Currents and Critters
1
Draw or Play
Take two cards, put one card down, or slide one animal to a better home. A turn is exactly one of those.
2
Build Your Reef
Oceans are the foundation. Every animal you play attaches to one, and matching families pay you more and more.
3
Score & Win
When the END GAME card is drawn, everyone takes one last turn and the biggest ecosystem takes it.
Draw or Play→
Score Points→
Win the Game
🌊
Setting up
Five minutes, once, and then you are playing. Online, the game does every one of these for you.
1
Prepare the deck
Take the END GAME card out and shuffle everything else.
2
Deal eight cards each
If you are dealt no Ocean cards at all, you may discard your hand and draw eight fresh ones.
3
Hide the ending
Take the bottom 15 cards of the deck, shuffle the END GAME card into them, and put that stack back on the bottom. Now nobody knows exactly when the game ends.
4
Make room
A face-down draw pile, a space for the Pool (the face-up discard board everyone can draw from), and a graveyard for the cards the Pool sweeps away.
5
Pick a first player
Whoever visited an ocean most recently goes first — or, if nobody can settle it, the youngest player. Play passes clockwise.
🐚
Your turn: pick one thing
A turn is one of these three. That is the whole engine of the game — everything else is what you choose to build with it.
🎣
Draw 2 cards
Two cards total, in any mix: blind off the deck, or exactly the card you want out of the face-up Pool. Two from the Pool, one of each, or two off the deck — your call.
🐠
Play 1 card
Lay a new Ocean down, or attach an animal to an Ocean you already own. Then pay the card's cost by discarding into the Pool.
⇄
Move 1 animal
Relocate one animal already on your board to a free slot on a different Ocean. It has to keep the same side it was on, and it uses your whole turn. Oceans themselves never move.
🏖️
Paying for a card
1
Read the cost
The sand dollars in a card's top-left corner are its price: one sand dollar means discard one card from your hand, two means two. Plenty of cards are free.
2
Choose the payment
Any card in your hand can pay a base cost. Symbols only matter when you want to switch on a ★ Star ability — see below.
3
Everything you pay goes to the Pool
Discards land face-up in the Pool in the middle of the table, where anyone — including you, next turn — can draw them. When the Pool reaches 10 cards it is swept into a face-down pile and starts fresh.
★
Star abilities
A gold ★ on a card marks an optional bonus, and it is where the big turns come from: a free extra play, a fistful of cards, a free animal.
- To fire it, pay with a card whose symbol matches the card you are playing (♥ ◆ ● ▲ ■).
- Pay with anything else and the card still lands and still scores, you just skip the ★.
- Stars happen immediately. You can never bank one for a later turn.
- "Play a free animal" always means from your hand — never from the deck or the Pool — and it needs an open spot to go to.
Online: the ★ Star ability tick-box sits in the action bar. Leave it on and the game
reaches for the star whenever it can; if you are about to waste one, it stops and checks with you first.
🗺️
Your board
Oceans are the foundation
Every animal has to hang off an Ocean, so your first play is almost always an Ocean. New Oceans line up left to right and never move again. Play one and you flip a card off the deck into the Pool.
Four slots per ocean
Each Ocean has an Up, Down, Left and Right slot, and each card can only go on its own side: birds and baitfish at the surface, crustaceans and coral on the floor, the big swimmers left and right. One card per slot — except Lobsters and Yellowfin Tuna, which stack with their own kind without limit.
Reading a card
Cost sits top-left, symbol top-right, name and species along the bottom, points and ability in the bottom box. Every animal card carries a creature at each end — the side you attach it on decides which one you are playing.
Ten cards, no more
If you finish a turn holding more than 10 cards, discard down to 10. Those go to the Pool too.
🐚
The nine families
Every animal in the game belongs to one of these nine families. Each family has its own colour, and that is the colour the online game lights a card up in once you switch on a strategy — in your hand and in the Pool alike. The small mark beside each name is the family's symbol, the one stamped in the bottom-right corner of every card it owns, so you can tell a card's family at a glance without reading a word.
Oceans
Not a species — the thing the other nine hang off. Oceans go down left to right, never move again, and each kind scores by its own rule: a Coral Reef pays more the more reefs you own, an Artificial Reef pays for every card hanging off it, a Tide Pool just counts your oceans.
🧮
How points work
Flat
+3
Worth the same every time. Easy, reliable points.
Per type
+2 per Bird
Counts everything of that kind on your board, so it grows as your reef grows.
Threshold
1 = 5 · 2 = 15 · 3 = 30
Pays off only once you collect a set. Commit early or leave it alone.
🏁
How the game ends
One END GAME card is shuffled at random into the bottom 15 cards of the deck, so nobody knows exactly when it lands. The moment somebody draws it, every player — including the one who drew it — gets one final turn. Then everyone totals their reef and the highest score wins. Extra plays still work during those last turns.
Because you cannot see it coming, a lead you already have is worth more than a plan you
have not finished.
That is the whole game.
Read the printed rulebook for every last detail, or jump straight into a free online match — the tutorial deals you a real hand and walks you through it, which is the fastest way to make it stick.
📖
This is the printed rulebook, word for word. The same book that comes in the box, and the same
one the online game shows under Menu → Rule Book. Use the contents below to jump to any section.
Loading the rulebook…
🧭
Every plan the game knows
These are the exact strategies the online game offers you mid-match, behind the 💡 Help button. Read them here at your leisure, then switch one on at the table and every card that belongs to it glows in its family colour — in your hand and in the Pool — with a gold ★ on the ones that carry a Star ability.
🎯
Pick a plan
Loading strategies…
Strategies are better felt than read.
Switch one on in a live game and the board starts pointing at the cards for you. You can run several at once, and you can save plans of your own.