With its nautical theme and some great art from Irina Kuzmina, Andrew Modestov, Oleg Proshin, Artur Varenyev and Marat Zakirov, Aquatica is immersive but designer Ivan Tuzovsky could just as easily have given this game a completely different theme. It's essentially a card game where the 1-4 players (the game includes a solitaire mode) are using their various character cards and manta ray tokens to acquire location cards from a display by either purchase or conquest: meeting either the monetary or military value shown on the card.
The USP for this game is that when you gain a location card you slide it into your individual board where you'll always be able to benefit from the topmost symbol visible on the lefthand side of the card. This typically will give you more coins or military power to use on a future turn: you slide the card up to the next symbol when you use that benefit. When you reach the bottom of the card, you can play a card with a scoring action to claim it for its end-game points value and possible other benefit (several cards give you an additional manta ray). Aside from their bonus value, your manta rays are also used to claim achievements - randomly set at the start of the game - but tho' spending a manta ray in this way deprives you of its continued use, you'll by then expect to have several location cards in your tableau to give you similar or better monetary or military resources.
Aquatica is published by Cosmodrome and Arcane Wonders. Its card play makes for a dynamic engine building game that's intuitively easy to pick up and which plays briskly. Even tho' you'll soon find you'll be chaining together multi-card and manta ray combos, turns are quick and you'll find most games take no more than 45 minutes, even with the maximum complement of four players.
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