Sit across from a friend.
You each get your own deck of cards. You both start with 20 light. If your light runs out, you lose.
A printed two-player card game
A game of words, played against time.
Every card you play leaves a single letter behind in your verse. Spell one of the eighteen old words from those letters and you may say it — for nothing at all. Both verses are face up, so the whole game is a race for the letter your opponent still needs.
- 594 cards, 208 pieces
- Two players, about an hour
- English, castellano, euskara
Six of the four hundred and sixteen — drawn by the same stylesheet the press prints from.
If you can spell,
you can play.
The whole game in five sentences. No jargon, no rulebook at the table — if this makes sense, you are ready to sit down.
On your turn, put cards on the table.
One card gives you energy — stand it up. Spend that energy to play creatures. Then attack with them.
Every card leaves a letter behind.
Play a card and its letter stays on the table, in a row with your last eight letters.
Spell a word. Say it. It's free.
If your eight letters spell one of the eighteen words — like FIRE or WOLF — say it, and its power happens for no energy at all.
Both rows of letters lie face up.
So you can see the word your friend is about to spell — and race to take the letter they still need.
First to take the other player's light down to zero wins. That's the whole game — the cards carry every rule after that. See one turn, step by step
- 416
- distinct leaves, no two alike
- 5
- sealed decks, no deckbuilding
- 18
- words you say for nothing
- 20
- runes cut into the cards
- 1
- plate — no colour at all
The letters arrive whether
you meant them to or not.
Read a leaf and its rune joins your verse. The newest eight stay; the oldest fades. Tap the tiles, or just type — and any word your letters spell will offer itself.
Your verse
Watching the table play itself…
The twenty runes, at their printed counts
The newest eight runes stay. The oldest fades.
Everything a leaf needs
is on the leaf.
A card is called a leaf. The drawing fills it to all four edges and the words are printed over its foot — and every keyword explains itself in small type, so the box needs no rulebook at the table.
Top left
What it costs in hours
Three hours of anything, then two that must come from Moon shrines. Shrines are the cards you stand up for light, and they wake again every hour.
Top right
The rune it leaves
Read this leaf and P joins your verse, whether or not you ever meant to spell with it. Every leaf in the box carries one.
The caption
Its name — and the frame that tells you it is a legend
The star is the only place the text admits it. A legend is really told by its frame: a heavier cut line, a doubled keyline, longer corner brackets.
The type line
Suit, kind, and its number in the tome
The suit's printer's mark, what the leaf is, and its numeral. There are 416 numbers and no two leaves share one.
The rules
What it does, in the grammar every other leaf uses
One vocabulary across all 416, so a rule you learn once holds everywhere. No leaf invents a word the reference sheet has not already defined.
Small print
Its keywords, spelled out
Each keyword prints its own clause underneath, in small caps and roman down one hairline. Nobody reaches for a rulebook mid-hour.
Straddling the seam
What it hits for, and what it takes
Power over toughness, sitting on the caption's top edge so it lands in the same place on all 203 figures however long their text runs.
The Turning of the Page · legendary figure of the Moon · numeral XLI
An hour, in seven steps —
scroll and it plays.
A turn is called an hour and it always runs in this order. Here is one, dealt from the printed decks and moved the way two people move it. Every figure on the table is a real card.
Step one
Wax
Your figures wake and stand back up. Your shrines wake with them, and you may raise one more — that is where the hours you spend come from.
Step two
Speak I
Read anything you can pay for. Its rune joins your verse on the way down, and you may say any word the verse already spells.
Step three
March
Choose which figures march. A marcher wanes — turned on its side until your next wax — unless it is vigilant.
Step four
Ward
Your opponent puts figures in front of the marchers. Warding does not wane them, so a good warder holds the line every single hour.
Step five
Toll
Warded marchers trade harm with their warders. Unwarded ones take that much light straight off the dial — and light is the thing you lose when you lose.
Step six
Speak II
Read again with whatever hours are left — and if the verse now spells one of the eighteen, say it. It costs nothing and cannot be countered.
Step seven
End
Harm is forgotten, tidal figures go home, rooted figures keep what they grew. Then the table turns and it is the other seat's hour.
North—
Hour 1—
South—
20
20
Dealing…
Every card in the box.
All 416, drawn by the stylesheet the press prints from — the same plate, the same caption, the same type at the same size. Search them, sift them by suit, kind, rune or cost, read one close, or put them back on the A4 sheets they go to the printer six to a page on.
/
416 cards
Nothing in the tome matches that.
Five decks, and each one
plays like itself.
A deck is called a rite. Every rite prints every leaf of its suit — no deckbuilding, no card pool, nothing to buy afterwards. Each suit speaks one mark the others never do, and that mark is the whole personality of the deck.
The Sun
Radiant
Every light that comes to you swells it by +1/+1 until the hour ends — each gain again, and they stack.
The Moon
Tidal
As your hour ends it goes back to your hand, so whatever it did on arriving can be spent again.
The Tomb
Risen
The first time it dies it stands back up, waned. The second time it stays down. A debt is not settled by dying.
The Tower
Reckless
It marches every hour it is able. You do not choose — holding it back is not a choice you have.
