Cydonia is a pyramidal point-trick-taking game of perfect information for 2 players.

Preparation

Materials needed:

Setup

Place four Treehouse sets into a sack and distribute two Treehouse sets to each player. Draw from the sack one small, one medium, and one large and make a tree. Continue this until all of the pyramids have been used to make a line of 20 trees called the "labyrinth."

The game is ready to begin after the players agree whom should lead first.

Game-play

Cydonia is played in two rounds: the first is meant to build a mixed stash of pyramids from the labyrinth, and the second consists of a series of 10 tricks used to build a set of final pyramids for scoring.

Stage one: building a mixed stash

Starting with the first tree, the lead player builds a tree from her current stash of pyramids and places it near the labyrinth. The other player follows with a tree of his own. The following player must present a tree containing at least one pyramid of the same color as any of the pyramids in the leading tree.

The player who played the higher wins the first tree in the labyrinth while the other player wins the second. The won pyramids are brought into each player's personal stash for use in wining future tricks and for final scoring while the pyramids used in the play are discarded. The player who wins a trick leads the next trick.

Stage one continue this way until all of the pyramids in the labyrinth are gone.

Stage two: building a scoring set

Using the pyramids remaining in their stashes, the players will play tricks to build a final scoring set. Starting with the person who won the final trick in stage one, one player will present a tree and the other will follow with one of their own. Again, the following player must present a tree containing at least one pyramid of the same color as any of the pyramids in the leading tree.

The player winning the trick will reserve the pyramids for final scoring, while the losing tree will be discarded. The player who won the trick leads the next trick. Play will continue like this until all of the players' pyramids have been used, after which final scoring will begin.

Resolving tricks

To resolve tricks the color of the pyramids used determines the higher-ranking tree. The ranking of the pyramid colors are: Red > Yellow > Green > Blue:

color-ranks

Solid color trees of will resolve according to the color rankings:

solids

Trees of a single color will always beat trees of mixed colors:

solid-v-mixed

Black is considered a wild color and can stand in for any color needed to complete a colored set, as long as there is at least one pyramid in the tree of the desired color and it's touching the wild:

wilds

Solid trees will always beat equivalent trees that contain wilds:

solid-v-wild-mixed

Trees of mixed colors will resolve from bottom to top according to color. That is, players compare the base of the trees first:

base-res

Then the middle of the tree is compared:

mid-res

Finally, the top of the tree is compared:

top-res

The player who won the majority of the tree segments wins the trick; in the example above, the left-side player wins by winning 1 segment vs. 0 for right. However, if the two trees played are identical or they result in a tie segment score then the player who placed first wins the trick.

Final scoring

From the pyramids won in tricks the players can rearrange the colors to form as many solid trees as possible. Solid trees are worth 3 points each while the remaining mixed trees are worth 1 point each. The player with the most valuable set of trees wins the game.

Cydonia is ©2014, Michael Fogus