State Ideas and the Inkpot

The Meeting Table, placing Ideas and Bright Ideas, resolving action spaces, moving the Inkpot and firing your Notebook rows and columns.

A State Ideas turn has three steps: place Ideas, resolve the Meeting Table, activate your Inkpot.

The Meeting Table

1. Notebook tile display — the level I and II stacks and the tiles on offer.
2. Gain a Notebook tile — three action spaces costing 1, 2 or 3 Coffee.
3. Insight actions — Elevate/Transfer and Generate.
4. Research and Treatises — gain a card; play cards or publish.
5. Moving your Professor or Freud — on the City Map.
6. Idea spaces — the speech-bubble outlines between the action spaces.
7. Inkpot icons — 1 to 4 per row of Idea spaces: your Inkpot move.
8. Recall reminder — Coffee per different Idea space when you Recall.

There are nine action spaces. The under each says it can be triggered up to twice in a turn — once per Idea pointed at it.

Place Ideas

Take 1 or 2 Ideas from your supply and put them on one empty Idea space, tails pointing at one adjacent action space. You may not point at an action space that your own Ideas already point at (other players’ Ideas don’t stop you).

With fewer than 4 players some Idea spaces are blocked at setup (Setup).

Placing Bright Ideas

Each Bright Idea can replace one of the Ideas you place, with exactly the same rules — even two Bright Ideas and none of yours. All Bright Ideas leave the table at the end of your turn, so they never block you later.

Resolve the Meeting Table

Trigger the action space once per Idea you placed. Fully resolve the first before starting the second. When a space offers two options split by a slash, choose one each time — the same one twice or both. You may do as much or as little of an action as you like. All the actions.

Activate your Inkpot

After the actions you must advance your Inkpot clockwise along its track:

1. Your move = the number of Inkpot icons on the row where you placed Ideas this turn (the same for one or two Ideas).
2. Move exactly that many spaces, then you may use the space where it stops.

Modifying the Inkpot move

Each Bright Idea you spend changes the move by 1, up or down. You can’t bring it to zero — the Inkpot always moves at least one space — but there is no upper limit.

Inkpot spaces

The track has five spaces. You may trigger effects only where the Inkpot stops.

• Three lower spaces — a row. Trigger the Generate effect right of the Inkpot, every Notebook tile in that row and, once unlocked, the Elevate in the far-right Insight space. Each once, in any order.
• Top space — a column. Choose an unlocked column (no Idea locked above it) and trigger every tile in it, plus the Generate in the bottom Insight space once unlocked. Each once, any order.
• Leftmost space — the Reputation track. Trigger the Reputation track.

Fully resolve each effect before the next. Effects you gain during the activation — a new tile in that column, a freshly unlocked Insight space — may be used too (ruling).

Unlocking Ideas and columns

The first three times the Inkpot moves past the icon, take the leftmost locked Idea from the top of your board into your supply — a new worker for the rest of the game. Its column is now unlocked for the top Inkpot space.