The Mandala: the symbol of an ancient and sacred ritual. Colored sand is laid to create a symbolic map of the world before the pattern is ceremonially destroyed and the sand cast into the river. In the two-player game Mandala, you are trying to score more than your opponent by collecting valuable cards — but you won't know which cards are valuable until well into the game! Over the course of the game, players play their colored cards into the two mandalas, building the central shared mountains and laying cards into their own fields. As soon as a mandala has all six colors, the players take turns choosing the colors in the mountain and adding those cards to their "river" and "cup". At the end of the game, the cards in your cup are worth points based on the position of their colors in that player's river. The player whose cup is worth more points wins. The linen playmat shows two circular mandalas, with each being divided by a horizontal space (the mountain) to create one "field" for each player. The playmat has seven spaces in front of each player to hold their river of single face-up cards and their cup: the stack of face-down cards which they score at the end of the game. To begin, each player receives a hand of six cards. Each player receives two random cards face down in their cup, then two random cards are dealt face up into the central mountain strip of each mandala.