Welcome to the annual ceremony that brings together druids from distant lands!
Based on a tradition dating back to ancient times, druids gathered annually in the Forest of Carnutes to perform rituals and pass down their knowledge. In Carnuta, you'll compete in a potion contest, striving to be elected Druid of the Year.
Overview: The Druids
Carnuta is a card-drafting resource management game for 2 to 4 players. Each player takes 2 actions over several rounds. There are 4 possible actions, and players can repeat the same action twice or choose two different ones. The objective is to create potions with ingredients that correlate with each other, by playing cards in front of you. You optimize your ingredient combinations through tableau building and the player with the highest score wins the Druid title.
Setup: The Ancestor
Players choose their Druid board and each take a tiny transparent counter, inserting it into the tracker at No.1 to indicate their 1st card. There are 8 starting cards; shuffle them and deal one to each player. This becomes their 1st card in play.
Next, pick up 4 double-sided Runes and flip them to show 2 Sun sides and 2 Moon sides facing up on the board, then add 2 Padlock tokens for the remaining spaces. Provide 2 Sickles for each player and give the Ancestor token to the first player. While the Carnuta rulebook says to choose the first player at random, my house rule is that the oldest player becomes the Ancestor.
There are two separate decks of Ingredients: Day and Night. Shuffle each deck separately, place both to the side, and draw four cards from each deck, revealing them face up in a row. Each card shows the Rune cost at the top, the main Ingredient in the bottom left, and points in the bottom right. As players build their potion with matching ingredients, the cards are stacked upward in a column, with only the bottom card's display staying visible.
Place the Runes reserve and 8 Bonus Ingredient tokens nearby. The size of the Runes reserve varies by player count: 1 Sun + 1 Moon (2P), 2 Sun + 2 Moon (3P), and 3 Sun + 3 Moon (4P). As the game progresses, the Runes reserve cycles based on what players discard and collect.
Gameplay: The Runes
Starting from the Ancestor, turns run clockwise. Each player chooses 2 actions from the following four: Take a Card / Play a Card / Take Runes / Flip Runes. The 2 actions can be performed in any order, and can either be the same action twice or two different ones.
-
Take a Card: Choose only from the 8 revealed Ingredients, add it to your hand, and replace the one taken with the top card from the deck. Players may hold any number of cards in hand during their turn but may only have 3 cards at the end of their turn.
-
Play a Card: When playing a card, pay the Ingredient's cost with Runes (by flipping them on your board or discarding them to the reserve). Don't forget to move your counter on the tracker as this reflects the number of Ingredients you've played so far. Certain spaces on the tracker grant an immediate bonus: remove a Padlock from a Rune space, and take a Bonus Ingredient token.
-
Take Runes: Take either Suns or Moons from the reserve and fill your empty Rune spaces without flipping them. Never take both types in the same action.
-
Flip Runes: Flip all your Suns or all your Moons so that only ONE type is face-up on your board. You cannot end this action with both types showing.
In addition to your 2 actions, Sickles can be used at any time during your turn to discard the 4 Day or 4 Night Ingredients, and reveal 4 new ones. If a deck runs out, reshuffle its discard pile to bring it back into play.
As soon as one player plays their 11th card, the remaining players finish their turns for that round, and then everyone plays one final round before the game ends; at this point, some players may have played more than 11 cards.
Points are tallied Ingredient by Ingredient on the score pad. The winner of Carnuta is the player with the highest score. Should there be a tie, the player with the most points in a single Ingredient takes the Druid title. If there's still a tie, the victory is shared.
Replayability: The Potions
There are plenty of elements that contribute to the replayability of Carnuta. Apart from luck and dibs through turn order, the Day and Night decks vary in Rune costs and points. Some points rely on other Ingredients forming a set, while others act as multipliers.
On your first go at the game, you might not realize how these sets and multipliers affect the final scoring. Even the Ingredients of Day and Night makes a certain scoring set. For me, this makes Carnuta a lowkey strategy game, worth playing a few times in one sitting to really feel like you've built the best-scoring potion tableau. I believe that's the only way players can learn to optimize their Ingredient combinations.
Plus, the chunky double-sided Runes are part of the shift in strategy when playing your cards according to their costs. It makes the timing of when you play Ingredients from your hand feel much more calculated, since you need to think a few steps ahead to the Ingredients that follow, and anticipate their Rune costs.
Verdict: The Elected
The artwork of each Druid on the player boards looks very cool. I do wish each character had their own abilities to give the game a bit of asymmetry for an added challenge; like boosting a certain Ingredient, scoring more points for a favoured deck, or even starting with a different Rune combo.
To be frank, there's nothing lacking in the rules for Carnuta as it is. The game is a pleasing entry-level title with simple mechanics. My wishful asymmetry might come as a future expansion, perhaps? Though I can definitely see myself taking different starting Runes as a house rule of mine. It's still a new game for 2026, so fingers crossed!
Are you ready to be the Druid of the Year? Grab your copy of Carnuta today :)
