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What is Tusk?

Tusk! is a semi-competitive game of survival in the Stone Age.

It’s a race against time as the Ice Age approaches. You will need lots of food to survive. The mammoth offers the tribes food beyond your wildest dreams, but they are powerful beasts. You and your fellow players will need to team up to hunt successfully. But there can only be one hunt leader, and to ensure that’s you and your tribe, you’ll need to manipulate alliances, hoard supplies, and make use of the land’s many resources to become the most powerful tribe and win the game.

Everything you need can be found in the box!

  • 37 Terrain tiles
  • 17 Meeples
  • 27 Cards
  • 141 Tokens
  • 4 Dice
  • 1 Rulebook

 

Getting Started

First things first you need to setup the world that your tribes will live in!

  1. Place the Mammoth Breeding Ground tile and mammoth token in the centre of the play area.
  2. Shuffle the Terrain tiles and put them in a stack face down near the play area, then draw six Terrain tiles and place them face up around the Mammoth Breeding Ground. These seven tiles are the initial play area.
  3. Place the Resource tokens near the play area.
  4. Put three Resource tokens of the appropriate type on each Terrain tile showing resources.
  5. Place the Hunt Board near the play area.
  6. Put four Tasty Food tokens on the Mammoth’s Wounds on the Hunt Board.
  7. Finally, shuffle the Seasons Deck and place it near the play area.

 

The random terrain tiles means that it’s going to be a different game every time you play!

 

Turns

Each turn in Tusk is split into 3 phases

Tribe Phase

The Tribe Phase has 3 steps that each player carries out in turn.

  1. Spend some tasty food to grow your tribe! As your tribe gets bigger it gradually gets more expensive to gain new members.
  2. Decide whether to commit to the hunt, the hunt for the mammoth is a great (but dangerous) way to gain more food for your tribe.
  3. Finally you can send out remaining tribe members to move, gather, recover, or fight an opposing tribe!

 

 

FIGHT!

If another player’s Tribe Members are on the same tile as yours, you can fight them. This counts as a Fight action for all of your Tribe Members on the tile.

First you need to secretly commit Pointy Sticks, Clumps of Grass, and Lumpy stones before revealing your choice at the top of your tribe board against the opposing tribe.

Then ROLL, each tribe rolls a die for every tribe member present. Each result of 6 or more Wounds an opposing Tribe Member — lay them on their side to show that they are Wounded. If you scored more Wounds than there are opposing Tribe Members then you win the fight!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hunt Phase

After the Tribe Phase you move on to the three steps of the Hunt Phase! Where you try to take down the mighty mammoth!

  1. First the Hunters attack! Any hunters that tribes committed in the previous phase help, and you commit resources just like you would in a fight. With every wound dealt to the mammoth resulting in one more tasty food. Once the last Tasty Food icon is taken then the Mammoth dies and the Hunt Leader distributes four bonus food tokens as they see fit. You can even keep it all! But by careful, you don’t want to make any permanent tribal enemies…
  2. If the Mammoth survives the attack then they get a chance to counter-attack! Roll a die for each tribe member in the fight and on a 4, 5, or 6 they get wounded and placed on their side. But remember! Any Clumps of Grass you used let you subtract -1 from each roll against your tribe members.
  3. Finally it’s time to regroup. Discard the resources you used and decide whether you want to call off the hunt, or go back to step 1 and try again with the remaining tribe members!

Season Phase

The final phase of each turn is the Season Phase, where the seasons change, new lands are discovered, and the Mammoth herd roams to new areas.

    1. Draw a new season card from the deck, follow the instructions and any special rules stay in place for the whole round.
    2. Roll a die, and consult the arrows on the mammoth herd to see what direction it roams in, with the season card giving the number of spaces it moves in. If the mammoth moves into any of your tribe members they are trampled and get moved to the side as wounded tribe members.
    3. Finally, discover new lands. For each of the first three turns the playing area expands by one ring. Once the world is fully expanded THE ICE AGE COMETH! Follow the number on the season card you drew to see how many tiles get covered in snow. Snow tiles are simply empty with no resources and no hazards.

 

Once Ice has covered the entire world that it! The game ends and you reveal your victory cards and stockpiles of tasty food to discover the winning tribe!

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For the complete rules you can click below to download the rulebook!