The Wheel
Rooted
As your hour ends it keeps +1/+1 — not borrowed, kept. Left alone long enough it wins on its own.
The Leaden
No mark, no suit
Twenty-five colourless leaves split five ways, one slice to each rite. Between the five decks every leaf in the box is in exactly one, and none is in two.
The eighteen words.
They cost nothing and they cannot be countered. The only price is the letters, and the letters only arrive by playing cards you had other plans for. Move over one to read it.
Three tongues,
one alphabet.
A word is never translated. It is re-spelled. FIRE, FUEGO and SUA are the same card doing the same thing — what changes is which letters you must gather to say it. Pick your tongue when you order and the whole box is printed in it.
That is every letter cut into the 594 cards, with how many carry it. There is no C, J, Q, X, Y or Z anywhere in the box, and exactly one H — which is why Spanish spells iron METAL rather than HIERRO, and Basque spells sun EGUNA rather than EGUZKI. The alphabet came first; the translations had to fit inside it.
What arrives.
One box, printed on cardboard, complete. Nothing is sold separately and there is nothing to expand.
- Five rites
- 570 cards
- Answers
- 24 cards
- The reference sheet
- 2 sides
- Counters
- 62 pieces
- Rune tiles
- 144 tiles
- Light dials
- 2
- In the box
- 594 cards, 208 pieces
Every leaf of every suit, 114 to a deck — about a third of them shrines. No two decks share a card.
The figures the cards create — acolytes, wolves, rats, the monarch — printed rather than improvised with coins.
Both setups, the hour in order, every keyword in a clause, the eighteen words in three spellings, and the eight rules printed on no card.
No two share a silhouette — lozenge, ring, hexagon, tombstone, long oval, coin — because you should know a counter by its outline in the dark.
The letters themselves, 29.5 mm square, one drawing to each of the twenty — weighted so the letters the cards cut most often are the ones you have most of. Six are left blank, for The Blank Rune.
A disc from 0 to 35 with a cut window and a pin, one to each seat. Light is the thing you lose when you lose.
Measured against the printer,
not against a screen.
The layout was not designed and then sent to a press. It was measured against the press first, and the game changed to fit.
63 × 118 mm
A taller card than you own
88 mm of drawing, 30 mm of words. That is exactly a 5:7 plate at 63 mm wide, which is why nothing is cropped and why a card of this game is not shaped like anyone else's.
30 mm, always
One caption height, on all of them
Whether the leaf says two words or forty. A sheet of cards with ragged captions reads as a misprint, so the wordiest leaf in the longest tongue set the height and the rest were measured against it.
0.18 mm at 45°
Lines, not tints
The seam above each caption is ruled hatching rather than a grey fill, because grey goes muddy on a press and lines stay lines — at any threshold, on any paper.
C 0.00 · M 0.00 · Y 0.00
Black from a single plate
A press builds black from four inks by default, and at this pitch four plates out of register smear the line work into grey. Every sheet goes to the printer with cyan, magenta and yellow at exactly zero.
The whole book, free.
One PDF, 122 pages, nothing withheld. Every card in the game, the reference sheet, the rune tiles, and — the part that turns a catalogue into a playable set — the quantities. Print it, cut it, and play tonight.
Englishazti — the whole bookPDF · 122 pages · 10 MB
Castellanoazti — el libro enteroPDF · 122 páginas · 10 MB
Euskaraazti — liburu osoaPDF · 122 orri · 10 MB
Reference sheetEnglishPDF · 2 sides
Hoja de referenciaCastellanoPDF · 2 caras
Erreferentzia-orriaEuskaraPDF · 2 alde
What the free book asks of you is an afternoon: 122 sheets through a printer that is honest about black, a guillotine or a steady hand, and something to sleeve or stiffen 594 cards with. The box is the same game with that afternoon already spent, on stock a home printer cannot buy.
Fair questions.
The four things everyone asks before the box, answered in one line each.
Where do you ship?
The EU and the US, for now — printed and shipped by our own press, seven to fourteen days door to door. VAT is handled at checkout, and there are no customs fees inside the EU.
Can I try it before paying €50?
Yes — the whole game is the free PDF above: all 594 cards, the reference sheet, the rules. Print it, cut it, play tonight. The box is the same game with that afternoon already spent.
What language is the box printed in?
You choose at checkout: English, castellano or euskara. The words you spell change with the tongue — the game underneath is exactly the same.
Who is it for?
Two players, about an hour. If you can read a card and spell a word you can play — most tables are fluent by the second hour. No deckbuilding, no expansions, nothing else to buy.
What if something arrives damaged?
Write to us with a photo and we reprint and replace the pieces. The press is ours, so reprints are cheap and fast — and Polar's receipts make every order easy to trace.
One box, one price
Take the box home.
Everything on this page in one box: five decks, the answers, the rune tiles, the counters, the dials and the sheet. No expansions, no second printing to chase, no app you must own to play.
- Ships to the EU and the US. Printed and shipped by our press — 7–14 days, no customs fees inside the EU.
- Paid through Polar. Card or bank, VAT handled at checkout.
- Not sure yet? Play the whole game free from the book above — the box is the same game with the cutting already done.