Shifting Stones Game

Shifting Stones is a nice tile laying, pattern matching, card drawing strategy game that is easy to learn and low in complexity with a quick 20-minute play time. The beautiful tile components are well made and easy to handle. To begin, the nine tiles are randomly set up in a 3”x3” grid. Each tile has two sides with different colors and illustrations. Players start with four cards that each show a pattern and point value. The goal is to create matching tile patterns on the 3”x3” grip to those shown on these cards in order to gain the point value of the card. Actions that can be taken on a turn are either to swap positions with any adjacent tile or flip a tile over to its other side which will display another color and pattern. There is a reference card so that each player can see which patterns are on each card. Each time the swap or flip action is taken during a player’s turn, they will discard one of their cards. If a player is able to match a pattern on one of the cards in their hand during their turn, they lay that card down in front of them. Once there are no remaining cards that they wish to discard, their turn ends and they draw cards to bring their hand back to four. Play continues in turns until one player has been able to match a specific number of patterns and lay down the total number of cards that are determined by the number of players in the game. For instance, in a two-player game, the end-game number will be 10 cards, in a three-player game it will be 9, etc. The game ends when each player has had their final turn and the player with the most points on their played pattern cards wins. There are also rules for a solo variant of this game included. Although this is a 1-5 player game, I would recommend playing with no more than three players to keep a balance between strategy and luck, because additional players increase the chances that the tile grid will change significantly before each person has another turn – thus making it more difficult to achieve patterns that may take more than one turn to complete. ~Marsha