Rules

Three players against a continent. Card lists live under DECKS; scale and grid live under MAP.

Components

Per player

A marker in your colour — your party stands on a town, never between two. Three colours on one table are never confused. A ruler is no longer needed to move: the roads carry their own cost.
Glass gem beads in your colour — your life. 9 at the start of a castle duel, plus one per Mana Link. About 20 beads is comfortable.
A starter deck — 40 cards, one colour, rolled not chosen: 17 basics, 22 commons across 8 names, and 1 uncommon. Roll it on the DECKS tab.
2d4. (Stolen Town trials call for 3d4 — share a set, or bring four dice. Tier 3 dungeons ask riddles and need no dice at all. The game master needs a d6 for the Hunter.)

Shared

The map — printed 48 in wide.
Blackout markers — about 145. Flat black discs or dark grey gems: deliberately drab, so they read as spent and never compete with the player colours.
3 party life tokens — shared, and never restored.
All card pools.

The Mark System

Cards move constantly — Uncommons get handed to other players, Commons get drafted, everything gets re-sorted at the end of a session. Every physical Magic card carries one mark saying which pool it goes home to.

Marks go on the front bottom-left corner of the outer sleeve, as a 6 mm vinyl sticker. Not on the card, and not on the back — backs must stay uniform. Sleeve fronts are clear, so the sticker sits over the card's own border where there is nothing but art.

Pool	Mark	Colour
Starter — White	● circle	white
Starter — Blue	● circle	blue
Starter — Black	● circle	black
Starter — Red	● circle	red
Starter — Green	● circle	green
Common	⚒ anvil	grey
Uncommon	★ star	purple
Rare	♛ chalice	gold

Four shapes; colour does the rest. Circle = you started with it. Anvil = you dug it out of a village. Star = someone gave it to you. Chalice = you earned it in a dungeon. Sorting is a four-pile split by shape, then the circles split five ways. Village, Unique Town, Trial, Scheme and Castle cards should use a different back and ideally a different size, so they can never be shuffled into a Magic pool.

Card pools

Commons — one shared deck of mono-coloured commons, plus all the fixing in the game: 3 copies of each dual land (ten pairs, 30 cards) and 4 City of Brass. Basic lands are free and unlimited. Splashing a second colour is something you earn at a village, not something you assume.
Uncommons — one pool, not split by colour. When you draw one, you choose which player receives it, including yourself. This is the game's only trading mechanic.
Rares — one shared pool.
Boons — not a separate deck. The six Boons are cards inside the Unique Town (Tier 2) deck, twelve of its twenty cards. You hold one until you spend it. Every reward in the game that would once have handed out a Boon now hands out a draw from the Unique Town deck instead.
The Ante pile — several Tier 3 Trials punish failure by making you ante a card: reveal one at random from your deck and set it face up in the Ante pile. It is out of your deck. The next player to pass a Trial takes the whole Ante pile. Failure funds somebody else's success.

The round

1 · Dawn

Each player rolls 2d4 — 2 to 8 road points for the round. No terrain penalty.

2 · Travel & Visit

A party travels by road, and may ride as far as its points reach in one move: each road costs what is printed on it — 1, 2 or 3 — and a journey costs the sum of the roads taken. Open ground is not crossed at all: if no road joins two towns, there is no journey between them. Towns on the way are ridden past — you stop only where you choose to, and only a stop turns a card over. Move in any order and split up freely.

Visiting is free — you pay for the road, not the town at the end of it. A blacked-out town can still be ridden through; it simply offers nothing. So can a town you have no stops left for, so nobody is ever stranded by a dead end.

3 · The Hunter

Once all three players have moved, the game master rolls 1d6 and moves the Hunter along the roads for that many points. It draws nothing and blacks out nothing — it is not adventuring. If it ends its move in a town a player occupies, or a player walks into it, the player is caught and the game master applies the penalty. A catch takes the Hunter off the board; it returns only once a castle has fallen, and it comes back as far from the party as the roads allow.

4 · Castle Watch

At the end of Travel, at least one player must be touching a castle. Any castle counts. If nobody is, the party loses one party life. That player has spent the whole round travelling and visited nothing — this is the sacrifice, and it is the engine of the game.

A castle is blacked out only when it is defeated, and a fallen castle no longer satisfies the Watch. As castles drop, the remaining ones get further apart and the Watch drags the party across the map.

4 · Dusk

Every T1–T4 site visited this round is blacked out permanently.

Visiting

Tier	Sites	What happens	Can it cost a party life?
1 Common Towns	102	Draw a Village card — a look-and-pick off the Common deck. No dice.	No
2 Special Towns	16	Draw a Unique Town card — Mana Links, a Boon to hold, or an Uncommon to assign.	No
3 Dungeons & Lairs	18	Draw a Riddle and hand it to the player on your left; they read the question and check the answer printed along its foot. One guess, said aloud, and no partial credit — the answer is right or the door stays shut. You may decline after seeing it — the site blacks out, nothing gained or lost. Failure costs Mana Links and anted cards, never a party life.	No
4 Stolen Towns	5	Draw any one of five Stolen Town trials — the trial is not tied to the town's colour. Winning takes the Seal of the town you are standing in, which strips the ward from the matching castle.	Yes
5 Castles	5	A 3 v 1 game of Magic against the Dungeon Master.	Yes

The tier number printed in front of every label on the map is the tier. Full card text for all four decks is on the DECKS page.

The castles

Not visited — assaulted, after all three players finish movement that round. A real game of Magic, 3 versus 1: three player decks (starter plus every mod collected) against one Dungeon Master castle deck.

A castle can only be assaulted once its stolen town of the same colour has fallen.
Each player starts at 9 life, as in Shandalar, plus 1 per Mana Link. Track with your gems.
Flip to see who goes first — unless someone spends an Initiative Boon, in which case the party goes first.
Level faced = castles already defeated. The five castles are fought at levels 0 through 4, in whatever order the party takes them.
Players may only attack the DM. The DM targets freely. Vanguard resolves before the DM's first turn.
A player at 0 life is out of the duel but stays in the game.
DM to 0 → castle destroyed and blacked out. All three players out → the party loses one life, the castle is not blacked out, and it may be assaulted again — at whatever level it has climbed to by then.

Two levers make 3 v 1 work: the DM begins with a starting board already on the battlefield, and flips an Archenemy-style Scheme at the start of each of its turns — so one deck generates three players' worth of pressure without taking three turns. The level table is on the DECKS page.

Party lives

Three, shared, never restored — the game is built to end. Lost when:

No player touches a castle at Castle Watch
A Tier 4 Trial is failed
A castle assault is lost

At 0 lives the party loses. Tier 3 can no longer kill you — it can only strip your Mana Links and Boons, which weakens you for the castles. Death comes from the castles and the stolen towns.

Open questions

Which dual cycle — ABUR duals, shocklands, or taplands? It sets the whole power level of the fixing.
A silver bar under the anvil on the 34 fixing cards, so they pull out fast?
Blackout markers — one drab colour, or colour-coded by tier?
A dud in the Village deck — "Deserted: look at 2, pick 0"?
Unique Town mix — 12 Boons in 20 cards. Too many, now that Trials pay out in Unique Town draws as well?
Starter decks — the pools are 4th-Edition-era from memory; worth a rarity check before you print them.
Does a lost assault cost cards as well as a life?
Maximum deck size, or unlimited?
Win condition — all five castles, or three of five?
Should a party ever leave the roads — a slow overland march for a point a turn, say — or is the network the whole geography now?
Starting cell — parked.