How To Play Mandragora

So you know you want Mandragora. Bruno Cathala and Florien Sirieix have bewitched you! But how exactly does it play? Well this little guide is here to hold you magic wand waving hand through your first game!

Once you have popped the tiles and assembled the assistant standee, place the shop tiles in a random circle to form the rondel.

The Assistant standee is placed outside the shop with the curved base. Then give each player a wild white Mandrake card, and then shuffle all the spell book, magical ingredient, and cursed scroll cards into a deck and pop it in the centre of the rondel.

The Spell cards are separated into piles according to their value each is shuffled and placed face up with the value and icons showing. Put these where everyone around the table can see.

Place one card from the central deck outside each shop in the rondel to form an outer circle. The “day” shops have face up cards whilst the “night” shops (darker green in shading) have face down cards.

Each turn, the active player gets to do one of two actions:

1. Move the Assistant up to 3 spaces clockwise around the rondel. Whichever shops they pass over, the player gets to take those cards (including the landing spot). Once they have been removed, they are replaced from the deck. These cards go into your hand ready to form sets of matching colours. If you have any cursed scroll cards, these must be kept face up in front of you until discarded by a Spell. Throughout the game, whoever has the most scrolls at any time has the -2 point scroll token.

Or:

2. Cast a spell. Spells give you powers to manipulate the cards in your hand, discard scrolls, donate cards to other plays, move further around the rondel, and exile cards etc. To cast a spell you need a spell book and any number of matching colour/wild ingredients. The number of ingredient cards you add to the set dictates which value of spell you can cast. So a spell with 3 ingredients will let you pick a Spell card with a value of 1, 2, or 3. You don’t have to take the highest – you can take a lower value spell if the power on it looks like it might be of more use (but remember the value of the spell will become important in end game scoring!). Once you have cast a Spell, you carry out the action and then place it on top of the Spell book set used to acquire it.

Play continues like this until the deck runs out. Then the round marker with Roman numeral III is given to the next player indicating that there are only 3 rounds left. Unlike the main portion of the game, you have the option to take an action or drop out of the game (i.e. take no more turns) in the final three rounds.

Then it’s scoring time. You win points in Mandragora for the total value of your Spells plus the value of the Spell books used to cast each one. So a 4 value Spell plus a 3 value Spell book = 7 points. The number of ingredients is not relevant to the end game scoring. But you will lose 1 point for each colour of card left remaining in your hand at end game. And here, white Mandrake cards count as a colour. Plus, whoever has the cursed scroll token by the final turn suffers an extra -2 penalty!

Whoever has the most points by the end of final scoring is the most magical Mandragora of them all!

I hope this short guide has helped you on your way to whipping up a magical storm in your first game of Mandragora! To buy Mandragora today click here!