Print and play, free
You hand your enemy every move you make
Three cards in your hand. Play one, set it aside, and take the card that was waiting. The card you just played is the card your opponent picks up next turn.
Reliquary28 descends from Onitama and keeps its cruellest idea: the hand cycles between you, so there are no secrets in it, only timing. Around that sits a skirmish game. Two warbands, two relics standing in the open, ruins to break the lines of sight, and a die counting down the peace.
The Pilgrim · four destinations · top of the diagram faces your opponent
What you need
Deliberately little. If you own miniatures, you already own most of this game.
- A square grid, 8 by 8 up to 12 by 12. Chalk on a mat, a chessboard, graph paper, tape on a table. Agree the size before you set up; the warband scales with it.
- One Hero, three to five Minions each, and one spare Minion. Any models you like, as long as the two sides can be told apart. The spare is for the Rite that adds one. Bigger boards take more bodies, or the armies never meet.
- Two relic tokens, two six-sided dice, damage tokens. One die is the Gamble die, the other is the Vigil counter. Coins and beads do fine for the rest.
- The four printed sheets, and something to cut with. Four A4 sides in black ink: 18 move cards, 9 factions and 9 Rites. Scissors do; a trimmer does better.
Players are not colours. You take a sigil: the Key or the Skull.
How a turn goes
One card, one mode, then the card leaves your hand and walks across the table.
Play one of your three cards, in one mode only. Not a move and an attack. One or the other, a rally, or the Rite you drafted.
Set it aside. It becomes the waiting card, face up, where both of you can read it.
Take the card that was waiting. Your hand is three again, and what you just played is now on its way to your opponent.
The four modes
- Move
- One piece, exactly as the diagram shows. Pieces jump, so only the landing square has to be clear. A card with no backward square carries the Escort cross , and lets a second piece take one step after it.
- Attack
- One attacker, and no move at all. Eight cards hand you your faction's attack. The other ten carry their own: a bolt at range, a hook that drags an enemy down a clear line, a gale that throws everything adjacent two squares away.
- Rally
- Forgo both and return a slain Minion to your back row. Quiet, slow, and now and then the only thing left worth doing.
- Rite
- Everyone drafts one at setup and spends it once. Forgo the card and do what your Rite says: a new Minion in your back row, a ruin torn out with a Minion standing where it was, or an enemy's slain Minion turned to fight under your sigil. Then you discard it, and the Vigil goes back to six.
How it ends
Slay the enemy Hero, or end any turn in your own back row carrying their relic. Heroes take four hits. Minions take one.
Carrying is the hard part. If an opponent pushes, pulls or swaps a carrier, the carrier drops the relic on the square it left, however far it travels. Your opponent can shoot a carrier through ruins, so there is no cover to carry it into.
The Vigil
A die set to six. Every full round in which nobody loses a hit point and no relic changes hands, it drops by one. A hit, a relic or a Rite resets it. At one, a round with no reset ends the game, and it is called on where the relics stand: plus one for a carrier in enemy ground, minus one for one skulking at home.
You cannot win this by sitting on it.
The sheets
Black ink, no colour cartridge, nothing to buy but a pair of scissors. Cards are butted so they share their cut lines.
One card, actual size
Here is what comes off the printer, at the size it comes off it: 63.5 by 88.9 mm, the width of a sleeve. The face is set across the card, so you read it turned. Every mark on it, the cut frame, the stamp, the hatched squares and the piece, is drawn by the same code that draws the sheet.
Take the sheets
Free to download, free to print, and free to teach. Print them, cut them, play tonight.
| File | Format | Extent | Size |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reliquary28 cards | 4 A4 sheets | 367 KB | |
| Reliquary28 rules, A5 booklet to fold | 1 A4 sheet, 2 sides | 196 KB | |
| Reliquary28 rules, four A5 pages | 4 A5 pages | 197 KB | |
| In Castellano | |||
| Cartas de Reliquary28 (castellano) | 4 A4 sheets | 372 KB | |
| Reglas de Reliquary28, cuadernillo A5 (castellano) | 1 A4 sheet, 2 sides | 199 KB | |
| Reglas de Reliquary28, cuatro páginas A5 (castellano) | 4 A5 pages | 200 KB | |
There are 36 cards. Sheet I is the nine agnostic moves. Sheet II is the nine unique cards. Sheet III is the nine factions, and each one holds your HP track and your slain Minions. Sheet IV is the nine Rites, one of which you draft at setup.
The rules, as a booklet
The rules are four A5 pages. Inside there is a setup diagram of a 9 by 9 board and the first two turns of a card cycle, worked through card by card. Four pages, and they are the whole game. They come as two files: same words, same diagrams, two ways of putting them on paper.
- To print and fold
- One A4 sheet in landscape, both sides, folded once down the middle. Open it on a screen and it looks scrambled: the pages are in the order the fold needs, not the order you read them.
- To read on a screen
- The same four pages, one A5 page each, in reading order. For a tablet, or for printing four separate A5 pages when duplex is not on offer. Nothing to fold.
The booklet asks for one thing the card sheets never do. Print both sides, flip on the short edge, then fold down the middle with page 1 facing out. Get the flip edge wrong and the pages come out in the wrong order. Folding will not put them right.
Or print from the browser
The card sheets and the booklet are served as ordinary web pages too, so you can print them without downloading anything. Take the PDF if you can, though: it prints at the right size with no browser settings to get right.
Before you print from a browser, set the scale to 100 per cent and the margins to none, and turn off “fit to page”. Browsers fit and add their own margins by default, which rescales the sheet: the cards come out under 63.5 mm wide and will not sleeve, and you find out after you have cut them.
The card names on the sheets are set in JSL Blackletter by Jeff Lee, embedded whole and published with its readme, as the licence asks.
Printing
Five minutes of care here is the difference between a deck that sleeves and one that does not.
- Print at 100 per cent. Actual size. Turn off "fit to page", "shrink oversized pages" and any auto-rotate or centring option. The cards are drawn at 63.5 by 88.9 mm, the size ordinary sleeves take. Any scaling at all, even 97 per cent, breaks that fit.
- Do not print duplex, except the folded booklet. There are no card backs, so every card sheet is single sided. If you want backs, print a second solid page and glue it behind. The folded booklet is the one file that prints on both sides, flipped on the short edge. If your printer will not do that, take the four A5 pages instead.
- A4, black and white. The artwork is pure line work with no colour anywhere, so a mono cartridge is enough.
- Cut on the marks. Each sheet is a 3 by 3 grid with crop marks in the four margins. The cards sit edge to edge, so every cut line runs the full width or height of the sheet: eight cuts a sheet, and a trimmer beats scissors.
- Measure the first card before you cut the rest. 63.5 mm wide by 88.9 mm tall. If it comes up short, your printer scaled the page: fix the settings and reprint rather than trimming to fit.
- 200 to 300 gsm for the cards. The heaviest stock your printer will take. Plain paper glued to a backing works too, and the booklet folds better on ordinary 80 gsm.