Awaken the Ancients

As the Warden of Whimwood, your duty is to awaken the Ancients during the Celestial Bloom. Sacred Seeds are rare and limited vessels of potent magical essence. Spread them throughout the wood to complete rituals of awakening. While many awakened Ancients draw enough power from the celestial alignment alone, some will consume the seeds to stabilize their form. Plan your actions wisely to ensure you have enough seeds to awaken all the Ancients and succeed in the Celestial Bloom.

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In "Awaken the Ancients," your goal is to awaken all eight Ancients by strategically placing Sacred Seed tokens on them using a mancala-style mechanism. Set up by shuffling and dealing eight Ancients in two rows of four, with Keepers at each end. Place two random Sacred Seeds on each Ancient. The game is played in turns with two phases: Warden and Ancients.

Warden Phase: Pick up all seeds from an Ancient or Keeper and distribute them counterclockwise, one per Ancient, until all seeds are placed. Awakened Ancients consume matching seeds, removing them from play! Keepers are excluded from this action. Any seeds placed and released cannot be picked up again.

Ancients Phase: If seeds on a dormant Ancient match the required combination, move seeds to the Keepers (even numbers to the left, odd numbers to the right), then flip the Ancient to its awakened side. 

Win by awakening all eight Ancients, or lose if no more can be awakened. Your final score is the number of remaining Sacred Seeds.

The print and play card bundle includes the base game (18 cards) and two mini expansions; The Raven (3 cards) and Heart of Whimwood (2 cards). Note: The other two available mini expansions require tokens.

Note: This game is being designed for the 2024 Solitaire Design Content on BoardGameGeek, so it's still under constant development and iteration. Come check out (and participate in) the latest developments of the game in my work-in-progress thread! These free print and play prototypes utilize Midjourney AI art. However, the published version of the game will have illustrated art.