Umbrella (2024)

Overview

A crowd of umbrellas throngs the streets of New York, and seen from the sky, the colors dance...

In Umbrella, each player orchestrates a "dance" of umbrellas in a street crossing. You start with a 4x4 square of umbrellas, with four each of four colors. One umbrella of each color starts in a "waiting zone" to your left and right (with these being shared with the players sitting in those directions), a "waiting zone" in the center of play (shared by all players), and a "waiting zone" below your personal game board (shared by no one else). Start with two stacks of two figure tiles on your game board. Each figure tile shows you an arrangement of umbrellas in a single color that you want to create on your board.

On a turn, take an umbrella from an adjacent waiting zone, then slide it onto your game board from the direction of that area, pushing out an umbrella into the waiting zone on the opposite side. If you've created a unicolor umbrella arrangement that matches a visible figure tile on your board, place a scoring token on an empty space of the matching color on your scoreboard, then pass the figure tile to the player on your left; they place this tile on their board in the first empty figure space, rotating the tile to match the depicted orientation.

Continue taking turns in clockwise order until a player has no figure tiles in front of them, a player has ten scoring tokens on their scoreboard, or a player empties the pool of scoring tokens by taking the final one. Each other player takes one turn, then everyone scores their points: 2 points per scoring token, a variable number of points for groups of tokens (which differs per scoreboard), and points based on the number of umbrellas in their personal waiting zone.