How to Play Finspan

Overview

Finspan is a 1–5 player marine engine game lasting four weeks. On each turn, place one available diver to either play one fish or dive down one of three sites on your ocean mat. Each player takes six turns per week, for 24 turns in all. This explains the 2025 base game; Sharks & Reefs adds its own overlay and coral rules.

Set up your ocean

Each player has an ocean mat with Sunlight, Twilight and Midnight zones arranged across three colored dive sites. Begin with two starter fish cards and three regular fish cards in hand, plus the two eggs and one young shown on the mat. Prepare the achievement board, deck, token supply and week marker following the player-count rules. The base game includes Nautoma components for solo play; use its separate solo booklet for that mode.

Choose one action each turn

Put an unused diver on your mat. You can play a fish from hand by paying its printed cost, or put the diver atop a dive site and move it all the way down that column. After everyone has used six divers, resolve the week’s end. You cannot play a fish and take a normal dive with that same turn unless a specific card effect says otherwise.

Play a fish: cost, zone, column, power

1. Pay the fish’s cost. It may require discarding cards, removing eggs or young, or consuming a shorter fish already in your ocean.
2. Place it in a legal Sunlight, Twilight or Midnight slot indicated by the card. A colored ability band may restrict it to the matching blue, purple or green dive site.
3. If placed on a shorter fish to consume it, leave that fish underneath. Transfer tokens on the covered fish to the new one. The consumed fish no longer counts as visible but scores one point later.
4. Resolve any optional WHEN PLAYED benefit on the newly placed card.

Dive: top bonus, fish, deeper bonuses, bottom

Choose one of your three columns. From top to bottom, check its zone bonus and the IF ACTIVATED power on the visible fish in each row. A zone’s printed bonus requires at least one fish, including printed forage fish, in that column and zone. Continue through all three zones even if one has no fish. The first diver to reach the bottom of that site in a week may gain its bottom bonus; later dives there that week do not get that bonus.

Example: if the top bonus gives an egg, a fish in the Sunlight zone hatches an egg, and a fish in Twilight adds another egg, resolve those opportunities in order as the diver descends. If this is your first dive at that site this week, you may then take the bottom bonus. Read each fish’s printed power; a GAME END ability is not a dive activation.

Eggs, young and schools

An egg sits on a fish and can hatch into young when a benefit tells you to flip it. When three young share a slot with no school already there, replace those young with one school token. A slot holds at most one school. These steps can matter for both card abilities and final points, so track the actual token stage rather than treating all population as identical.

What happens after each week?

At the end of weeks 1, 2 and 3, score that week’s achievement and record it. If using side B of the achievement board, the player or players who earned the most achievement points that week get a further three-point bonus. Retrieve divers, pass the first-player token clockwise and begin the next week. At the end of week four, go directly to end-game abilities and scoring; there is no fourth achievement score.

End the game and score

After week four, resolve applicable GAME END powers and count the scorepad: printed points on visible fish, one point per consumed fish, one per egg, one per young, six per school and achievement points already earned. For the exact order, a worked example and the tiebreak, use Finspan scoring.

Common first-game questions

• Can I dive through an empty zone? Yes. Continue to the bottom, but gain a zone bonus only when its required fish is present.
• Does a consumed fish still activate or score its printed points? No. It is underneath the visible fish and scores one consumed-fish point instead.
• Can a second dive at the same site earn the bottom bonus this week? No. The first diver there gets that bonus; the rest use the gray bottom area.

More Finspan guides

• Game guide
• Strategy
• Scoring
• Sharks & Reefs expansion

Sources and scope

Checked September 2026 against Stonemaier Games’ rules and FAQ and its base-game page. Card-specific abilities and the solo booklet take precedence; this is the multiplayer base-game sequence.