CRISPR (2020): Buy or sell now

Medium-weight, set collection, action allowance plus secret action programming game, where you play as a genetic engineer with the goal of completing genetic sequences to fix troublesome mutations in the human genome, first extracting chains of 3 cubes from a shared sequence, and then, creating different chains to complete public objectives. All players build onto the same shared chain; therefore, they’re constantly getting in each other’s way, requiring a secret action programming mechanic that lets them modify or rearrange the sequence to their benefit. Public objectives vary in points according to their difficulty, and players can also combine private objectives onto longer sequences to get more points. Gameplay: Each turn, you have a set number of actions, initially 4. The ones in your color are called edit tokens, while the generic white ones are called extra action tokens. It all starts in the manufacturer, where you can use 1 action to place 1 cube of any color. You’re looking to create the sequences that you have on your CRISPR cards, so that when the cubes get transferred to the shared sequence, you can extract them. Since the cubes are added to the same queue by all the players, you can use 1 action to play an Edit card, marking it with the edit token. This will allow you to change what’s being built. When all the spaces are full, the first half gets transferred to the shared sequence, but the edits are resolved first, letting the player remove, replace, duplicate the cubes, etc. As edit cards are used, they go to the spent side of your board. To recover them so you can use them again, you’ll need to spend 2 actions. Once the cubes are on the shared sequence, you can use 1 action to extract the cubes from the sequence, matching the cards in your hand. In the same action, you can chain more than 1 card, or even overlap them, to extract a longer, uninterrupted sequence. To get more cards onto your hand, you can use 1 action to draw 2 cards and keep 1, or you can use more than 1 action to, for instance, get 6 cards and keep 3. After claiming them, you place the cards below your board, face up, and you take the sequence of cubes onto your private sequence. If there are cubes there already, you may insert them on any position, to get other sequences that you need. You can also discard an extra action token to remove any number of cubes from your sequence. From your private sequence, you may match 3 consecutive cubes, and discard them to turn them into an amino-acid, or codon, placing one of your edit tokens onto the corresponding space. Some of the amino-acids have an “extra action” icon –the first person to place an edit cube there, gets an extra action token, but they can be claimed more than once by the same or different players. To unlock more edit tokens from your reserve, once every turn you may spend two actions to get a new token. However, you may only have 4 edit cubes available on your board or at the manufacturer. While extracting CRISPR cards and claiming codons, ideally you should be trying to complete the public objectives, getting each of the letters shown, either from your collected cards, or from codons marked with your tokens. To claim an objective, discard the cards and remove the tokens, using one of them to mark the objective – The first player to claim it gets a few extra points, as shown in the single space, but the objective can be claimed any number of times, by the same or different players. When a player has no edit tokens left at the end of their turn, the end of the game is triggered – every OTHER player gets 1 more turn, and then the game ends. Players get the points from each completed objective, plus the points from each amino-acid with one of their tokens, plus 1 point for each collected CRISPR card, plus 1 point for every 2 action tokens of either kind still on their board. The winner is simply the player with the most points. -description from designer