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.
Reliquary 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 and three to five Minions each. Any models you like, as long as the two sides can be told apart. Bigger boards take more bodies, or the armies never meet.
- Two relic tokens, two six-sided dice, damage markers. 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, 9 shared table cards. 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. Nine cards simply hand you your faction's attack. The other nine 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 dead Minion turned to fight under your sigil. Then it is discarded, and the Vigil goes back to six.
How it ends
Slay the enemy Hero, or end a turn in your own back row carrying their relic. Heroes take four hits. Minions take one.
Carrying is the hard part. Push or pull a carrier and they drop the relic on the square they left, however far they travel. A carrier can be shot at 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. Anything at all resets it. At zero the game 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 assemble 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.
What is on each sheet
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Sheet I
The nine agnostic moves. Their attack is always your faction's.
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Sheet II
The nine unique cards. Weaker moves, stronger attacks.
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Sheet III
The nine factions. Each card is also your player board.
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Sheet IV
Shared table cards: five play aids, three Rites and the card you draft them from.
All four card sheets are one file: PDF · 4 A4 sheets · 364 KB.
Take the sheets
Free, and free to stay that way. Print them, cut them, play tonight.
| File | Format | Extent | Size |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reliquary cards | 4 A4 sheets | 364 KB | |
| Reliquary rules, A5 booklet to fold | 1 A4 sheet, 2 sides | 185 KB | |
| Reliquary rules, four A5 pages | 4 A5 pages | 187 KB | |
| In Castellano | |||
| Cartas de Reliquary (castellano) | 4 A4 sheets | 365 KB | |
| Reglas de Reliquary, cuadernillo A5 (castellano) | 1 A4 sheet, 2 sides | 187 KB | |
| Reglas de Reliquary, cuatro páginas A5 (castellano) | 4 A5 pages | 189 KB | |
There are 36 cards, nine to a sheet. Sheet I holds the nine agnostic moves, sheet II the nine unique cards, sheet III the nine factions (each one doubles as your player board), and sheet IV the shared table cards: five play aids, three Rites and the card you draft them from.
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 paper is fine but the pages are not: they come out in the wrong order, and 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 is the version that cannot go wrong.
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 quietly rescales the sheet: the cards come out slightly the wrong size, and you find out after you have cut them.
Printing
Five minutes of care here saves a deck that will not sleeve.
- 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 so they fit ordinary sleeves, and any scaling at all, even 97 per cent, means they will not.
- 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 goes on both sides of a sheet, 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.