Goal: Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to collect a complete pathway without mutations! The first player to collect a complete set of cards for a single pathway of a single color with no mutations on any of those cards wins. Each pathway of a single color has exactly three genes.
Board setup:
- Shuffle cards of a given color, and place the stack of cards face down on their appropriate square inside the cell cycle game board. This constitutes a pathway draw pile.
- Shuffle the trivia cards and place face down in the center of the board.
- All players pick a token and place it on the purple Start position.
- As players accumulate pathway cards, they must be placed face up in front of the player.
Turn actions: Each player takes a turn going in order clockwise around the board, starting with the player closest to the purple Start space. On a given turn, players roll two dice and move that number of squares clockwise around the cell cycle. The player then takes the action indicated on the square.
Actions may include the following:
- Pick Player must answer a trivia question asked by any other player. If the player gets the right answer, the player then picks a card of the same color as the square the player landed on. If no cards of that color are left in the appropriate draw pile, a Recombine! is performed instead (below).
- Induce! “Induce a mutation” on any player’s card. Take one glass token, and place it on any pathway card without an induced mutation. If no other players have pathway cards without mutations, the player must induce a mutation on one of their own cards. If no players have pathway cards in play, no action is taken.
- Revert! Player removes a mutation token from any played pathway card of their choice. If no pathway cards in play have a mutation, no action is taken.
- Recombine! Player swaps one of their own cards with one in front of any other player of their choice. If the player does not have any cards, they collect one card of their choice from any other player.
- Horizontal transfer! All players transfer one of their cards to the player clockwise around the board. If a player has no cards in play, that player does not transfer any cards to another player, but may receive one from the counterclockwise neighbor.
- Start – A player landing exactly on the purple Start space can pick one card from any color pathway pile.