Discover the spirits within…
Inside the core game box, which is small enough to fit in your pocket, you get a set of small rectangular landscape tiles, a small supply of rainbow tiles, and some small wooden spirit tiles. Along with these, you will find your instructions and a small reference sheet.
The landscape tiles are good quality card tiles; each illustrated with a small section of a larger image. The style of art is cartoony but adds a real character to the game. Along with the illustration, you will find some other mechanical aspects to consider, including a number inside a coloured box, a line of circles, with one shaded in, and on some tiles, a fire symbol at the top.
The rainbow tiles are the same size as the landscape tiles, with a picture of a rainbow in the clouds, in a similar art style to the rest of the landscape.
The spirit tiles are mounted on wooden pieces, which offers a real quality feel to them, beautifully illustrated with animals, which represent the spirits in the game. Long with the image, you will get information on a special action that spirit brings with it.
The reference card is a simple fold out card to show you where to place each tile to correctly build your landscape.
Finally, the instructions, clearly written, similar art style present, easy to follow and provides examples.
Solstis really comes in a small package, but how does it play?
Exploring the mountains
Set up takes minutes. You shuffle the landscape tiles and make a stack of them. You proceed to lay six tiles face down in a row and then lay six face-up on top of them.
You shuffle the spirit tiles and place them in a stack within reach of both players.
Rainbow tiles are stacked within reach of each player and then each player then draws three tiles each and keeps them hidden. You are now ready to go.
There are three goals to Solstis.
- Explore the mountain – which involves you selecting and placing tiles, building your landscape.
- Discover spirits – which offer points bonus and bonus actions you can take.
- Light fires on the peaks – this is achieved by creating a continuous path from the bottom of the mountain to one of the peak tiles with a fire symbol on.
To achieve this, players take tuns, performing a series of simple steps.
On a turn, a player will select a tile in their hand, placing it face-up in the centre of the play area. They will look at the number inside the coloured box and see if it can be used to capture a tile in the row. You get to capture a tile if the box is the same colour as one in the shared row or has a number that matches with one in the row.
If you successfully capture a tile, this is where it can be a bit fiddly in the early stages of the game. You place both tiles into your panorama. The circles indicate which row to place the tile, and the number indicates the column. As you can imagine, in the early stages, gauging where to start this can be a bit of a guessing game, and you will likely find yourself readjusting placements once you start to establish your paths. That said, the use of the symbols and the reference card really help with this.
If you don’t match either colour or number, and you will find this happening as you progress through the game, you get a second chance. You move your tile to the row and draw a new tile from the stack. If you are then lucky enough for that to match with another tile, you proceed with placement. Unlucky enough to draw another tile that doesn’t match? Then you send that tile to the row and then draw a rainbow tile. These tiles operate as joker tiles and can be placed anywhere in your tableau.
If when placing your new tiles, you create a group of four tiles in a 2×2 formation, you get to draw spirit tiles, pick one and place it in the middle of the four tiles. Some spirits will then activate a onetime ability, others will bring end game bonuses, so picking the right spirits can really shape your game strategy.
At the end of your turn, you draw a new tile to your hand from the stack and play proceeds to the next player.
Solstis continues like this until there are no more tiles to draw from the stack.
Once the game is over, scoring is calculated by adding together number tiles (excluding rainbows) in your largest panorama, any fires lit, and any spirits encountered plus scoring bonuses. The player with the most points wins.
As you can see a very straightforward game…
So, let’s explore more with the Fireflies…
The Firefly expansion brings with it new spirit tiles and some small firefly tokens, all delivered in a simple booster pack.
Because there is very little in the way of extras, you can easily add the new content to the original core box.
Rules wise it adds little but can have big impacts.
The new spirits just add new bonuses, but the fireflies bring with them points and a new way to win.
When you get 2 or more 2×2 sets of land tiles, you place one spirit as normal, followed by the addition of a firefly for each of the other sets. Fireflies bring with them points but get four of them and you instantly win!
Final thoughts
Solstis is a cute little game, that takes as little as 15 to 20 minutes start to finish. Even with the expansion, gameplay and set up is not drawn out any more than normal. Everything feels nice quality, and will last, all boxed in a very handy, fit in your pocket-sized box, making it a great game to travel around with.
The one thing that can be a little fiddly is the placement of tiles in the early stages. Yes they have symbols and a nice reference card to help guide you, but place something slightly too close of too far, and suddenly you end up shifting multiple tiles over to realign when something doesn’t quite fit. To help solve this, they do offer a free to download image file, that can be printed on to A3 paper, allowing you to have a playmat to help. Alternatively, if you love the game enough, it is well worth investing in the official neoprene mat set, which contains to playmats, and offer both the same cutesy art style of the full panorama, with the grid over the top to help with placement. It does feel a shame though that both options are extras as opposed maybe making the box a little bit bigger to offer 2 folded paper playmats at the least with the initial purchase.
That aside though, even before getting the neoprene mats, we had plenty of fun games of this which is why we purchased the expansion.
On the note of the firefly expansion, we would honestly recommend you get it to add to the game and never take it out. It does not add any extra complexity, its does not bloat or extend the existing Solstis game, but simply adds another way to win or score points.
If you are looking for a nice and quick two player experience, this is one for you. It works well, rules are not overly complex, can offer a nice relaxed mid-week gameplay experience, and looks nice on the table. We love Solstis, and it shows, as not only does it game played a lot, one of us has played well over 40 games of this on board game arena as well.
About the Author:
We are Peaches and Meeples, busy professionals who love to chill out to fun table top games. We love board games, card games, miniatures games, competitive or co-operative. Put some dice in our hands and we are in our happy place.
We are also proud guinea pig parents to two lovely fluffballs of joy.
