Exploration · 2023

Faraway

Eight cards, eight rounds and reverse scoring: explore Alula and cash your quests by looking at what you played later.

2–6 players
20–30 min
1.9 / 5 · Light

Set up the game

0 of 6 steps

Tick each step as you complete it.

1Shuffle the 68 region cards and deal three to each player, face down. Everyone may look at their own cards without showing them. The region deck stays in the middle of the table.
Components
2Reveal as many cards from the deck as there are players plus one. With four players that is five cards on display. This is the pool everyone picks from during the game.
The central display
3Shuffle the 45 sanctuary cards separately into a face-down deck beside the region deck. Sanctuaries are not in the display: they are dealt when you find one.
Cards
4Keep the score pad within reach. There are no intermediate scores: the whole tally happens at the end, card by card.
Score pad
Cards
5For the advanced variant, deal five cards to each player and have them keep three, returning the other two to the deck unseen. The rulebook recommends playing a normal game first.
Cards
6Agree on the table layout: every player lays their cards in a row, left to right, because that order is the key information in the game. If space is tight the rulebook allows another shape, as long as the order stays clear.
Cards

What it is about

Faraway looks like a quiet game about collecting landscapes, yet it is really an exercise in planning backwards. You play eight cards left to right and score them right to left, so every early decision pays off at the end and every late card barely has room to satisfy its quest.

The tension sits in the duration: going faster lets you pick earlier from the display and from the sanctuaries, while going slower earns you more sanctuaries. Nobody can always be fast or always be slow, and that is where good routes separate from mediocre ones.

At the end the table tells the story of your game: cards on the left surrounded by the resources and colours they wanted, cards on the right holding quests that can no longer be paid. Whoever planned the whole route wins; whoever played card by card watches their best quest score nothing.

BGG page Official rulebook

Source note

The official English rulebook covers setup, the three phases of each round, sanctuaries, reverse scoring and the advanced dealing variant. Every card prints its own values, so this guide explains the quest types without fixing numbers.

Reglamento EN (Catch Up Games, 2023) · Reviewed: 24 Oct 2026