The Older Current — a board game for PlayGrid

You never move your own people. You re-aim the current that carries them.

THE OLDER CURRENT is a complete 2-4 player strategy game. Board, 100 tiles, 12 figures, 12 shards and a box. No dice, no cards, no magnets, no hardware, no supports. 16-26 minutes, ages 10+.

Watch it explained and played (17 minutes): https://youtu.be/j4ZAqDv7syM

Play it in your browser first

Not sure it is your kind of game? The Older Current has a free digital version: the same board, the same rules, against a computer opponent at three levels. Ten minutes there tells you whether it is worth 270 g of filament.

https://morassgames.com/games/older-current/

How it plays

Every cell holds a krel - a tile showing a direction. Your wardens cannot walk. They drift, carried one cell at a time along whatever arrow they stand on.

On your turn you do two things, and you always do both:

• Twist a krel. Lift one tile within two cells of one of YOUR OWN wardens - even the tile a figure is standing on - and set it to any of its eight orientations.

• Drift. Choose one warden and ride the current, up to three cells, stopping whenever you like. You choose how far. You never choose which way.

Each kingdom sends three wardens to the world-heart at the centre to cut a shard loose and carry it home. The first kingdom to bank one shard for every warden it has wins.

Why it holds up

All the randomness is in the setup, none in the resolution. The field is laid out with four-fold rotational symmetry, so every corner faces an identical current - random, but never lucky.

A round is always finished, so more than one kingdom can cross the line together and a tiebreak settles it on who banked earlier. The video ends on exactly that.

What you print

A 218 x 218 mm board of 100 pockets, 100 krel tiles, 12 wardens (three per kingdom, each with its own silhouette), 12 shards that plug into a warden's chest, a component box and a tile-lifting tool.

About 270 g total. No supports anywhere. The tile and the box lid each ship twice - once single-colour, and once split into two named solids for a true two-colour print.

At A Glance

• Players: 2–4

• Age: 10+

• Time: 16–26 minutes (about 23 at four players, nearer 18 at two or three)

• Rules weight: 3 / 5 — indirect movement is a genuinely new idea to learn

• Reading needed: none on the components — every tile is an arrow

There are no dice. The only random input is the opening field, laid once before anybody moves; everything after it is deterministic. Random play won 0 of 540 seats measured, and replaying the identical field with one seat swapped from good play to random changes the winner 80–90% of the time. What happens is up to the table, not the board.

The Dials

More stars means more of the named thing - never "better". Every row names both ends, so nothing here needs a legend.

• Luck ★★☆☆☆ - 1 = your choices decide it; 5 = the dice decide it

• Depth ★★★★☆ - 1 = best play fits in one sentence; 5 = years to learn

• Player interaction ★★★★★ - 1 = solitaire side by side; 5 = every turn changes everyone's

• Swing ★★☆☆☆ - 1 = the leader stays the leader; 5 = anyone can come back

• Waiting between turns ★★★★☆ - 1 = almost no waiting; 5 = long gaps between your turns

• Replayability ★★★☆☆ - 1 = identical every time; 5 = a new game each play

• Rules weight ★★★☆☆ - 1 = taught in a sentence; 5 = a 40-page manual

• Memory needed ★☆☆☆☆ - 1 = nothing to remember; 5 = constant recall

• Reading needed ★☆☆☆☆ - 1 = no text at all; 5 = unplayable without the language

• Setup time ★★★★☆ - 1 = laid out in a minute; 5 = a long build every game

• Print effort ★★★★☆ - 1 = a couple of parts; 5 = a hundred-plus pieces

• Table presence ★★★★☆ - 1 = flat tokens; 5 = a centrepiece people stop to look at

Rules in ten languages

RULES.pdf and ASSEMBLY.pdf are attached, and the zip adds the rules in English, Czech, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak and Chinese.

Our board matches the pitch of the CC0 PlayGrid Core Module by @Ozarkexpeditions rather than copying it - if you already own a PlayGrid board the tiles drop straight in. Print one board or the other.