Some things that may be interesting, helpful, or could help clarify some questions that you might have. These things came up during play test sessions.

  • Each Trial has a title:  This title is underlined and ends in a colon.  It is not a description of an additional effect, but a name for the effect/power that is described following the colon “:”
  • Tracking Life: A handy way to track life tokens is to place them in the “Those that Lose” column. Place one token per trial.  As they are lost, remove them from the board.  If more are lost due to a Trial victor’s actions (in Trials 1, 4 and 7), remove them from the “bottom”, meaning remove them from Trial 7 and move up the column.
  • Token limits: In game play, you actions may dictate that you lose more tokens than you have.  In this case, you do not have to track negative values, you just lose what you have in your active supply and that is it.  Later, if you gain that kind of token, you can simply add it to your active supply. In a similar way, you may have benefits that allow you to gain more tokens than there are in the game. Simply put, you cannot.
  • Organization on the table helps: Use bowls or some other special place to discard lost Hope or Life. If it isn’t organized in a consistent way it can be easy to lose track of who has what.
  • Bidding is two or less rounds, like some styles of poker: There are only two rounds in bidding, and if a person passes, they are out of that bidding process. They cannot rejoin.
  • The Demon can die: In solo play or in multi-player play with the Demon, the demon can be eliminated in play (that is why they have life tokens).
  • Switching Order, Switching Seats: In longer play sessions (playing multiple games in one sitting) it is sometimes helpful to switch player order, or the direction of play between games. This is because players may become familiar with betting styles of certain players. In some play test sessions, players decided to rotate play order to counter clockwise every other game just to “mix things up”.
  • Play Variant: (Disclaimer) – this is for fun, and hasn’t been extensively tested. Another way to “mix things up” is to roll a d6 at the beginning of the game, the result being the first Trial you play, then you have two choices:Proceed in order from that point, going back to the “top” of the Trials after the 7th Trial is played.
  • Continue to roll the d6, ignoring previous results to determine the next Trial to play.
  • IMPORTANT: not matter what – the new order you follow in this variant should always have the 4th Trial be the one published in the game.