Scarab Sands is a ‘fast-paced, dice-chucking, area-control, programming board game set in ancient Egypt’ in which ‘you play as a soul trapped inside the Great Pyramid, fighting for Final Judgement. Your heart will be weighed against the Feather of Ma’at, Goddess of Truth and Balance, and only the soul with the lightest heart will ascend to the Afterlife. Scarabs will help you in your quest to shed the weight of your heart.’ (Taken from the game’s Kickstarter page.
Designed by Antonio Liga and Miguel Hermida Ayala, published by Stranger Games Studio, Scarab Sands is a quick-fire, 2–4 player, area-control game using 3 flavours of scarab as your soldiers. Your aim is to get rid of your 7 canopic jars, which generally involves controlling more rooms than your opponents, which in turn means winning more battles.
Gameplay Summary
The game is played on a cutaway pyramid map of 15 numbered rooms. (The significance of the numbers is that room actions are resolved in numeric order.) Players have a mat containing a copy of the pyramid map on which to plan their moves and 10 basic scarabs (not very strong in battle) along with 4 each of flying (slightly stronger) and armoured (serious bruisers) ones. 7 of their basic scarabs are placed in room 14. Flying and armoured scarabs, as well as the remaining basic ones, will join the game as a result of various room actions. Players start with a single command arrow if there are 3 or 4 players, and 2 arrows in a 2-player game. Room 15 contains a ma’at favour track, which provides various benefits when players have moved sufficiently far up the track; players place their tokens at level 1 to begin.
Each game round has 3 phases: movement, resolution and refresh. Movement takes place separately for the 3 types of scarab. First, players place their command arrows on their player mats in secret (behind provided screens), indicating how many basic scarabs they want to move from one room to an adjacent one. The arrows are double sided, letting players move either a single scarab or 3 of them. The same command arrows are used for armoured scarabs later on, so it may be wise to not use all of them for basic scarabs. Once everyone’s finished, the player mats are revealed and basic scarabs moved as indicated; the command arrows are placed to one side, not touched until the start of the next round. Next, similar happens for flying scarabs, using flying scarab markers (see later about how to get those)—because these beetles can fly, there’s no notion of adjacency, so the markers can be placed in any room. Finally, any armoured scarabs are moved, using whatever command arrows players have remaining—as the rulebook says, since these are the final critters to be moved, players have the most information about where they want to move them.
Obviously, there’s not going to be a lot happening in the first round of the game: each player has 7 basic scarabs, all in room 14, and only a single arrow (2 for a 2-player game), so will be planning to move at most 3 (or 6) scarabs from room 14 to 11, 12 or 13.
Once all movement has been completed, room effects are resolved. First, the player who controls the room needs to be determined—if only one player’s scarabs are present, that’s straightforward. If there are more than one, it’s fighting time, which I’ll talk about in a moment, and there may be multiple battles until a single player is left in the room.
Whoever controls any of rooms 1 to 13 gains its reward, according to symbols printed at the bottom of the room spaces: e.g., removing a canopic jar, gaining a command arrow, converting a scarab of any type to either a flying or armoured one, or gain ma’at. Rooms 5, 8 and 9 contain obelisk dice, which can be claimed for single use in a subsequent battle before returning to their rooms; if someone else happens to currently have the die, you get to steal it from them. As I’ll describe when talking about combat, it’s possibly for canopic jars to be flipped to show a larva symbol; in room 14 (which all players can activate), all such jars can be flipped back and the same number of basic scarabs added to the room (you might note that as the game proceeds, players will be reducing the number of their canopic jars, hence there will be fewer opportunities to spawn new scarabs this way). In room 15 (which no scarabs can enter, and again, which all players can activate), players can spend ma’at to gain a command arrow, spawn a basic scarab or remove a canopic jar.
Battle starts with players taking a die for each scarab in the room, different dice for each scarab type; the dice indicate major and minor hits and protective shields, and those for the stronger scarab types can provide more chance of landing stronger attacks and defences. If they have them, players can add in obelisk dice, and then everyone rolls and compares results. Players can spend ma’at to convert minor hits into major ones at this stage. A major hit will wipe out one of any scarab type; a minor will take out a basic scarab, and 2 will destroy flying or armoured ones; if someone has a successful roll on the Anubis obelisk die, all scarabs are defeated (including those of the player using the die); the Horus die will resurrect defeated scarabs belonging to the player using it; and the Osiris one won’t affect battle, but will remove one of the player’s canopic jars. Defeated scarabs are removed from the board, and the losing player flips a related number of canopic jars to their larva sides. As a consolation prize, however, losing players do gain ma’at. (Because one of the rewards you can trade-in ma’at for is removal of a canopic jar, it’s entirely possible that losing a battle here and there could actually be beneficial!)
Finally, in the refresh phase, players return their command arrows into play for the next round, and place all flying scarabs to one side of the pyramid, taking a flying scarab marker for each.
Then the next round begins, and play continues until someone has no canopic jars left, winning the game.
Final Words
Scarab Sands (I can see the scarabs, not so much of the sand…) is an entertaining game with oodles of player interaction. It’s perhaps more about tactics than strategy, since what other players do has the potential to render your careful planning completely invalid. I like the range of rewards the different rooms offer, and the obelisk dice are an interesting addition. I do wonder, with the relatively large number of rooms, if 2-player games might end up with each player simply keeping out of the other’s way and simply gaining rewards without bothering to start conflicts.
The movement ‘programming’ is an interesting approach, but could become a little tedious with the 3 separate stages of shields up, plan moves, shields down, do moves.
Blanka Sőre’s artwork makes this an attractive game, though I’m not totally convinced about the scarabs. I’m not much of a fan of plastic minis in any game, and my tastes would run to wooden meeples or just plain cardboard tokens.
The Kickstarter campaign was originally planned to launch almost a year ago according to a Stranger Games newsletter, but a studio move from Italy to Belgium stalled things, followed by illness—that was posted last May, with no further newsletters since then. However, the campaign is running now, and you can find more pictures, links to the rulebook and a Tabletopia demo at a lot more there.
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.
