Gamehelptranquility

SUMMARY

Attempt to find your paradise island on the good ship Tranquility! All you need to do is fill a 6x6 sea grid with Island cards (which are numbered 1-80) and have played one Start and one Finish card.

• You all win once the grid is complete and the Start and Finish cards have been placed, living out your days on an island paradise.

• You all lose if a single player can no longer play or discard any cards, causing the ship to be lost at sea forever.

OVERVIEW OF PLAY

You may NOT communicate with other players except when discussing the Start card.

Everyone starts with 5 cards in their hand and a their own draw pile.

On your turn you must take one of the following actions:

A) Play 1 card from your hand, or
B) Discard two cards from your hand.

After taking an action you must draw back up to a hand of five cards. The cards come from the top of your own draw pile. If your draw pile runs out, continue playing until the game ends.

A) Play a Card

Select an Island card from your hand and play it anywhere in the grid, providing you follow these rules:

1. Cards must be placed on the grid so that their numbers ascends from lowest to highest, starting at the bottom-left corner and ending in the top-right. On each row, cards to the right must be a higher number than cards on their left. All the cards on a row must be higher numbers than the cards on the rows below.

2. If the card is placed next to an existing card in the sequence (even if they are on different rows), then you must discard a number of cards from your hand equal to the difference between the two card numbers

EXAMPLE: placing a ‘5’ next to a ‘3’ means you must discard two cards because 5-3=2.

If a card is played between two cards, discard cards the least number of cards to make up the difference between your card and one to either side of it.

EXAMPLE: You play a 6 between 3 and 7. Discard 1 card because 7-6=1 and 6-3=3. Always discard the least.

You may not place a card if that would require you to discard more than the four cards remaining in your hand.

You may not discard cards from your draw pile.

B) Discard two cards

You may discard two cards rather if you cannot legally play a card or because you choose to.

START CARD

Every player has one Start Card in their draw deck. When you draw a Start card and nobody has played one yet, you must play that Start card as your action this turn.

The Start card is not placed within the grid but in the bottom left-hand corner of the frame. Then a total of eight cards, divided among players, must be discarded from hand. You may discuss HOW MANY CARDS each of you is willing to discard but not specifics about what is in your hand or where you might wish to play cards in the future.

After discarding, all players draw back up to a hand of five cards.

If the Start space has already been filled, the remaining Start cards have no purpose and may be discarded per normal rules.

FINISH CARDS

There are 5 Finish Cards in the game.

You may only play a Finish card once you have finished completely filling in the grid with cards (plus a Start card). You cannot win without a Finish card being played.

Prior to completing the grid, Finish Cards may be discarded like any other card during your turn.

GAME END

You all win if the active player successfully plays a Finish card after the grid is complete. You all lose if any player cannot take a legal action on their turn. This could be because they can’t play a card into the grid, either because it doesn’t fit numerically, or because the player doesn’t have enough cards to discard in order to play it, or you have either one or zero cards left in your hand at the start of your turn.

Guidance for Communication

Strictly speaking, Tranquility should be played in silence. Ultimately, however, players may create their own rules of communication or may simply choose to take the opportunity to discuss other aspects of life.

VARIANTS

SEA MONSTERS ~ You can add 3-5 sea monster cards to the deck. These allow you to destroy an island card on the grid, removing it and the sea monster card from the game -- but watch out! You can't play the Finish card until all players have played their Sea Monsters! They cannot be discard ~ Sea Monsters MUST be played to get them out of your hand!

JAGGED ROCKS ~ The Jagged Rock card blocks you from placing cards in a specific row, moving to a new row each turn. The row is considered as temporarily impenetrable so no cards may be placed into it. The selected row has the jagged rocks card on the left hand side to indicate that it's off limits.

After each turn the jagged rocks card moves to a different row. There are 2 game modes for jagged rocks:

• Automation - the new row is selected randomly.

• Manual - players choose which row to move the jagged rocks card to after playing a card but before drawing up. You can choose not to move it by discarding 2 cards from your hand.

The Jagged Rocks card must move to a row with at least one empty space in it.

The Jagged Rocks card is removed from the game once 4 rows have been completely filled with cards.

REMOVE CARDS FROM THE GAME ~ You can remove 4-12 randomly selected number cards from the game. You will still have the same number of start and finish cards as in a normal game.