How to play Umbra Via

Umbra Via is an area control game from Pandasaurus games and designer Connor Wake where players compete to create and control paths with their flower tokens.  The game includes the main board and the altar board, placement order counters, player screens, bidding boards, path tiles, energy and soul flowers, bags, and four soul tiles.  The energy flowers are the darker colored tokens, and the soul flowers are a lighter shade of the same color.  So for the red player, these are their energy flowers, and these are their soul flowers.

The game is played over a series of rounds, and each round players will be blind bidding on path tiles to see who gets to place each tile.  The goal of the game is to be the first player to claim all of their soul flowers and their soul tile. 

We’re showing the setup for 3-4 players here, but there’s some modified rules for 2 players that you can find in the rule book.

To setup the game, put the main board in the middle of the table with the altar board above it.  Then shuffle the path tiles and put them in a facedown pile.  Each player picks a color and takes their bag, energy flowers, soul flowers, bidding board, and screen.

Next, put one energy flower from each player in random order on the tiebreaker track on the side of the alter board.

then put everyone’s soul tile near the board with 11 soul flowers on it and then everyone puts the rest of their energy and soul flowers in their bag – this should be 6 soul and 32 energy flowers.