A deeper dive into Ayar

As promised, we are here to dive deeper into ☀️ Ayar: Children of the Sun!
I find the action selection really fascinating, so I’ll try to summarize it. This won’t be easy, so stay with me for a while! 🧐

The map is basically 4 long tracks where 4 Ayar meeples will move forward on, depending on the action selection of the players. Between each step of the tracks there are action spots depicting 1 of the 4 possible actions. 

To choose an action you place one of your Step tokens next to your little 4x4 grid of houses. The color of the Step marker determines which Ayar will move, and the number of arrows at the space determines how much it moves. After moving the Ayar on the board, you move a little house from the corresponding row/column over to the Ayar’s track and perform the action you just covered.

I hope you are still with me. 😄

The 4 actions themselves are fairly simple mini-games:
🌽Place corn cubes from your player board to the game board (majority scoring)
🚣Move your little boat forward and place out islands from your player board (track progression)
🏺Collect pots of different colors (set collection)
🧣Collect pieces of tapestry (tile-laying)

What’s interesting is how the strength of an action is determined by the amount of houses missing from the row/column of your Step marker. There are also different ways of increasing your Sun and Moon scoring for each of these actions. It’s all quite abstract and takes time to really digest how it’s all tied together.

Ayars will trigger scorings as they progress on their tracks, and the slowest Ayar will retire at the end of each round. You really have to keep an eye on what scorings are available, what is coming up and when. Good timing is quintessential. There will be different opportunities to score Sun and Moon points and both are important, as at the end only your lowest of the two will count! 😦

You can’t really do all the actions, it is worth it to focus on 1-2 specific ones to score more, but it could also backfire if certain Ayars retire faster than you wanted. Yeah, it’s pretty hard to do well in this game! 😄 It’s a lot more interactive than our usual euro games, but we like it!