Sanctuary is a quick and light tile-based zoo building game for 1–5 players. See my review elsewhere on the blog for more details.
Anatomy of a Tile
The first thing to do is familiarise yourself with some of the 135 tiles (136, if you’ve managed to snag the Kiosk promo tile); once you get your head around the icons and instructions on them, you’ll understand 99% of the game. Not surprisingly, the majority are animals, but there are also buildings and projects, the latter encompassing concepts like field experts, partner zoos, or releasing animals (as with Savanna in the picture above).
Across the top of the tile are several circular icons; the rightmost one identifies the type of tile: building, project or animal class (e.g., lizard, ape, herbivore and predator in the photo). For animal tiles specifically, the leftmost one indicates the animal’s habitat (forest, water, rock, or ‘undefined’)—this determines which action card (see later) you need to use to place the tile. The other icon that can appear is the continent the animal can be found in. Besides showing tile type and animal habitat, these icons count towards what’s in your zoo when it comes to scoring time or when placing other tiles.
On the left of animal and project tiles, you’ll see a number in a black square: this is the minimum strength your action card has to be in order to place the tile. In roughly the same space on building tiles, there’s a restriction on where the building can be placed, e.g., the Primate House has to be adjacent to a tile with an ape icon.
Another type of restriction is that a few of the larger animals need more space, which will be shown by white arrows on one or more edges of the tile—the panda in the photo above needs open areas on three sides. When you place those tiles, the arrowed edges much be adjacent to an open area, i.e., a facedown tile or one of the tile back spaces on the map.
The next thing to note is a ticket towards the tile’s bottom right containing a number indicating what the tile will score at the end of the game. Some are straightforward numbers, while others are conditional on what else is in the zoo—for example, the aforementioned Primate House scores two points per adjacent ape tile. The glossary booklet goes into detail on how the different types of tile scoring mechanisms work.
Indirectly related to scoring are the male/female graphics on the right side of some animal tiles, such as the otter in the picture above—more about those later.
Finally, some tiles have a block of text and icons in the middle, giving the tile’s effect. This can be immediate (marked with a lightning bolt), and you perform the indicated action when you place the tile, which might be to gain a conservation or pouch token, or to take a tile from the display. Other effects are ongoing (marked with an infinity symbol), such as the Ornithologist letting you place a new open area every time you play a bird tile, or the Expert in Large Animals letting you place a four or five strength animal tile at a one strength point discount.
Actually, I’ve missed two other important features of the tiles: the title and the gorgeous image. But those won’t affect game play, except for the few moments you spend admiring the pictures.
Setup
Put the display board (in the photo at the head of the previous section) where it can be reached by everyone, with a facedown draw pile at the 6 end and a discard pile at the 1 end. The game comes with a neat tile carrier, which can act as a convenient draw stack. Place six tiles from the draw pile faceup in the display, and set the conservation board (see picture later) nearby, selecting five conservation objectives at random.
Each player gets their own zoo map (make sure everyone’s using the same side of the double-sided board) and a tile rack, along with four action cards (project and the three animal habitat types) and upgrade and conservation markers of their chosen colour.
The animal action cards let you play an animal tile of the matching habitat (or the undefined one), or if you prefer not to or can’t, you can use it to draw two tiles from the pile; while the project one lets you place a project tile or draw a tile from anywhere on the display. The project tile also indicates your reputation range—more on that in a moment.
The action cards are two sided, marked with I (see map picture) and II (see above) at the bottom right, the latter being a more powerful upgrade; as well as increasing the strength at which they can be used, the upgrades let you, for example, place two animal tiles instead of just one. The upgrade markers show (rather cryptically!) what you need to do to upgrade a card: support a conservation objective (see later), have at least two projects in your zoo, at least three connected tiles of any one habitat, or at least four different animal classes—as soon as you achieve one of those, you can immediately flip the marker and an action card of your choosing.
Along the bottom of the map are four slots for the action cards, such that the arrows on the cards point to numbers indicating their current strength. The first player puts their project action card, side I up, in slot 1, then the next player places the project card in slot 2, next slot 3, and fourth and fifth players slot 4. The other cards are placed randomly in the remaining slots, also side I up.
And now you’re ready to play…
Turns
Despite what follows being a long description, you’ll find that taking a turn is fairly quick in practice.
Your turn starts with drawing a tile within reputation range (i.e., from the slot numbered to match where the project action card’s arrow points, or anywhere below that point—in the zoo board picture above, this would be slot 1) and adding it to your rack.
Next, you perform an action, e.g., to place an animal tile from your rack, you choose the action card of the appropriate habitat (icon on the left of the animal tile matches the one on the action card) and, as long as the action card’s arrow points to a number at least as large as the animal tile’s strength, you can place it on the map. Any tile you place must be adjacent to the zoo’s entrance (bottom centre three spaces) or to a tile you’ve already placed. As mentioned earlier, some animals have requirements for open areas beside the tile; if you’re not using existing open areas, you will need to place additional tiles from your rack facedown to create these open areas, and if you don’t have enough tiles, you can’t play that animal.
