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Rule Summary

Each tourist has a favourite animal and each animal has its favourite habitat. When all the animals have been photographed, the game ends and the player with the most sets of unique animal photos wins.

The Mara consists of face down tiles, where only the habitat color is known, not the animal symbol. The players take turns to either pick up/drop off tourist cards at lodges or to drive their jeeps and peek at adjacent tiles. The more tourists they have, the less drive actions they can take.

If a tile’s color and symbol matches a card’s color and symbol, the tourist ”takes a photo”.

Version History

  • 1.0: First edition
  • 0.9: Personally colored tracks, 1 action to switch tracks
  • 0.8: Physical tracks left after jeeps with unlimited driving
  • 0.7: Tourist cards with only 1 animal each
  • 0.6: Peek moved from drive action to photo action
  • 0.5: Allowed to drop off tourists without photos
  • 0.4: Skip tracks adjacent to face up tiles for faster movement
  • 0.3: Draw only 1 tourist card, drive 3 tracks if no tourist cards
  • 0.2: Drive and photo in different turns instead of same
  • 0.1: Tourist cards with only 3 color symbols each instead of 1-6 with or without color

The complete rules are available in the PDF file to the right. In the following sections, I will describe how they came to be.

Implemented Rules

Meet tourists

A key idea of the Mara is to have the players match cards (tourists) with tiles (animals). Since the tiles are unknown, it's natural that at least the cards are known. For the opening, the card knowledge is of little use, but as the players learn about their own subset of tiles, the game challenges them to match this knowledge with the card knowledge.

  • Which tourists should I pick up given the tiles I know?
  • How many tourists should I pick up given the optimal jeep speed.
  • Where should I drop them off to be well positioned for the next tourists?

The result was the deductive challenge aimed for: how can I use what I know and what I think the other players know to beat them to the best cards and tiles?

Guide tourists

Guide tourists accomplishes two things: learning about tiles and matching tiles with cards. Initially, a player did both in the same action with the idea that driving should always be rewarded with new knowledge. However, once the players do know the tiles, driving past them will be less rewarding.

The first solution to this was to split the action in two so that a player may sacrifice peeking at tiles for driving past more tiles. This did give the players more agency in the opening as they could choose to drive past tiles of the "wrong" colors. However, as the known areas grew this rule wasn't enough.

One idea was to allow players to skip tracks next to flipped tiles but even unflipped tiles may be known. The simple solution was to let the players lay tracks behind them and return along them for free. This would also encourage the players to build efficient networks to travel along and even to use each others' networks. To avoid the creation of one big (and less interesting) network, an extra "cost" was added when a player switched to another player's network.

The result was a game with an "arc", where the opening is about building knowledge, the mid-game about building efficient networks, and the end-game about taking advantage of optimal routes.

The set scoring

The introduction of tracks for faster driving did add another challenge: why should a player spend time on crossing the board to a new lodge when she can return to an old lodge in one go? The simple answer was to place different animal types at different lodges and reward sets of different animals. It's still possible to focus on many similar animals in a smaller area but for the player wishing to play for few but different animals spread out across the board, there is a strategic option to do so.

Rules (Video)



Rules (PDF)



... and Rejected Rules

Multi-animal cards

The initial tourist cards featured several animals, such as "big five" cards. This felt thematically correct and did provide the players with the option to "fulfil" all or parts of a "contract". There were even simpler but less rewarding contracts, such as finding an animal of any color. However, this inevitably led to the same animal appearing on several cards and if so, why should you choose to look for an unknown animal when another player has found an animal for you.

The solution was to have only one animal per card. The players would still have the option to pick up several cards and choose whether to find animal for each of them or to return to a lodge before all animals have been found.

Sadly, this did remove the need of "camera lenses" or gems to be placed on photographed animals. With only one animal per card, a photographed animal could simply be flipped face down.