Description

From the publisher:

In Ancient Sands, players will play as treasure hunters digging for valuable artifacts in a hostile desert. The game is played on a 4x4 grid of treasure card stacks. At the top of the stacks are easy to recover simple treasures. Each one of these will give you a small number of points and an additional bonus or way to manipulate the desert. As you take these, more valuable treasures are revealed deeper in the sands. Should you manage to reach the bottom and gather the workers needed to dig one, you'll find ancient artifacts of tremendous power. Recover one and you'll not only get a huge boost to your score, you'll be able to turn its power on your rivals!

Each turn, you will choose a worker to recruit and play for both progress towards recovering treasures and for a variety of effects depending on who you chose. Alternatively, many workers can be instead discarded for stronger powers, but no progress towards digging. Once you have gathered enough workers in play you can send them out to dig up a treasure from the desert grid. Each treasure is worth a number of victory points along with a wide variety of special effects from recovering them. You might find functioning tools that make your work easier or uncover old tomes that point to where more valuable treasures lie. Be warned though, the Dead Reaches are not a safe place to be. Each round an event card will be drawn that could radically change the situation and have everyone scrambling to recover. Worse still are detrimental weather cards that could bring your progress to a screeching halt. It will be up to you to carefully use your workers to mitigate the risks that lie in the Ancient Sands.