Rio Grande Games 10 manual Further actions, Alexander’s special move, Province, Occupy province

the figure, to cut the biggest possible province. The alternative paths are shown with the dotted lines. Note that both paths would have passed over a previous placed boundary wall. In this case only the remaining two boundary walls would have been placed.

Figure 4: The player takes the soldier card. He can choose between 9 different points because there are three soldier spaces at the same distance away: that is two edges to the nearest points.

He decides to move to the point indicated as

shown in figure 5. He now has 3 different ways

to place the boundary walls; he decides, as shown in

Players only place black boundary walls during normal turns. The red boundary walls are used for Alexander’s last move in the game (see game end below).

Alexander’s special move

It can happen that neither face-up card offers a symbol that will give the player a good Alexander move or that the moves offered gives the player’s opponents better opportunities than they give the player.

It can often happen that the player sees a good Alexander move, but the required symbol is not on one of the face-up cards.

In such a case, the player may play a card from his hand and move Alexander to the next empty space showing that symbol.

By doing this, the player loses 2 cards: the one he plays and the one face-up card he does not take.

Due to this cost, a player cannot afford to do this often.

2. Further actions

After moving Alexander, a player may take 2 further actions in any combination or order. These can be any 2 of the following 4 actions. Also, a player may choose to do the same action twice, except for levy taxes, which a player may only do once in a turn.

- take a card

- occupy an empty province or take over an opponent’s province

- levy taxes

- take back a guard

Players may place boundary walls that cross each other and

also inside closed provinces. As you will see, that’s a very important point, because you may decide to divide an opponent’s province.

The figure 6 shows another possible movement. Here, the player has decided to go to another of the 9 possible points (fig.4). In this particular case, the player simply moves Alexander following the existing path and, therefore without placing new boundary walls. The

dotted line shows the only other alternative path (as you can see, it runs inside the closed

province).

- Take a card

This is the simplest and most common action. The player takes the top-most card from the card supply or one of the two face-up cards. He adds it to his hand, which he keeps secret from the other players. If the player chooses to take a card as his first action and wants to take another card as his second action, he may only choose between the card supply and the remaining face-up card(s). He does not draw a second face-up card to replace one he took until the end of his turn. Then he replaces any face-up cards he took. When the card supply is exhausted, shuffle the discard stack and place it face down as the new card supply.

- Occupy province

A province is a connected group of triangular spaces (with or without symbols) that are enclosed by boundary walls and the coast (or the

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