Canvas: Reflections is live (Creative freedom)
Update: Canvas: Reflections is live on Kickstarter and the campaign will run for 28 days. You may back either the standard or the Deluxe edition of the expansion, or combine the expansion with the standard or the Deluxe edition of the base game.
Our preview post below was published on April 9.
Canvas: Reflections is an expansion to the 1-5 players card drafting game Canvas. It will launch on Kickstarter on April 13.
In Canvas, players try to create the most beautiful paintings by drafting transparent overlays that are placed on top of a canvas to make the final painting. Each overlay features icons in two out of five colour swatches. Which icons appear on the final painting and which swatches are filled will determine the value of the final painting.
On your turn, you can either draft an overlay card from the central display or (mandatory if you have five cards in hand) complete a painting by selecting three overlays and putting them on top of each other. The resulting painting is then immediately scored according to publicly displayed scoring conditions, and according to the grey ribbons: special icons on the overlays that score if the other icons on the painting match their condition. The public scoring conditions can vary from one game to the other. For instance, you might score points for pairs of symbols appearing on your layers or for having an icon in each of the five swatches. In all cases, the more of these scoring conditions you fulfill, the more rewards you will reap in the end.
Whenever you draft a card, you must select the leftmost one from the display, unless you spend an Inspiration token (of which you have four at the beginning of the game) for each card you skip. When you draft a card with an Inspiration token on it, you also get the token back to your personal supply. The game ends when you complete three paintings.
There are two variants for the solo mode, depending on the level of control you want to have on the Inspiration tokens dynamics. You can play against “Vincent” who also starts with four tokens, and each turn tosses them randomly. All face-up icons are cards he will skip before drafting an overlay (that is subsequently discarded). The other variant is the “puzzle” variant. When you skip cards by spending Inspiration tokens, they are discarded. To get back one inspiration token from the supply, you can either draft the leftmost card available or complete a painting. In both variants, your goal is to achieve the highest possible score with your three paintings.
The Reflections expansion adds new scoring conditions which you select at the beginning of the game, gold ribbons (a harder variant of the grey ribbons that can be earned if the immediately adjacent icons of the painting match their condition), and new “mirror” cards, that can be flipped over so that you can use either the front set of swatches or its mirroring opposite, and give you more leeway to compose your paintings. Furthermore, the expansion introduces a new board: instead of choosing from a single row of five overlay cards, you now choose from two rows of four cards each. You thus have a choice of two cards to be picked up for free, but if you want to pick cards from further right in the display, you must now spend Inspiration tokens for both cards in a column. The two solo variants have been adjusted to reflect these changes.
Is Canvas kinda like Mystic Vale (which I've played) in the way you overlay cards to make them more powerful?