Ostoja Game
Create a miniature world where animals live in perfect harmony with nature! Ostoja is a beautifully illustrated strategy game in which every decision you make can prove crucial to the final outcome. During the game, you place colorful landscape tiles on your board to shape extraordinary lands. To win, you must score as many points as possible by cleverly establishing habitats and attracting animals to them.
What’s it about?
- The goal is to earn the most points from collected landscape features and animal markers.
- On your turn, take landscape tokens from the main board and place them on your board following the rules in the manual.
- The colors and symbols on the tokens represent different terrain types and their corresponding habitat sets. These are what we’ll focus on to attract animals.
- Once per turn, you may choose one of the revealed animal cards. This sets your objectives; each card shows a layout of landscape tokens at the bottom that you must map onto your board for that animal to appear.
- The habitat layout on your board must match the animal card, including mountain and tree heights, but it may be rotated in any direction.
- When you successfully reproduce the indicated layout of tokens, you may transfer one of the animal markers from the card to the corresponding landscape feature on your board.
- The game ends when not enough landscape tokens can be drawn from the bag, or when one player has two (or fewer) empty spaces left on their board. Each landscape feature scores in its own way (some by height, others by adjacency rules). Points are also awarded for collected animal markers.
Why you’ll love this game
- It’s a great example of a game with simple core rules where the richness comes from the interactions between elements. Harmonizing the different token types is counterintuitively challenging, and players will constantly be torn between completing animal card patterns and efficiently grouping terrain features.
- By adding or removing special nature spirit cards, you can adjust the game’s difficulty. The manual also includes tips to ease your first play, improving onboarding.
- The manual describes a dedicated solo variant that lets you learn the mechanics, practice, or try to beat your high score.
