You and your fellow player are curators who want to create the best set-up for a new water-themed exhibit at your art museum. One of you believes very strongly in the power of vertical alignment, while the other argues that the focus should be on horizontal structure. You each take turns placing the paintings in the exhibit, and once you've finished, you earn presentation points for the horizontal or vertical groupings of the artwork. When the exhibition ends, the curator with the most points wins!
In more detail, in Aqua, players take turns placing painting cards in the museum, with cards being placed face down when they're adjacent to face-up cards, and vice versa. When a face-down card is surrounded, flip it face up. When someone plays a face-up boat, each player moves a visitor token up to three spaces from that card, with each visitor token adding 1 point to the card on which it stands. Players score points by strategically aligning cards with matching icons and numbers in each row or column, with one player scoring the columns at game's end and the other scoring the rows — but these lines score only if they're valued from 10-20 points, so don't concentrate too much artistic power in one line!
