Barbarossa (board game)
Barbarossa is a clay-shaping German-style board game for 3 to 6 players, designed by Klaus Teuber who based it off The Riddle-Master trilogy by Patricia A. McKillip, it was published in 1988 by Kosmos in German and by Rio Grande Games in English. Barbarossa won the 1988 Spiel des Jahres award.
Gameplay
The game is played on a circular board, with three tracks running around it. Around the outside are the scoring track and the elfstone track. Further in there is a circular track with twelve marked spaces on it, and in the center there is a space for sculptures. Later editions of the game change the shape of the board but not its contents.At the start of the game, each player chooses two objects from a list provided and creates clay sculptures of each, and places them in the middle of the board. Each player places on the board three tokens: a magician, a witches' hat and an Elfstone. The hats are placed on the scoring track; the elfstones are placed on the elfstone track, and the magicians are placed on the space marked "A". Each player receives three curse tokens.
Players then take turns as follows: They may begin either by rolling a six-sided die and moving their magician that many spaces, or by forfeiting their roll and instead spending elfstones to move. After they roll or spend elfstones, what happens next depends on the space they land on:
;Elfstone
;Dragon
;Ghost
;Dwarf
;Question mark
At any point, a player may spend a curse token to either ask a player for a letter or to guess an object. Once a player has spent their first three curse tokens, and five curse tokens have been spent, they may take three more tokens - so any given player may spend six tokens during the course of the game.
When a player reaches the end of the scoring track, or when 13 or 17 flags have been placed, the game ends. Each player loses two points for each of their objects which only got one flag, and five points for each of their objects which did not get any flags. The player with the highest score wins.