Episode 306: Skara Brae

On your turn, you draft an available Village Card. You might grab a Roof to shelter your people, shiny Stone Balls to score knives and clout, or fancy Utensils to raise your cooking capacity and suppress your trash output.

In Skara Brae, most often you draft Settlers across four terrains: Shore, Hills, Thickets, and Fields. When you play a Settler, you trigger a harvest that scales with how many matching buddies you’ve already placed in that biome. More shoreline hippies means buckets of seaweed and shells. Need more leverage? Chuck a Skaill Knife at the problem to temporarily boost your numbers.

Worker Placement & Flipping Tiles

After playing your card, you send your workers out to your 10 personal Action Tiles to Furnish, Cook, Craft, Clean, and Trade. You start with one chunky Large Worker and gain an extra Small Worker each round.

• Cooking converts raw meat, fish, and shellfish into stored food, bone, and hides up to your hearth limit,
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• Crafting spends materials to permanently flip your Action Tiles over to their supercharged sides, unlocking better actions and endgame points.
• Furnishing & Trading let you push markers up your tracks for massive end-game scoring.

The Midden Menace (End of Round)

Here is the catch: hoarding goods requires moving your storage slider to the right. The further right it creeps, the more Midden (ancient Neolithic refuse) dumps onto your board at the end of the round.

When the round wraps up, you must feed every Settler who doesn't have a Roof over their head. If you run out of food, they pack their bags and wander off into the Scottish fog. Then, your slider dumps its Midden on your board. Leftover Midden penalizes your final score, so taking the Clean action to sweep out the trash and slide that board back left is essential for survival.

After 4 rounds of Skara Brae, total up your furnished homes, trade empires, upgraded tiles, and roofs—subtract your garbage penalties—and crown the supreme chieftain of compost!