (see below for details)
• Roll all of your dice and take actions (see below)

Turns continue around the table until one color of jewels is depleted -- then each of the other players get one more turn before final scoring.

Offer & Bids

One key aspect of the game is the required offer-and-bid phase on each turn. In this phase on your turn, you are required to offer something from your inventory and the other players must place a bid in response.

The offer and bids are allowed to change, giving the opportunity for discussions, negotiations, and social manipulation ... until you announce that players must lock their bids. (Note: Due to each player having their own secret scoring card, which sets player-specific values for the jewels, the value of the different colors of crystals and dice will be different for each player.)

Once locked, you must accept one of the bids and swap your offer with that bid.

Available Actions

After the offer-and-bid process is complete, you roll of your dice and the numbers on the dice indicate which actions are available to be taken.

You can adjust the values on your dice by either discarding a crystal (allows you to adjust increase/decrease 1 die or re-roll any number of dice) or by discarding a die (allows you to set another die to any value of your choice).

The actions you can take:

MINE (any number) - Any die can be used to get additional random crystals from the draw bag.

MANIPULATE MARKET (1, 2, or 3) - This action allows you to change the value on the popularity value for each of the different color jewels.

CONVERT CRYSTALS (4 or 5) - This action allows you to discard 2 crystals to select 1 crystal of a specific color.

FUSE CRYSTALS INTO JEWELS (6) - This action allows you to discard 2 crystals to pick 1 jewel from the middle of the board.

For the dice mitigation contest ...

There are 2 different sets of dice that can be mitigated:

1. The values on the 3 "Jewel Popularity" Dice in the middle of the play area can be manipulated by taking "Market Manipulation" actions on your turn. This action allows you to change the value on one or more of these dice, which impacts how jewels are scored at the end of the game.

2. The values on the dice in your inventory indicate which actions can be taken. Crystals can be discarded to increase, decrease, or re-roll these dice. A die can be discarded to set another die to a specific value. And, you re-roll your dice on each of your turns, so a value that doesn't help you now will probably be different next time.