Kahuna

Kahuna is a fairly abstract game of control: controlling islands on the board by virtue of having built the most adjacent bridges. But bridges can also be removed, as we shall see…

The board shows the twelve islands players will be competing over. Each player gets a bunch of bridge pieces – for bridges – and marker stones, with which to denote who controls the island. At the start that’s nobody, but players will be dealt a hand of three cards, and each card has a specific island name on it.

On your turn, you can play as many cards as you like from your hand (including none) and then pick up a single card, either from a face-up row of three or the top of the deck. When you play cards, you can add a bridge to the islands named on them or – if you play two cards – remove your opponent’s bridge. In this case, the two cards must be either one of (or both) the two islands that bridge connects.

When your turn is over, players assess who – if anyone – controls the islands. If your bridges are the majority (ie more than half) of the possible island connections, you can add a marker stone to the island. When this happens, all opponent bridges that connect to that island are also removed! This can sometimes – especially late in the game – lead to a chain of events as one island affects another, which affects another and so on (if there is a tie for control; for instance both players have 2 bridges on an island with four connections, a stone marker should be removed but all bridges stay).

There are three rounds and each one ends when the draw cards run out. In the first round the player with the most stone markers gets a point, in the second they get 2 points, and in the third the player with the most stone markers on the board scores the difference between the two players’ total: for example, if you have six and I only have two, you’d get 4 points.