I mentioned the male/female icons on some animal cards earlier; if you can place the male and female tiles of the same species adjacent to each other, you gain a conservation token. (I have to say, given the likelihood of one player pulling both tiles from the total of 135 and having an open space beside the first into which to play the second, a single token seems rather stingy.)
Some spaces on the map have icons on them indicating bonuses when you place a tile there, such as drawing another tile.
Playing a project is similar, though one project type worth noting is releasing an animal: here, you place the tile on top of a matching animal and gain a number of conservation tokens, depending in the strength of the covered animal, and that animal no longer contributes to your final score.
If you can’t or don’t want to play a tile, you can use the action cards’ other behaviour, taking tiles from the display or draw deck as appropriate. Note that when drawing from the display as the result of an action, you are not limited to your reputation range.
Once you’ve used an action card, you move it to slot 1, shifting the other cards right; i.e., that action card ends up at minimum strength for your next turn, while any that you’ve moved will be stronger than they were this turn.
If the tile you’ve placed has effects, you can play them now. While these effects are optional, you’ll generally want to use them if you can. If a card has an ongoing effect, as well as playing it now, you’ll need to remember to use it when it applies in future turns. (I recommend noting down ongoing actions on a scrap of paper beside the board to make it less likely you’ll forget about them, and to reduce the need to scan the zoo board on every turn.)
Whew, it’s not over yet; we’re still going…
At this point, you can play a building from your rack into the zoo, but take note of the placement constraints. Besides looking at constraints, you should be placing tiles to maximise their scoring potential—e.g., the Primate house has to be adjacent to at least one ape tile, but it should be placed where it can touch as many ape tiles as possible, since it scores 2 points for each.
After all that, depending on the current state of your zoo, you can support a conservation objective (at most one per turn). The conservation board shows five different objectives: basically, icons you need to have in your zoo. You have conservation markers with numbers 2–5 on them, shown on the right of the picture above; as soon as you have at least that number of matching icons on tiles on your board, you can place your conservation marker in the appropriate space on the board, which will score points at the end. If you have fewer icons than needed, you can use any conservation tokens you have to make up the deficit (though you must have at least one matching icon—you can’t use conservation tokens alone). Note that you can support each objective only once, so don’t squander the low numbers too early, when you think you might place further matching tiles later in the game.
Before finishing your turn, you can check for opportunities to upgrade an action card, if you’ve played the appropriate tiles to accomplish that, or placed a conservation marker.
Finally, discard down to six tiles in your rack, replenish the central tile collection by sliding all tiles down to leave no gaps, then adding tiles from the draw pile to fill up spaces at the top. Check if game end has been triggered (i.e., your zoo map is full, you’ve placed all four conservation markers, or there are no tiles left in the draw pile). The person who triggers the end of the game takes the ten-point end marker, and everyone else gets one more turn; if any of those players also complete an end-triggering action, they take a five-point end marker.
And then it’s the next player’s turn until it’s all over.
Scoring
Scoring notepads are provided, but they’re not really necessary. Just tot up the ticket values on each tile on the map (not forgetting a point for the open areas printed on the map), and note that some of those scores are dependent on other tiles/icons. Add in the values printed on placed conservation markers, two points for each conservation or pouch token, and the points from a game end token, as appropriate.
The winner is the person with the highest score.
Solo
A solo mode is outlined in the rule book (technically the glossary, but the split between actual rule book and glossary seems rather arbitrary), in which a pile of randomly numbered tokens sort of behaves like another player by removing tiles from the display between your turns. Given how little interaction there is between players in this game, this is a pretty good simulation of a multiplayer game, although the tile removal doesn’t occur at quite the right time, and doesn’t take into account any additional tile drawing actions real opponents might perform during their turn. It shouldn’t be very difficult to come up with a more accurate automa, but it’s probably not worth the effort.
Set up the game as normal, and shuffle the 18 solo markers face down.
You play each turn up to just before replenishing the display. At that point, turn over one of the solo markers. Discard the tile at the revealed position in the display, or if that slot is empty, the tile at the lowest occupied position. Then replenish the display and continue.
If you reveal the last solo marker before reaching game end conditions, you lose. On the other hand, if you’ve managed to fulfil at least one of those conditions, you score as normal, adding an additional five points for each unturned solo marker.
You can make the solo play exercise harder by choosing to use fewer solo markers.
The rule book suggests nipping across to the Capstone website for solo challenges, but these don’t appear to be available there yet; however, you can find the PDF on the Feuerland Spiele site instead. These challenges are things like ‘get four petting zoo animals’ or ‘place five buildings’—definitely tricky and rather reliant on the luck of the draw, but more interesting than merely counting points.
And that’s how you play Sanctuary.
About the Author:
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
