azti Buy the box €50

A game of words,
played against time.

Two players, one table, no screen. 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.

Buy the box €50 Read it free

Your verse

Watching the table play itself…

The newest eight runes stay. The oldest fades.

An hour, in seven steps

A turn is called an hour, and it always runs in this order. You can teach it in the time it takes to read this line.

  • Wax
    Your figures wake and stand. Your shrines wake with them, and you may raise one more.
  • Speak I
    Read anything you can pay for. Say any word your verse spells.
  • March
    Choose which figures march. A marcher wanes unless it is vigilant.
  • Ward
    Your opponent puts figures in front of the marchers. Warding does not wane them.
  • Toll
    Warded marchers trade harm with their warders. Unwarded ones take that much light.
  • Speak II
    Read again with whatever hours are left.
  • End
    Harm is forgotten, tidal figures go home, rooted figures keep what they grew.

    • What is printed on a card

    A card is called a leaf. The drawing is not a window in the middle of a border — it fills the card to all four edges, and the words are printed over its foot. Every leaf explains its own keywords in small type, so the box needs no rulebook at the table.

    1. What it costs in hoursThree 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.
    2. The rune it leavesRead this leaf and P joins your verse, whether or not you ever meant to spell with it. Every leaf in the box carries one.
    3. Its name, and whether it is a legendThe 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.
    4. The type lineThe suit's printer's mark, what the leaf is, and its number in the tome. There are 416 numbers and no two leaves share one.
    5. What it doesWritten in the same grammar as every other leaf, so a rule you learn once holds everywhere.
    6. Its keywords, spelled outEach keyword prints its own clause underneath, in small caps and roman down one hairline. Nobody reaches for a rulebook mid-hour.
    7. What it hits for, and what it takesPower over toughness, straddling the caption's top edge so it sits in the same place on all 203 figures.

    Every card in the box

    All 416, laid out as they are printed — the same plate, the same caption, the same type at the same size. Search them, sift them by suit or by kind, and click any one to read it close. No download, no sign-in, no sample of six.

    416 cards

    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 of them, 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 figures the cards create — acolytes, wolves, rats, the monarch — printed rather than improvised with coins.
    The reference sheet
    2 sides
    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.
    Counters
    62 pieces
    No two share a silhouette — lozenge, ring, hexagon, tombstone, long oval, coin — because you should know a counter by its outline in the dark.
    Rune tiles
    144 tiles
    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.
    Light dials
    2
    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.
    In the box
    594 cards, 208 pieces

    How it is printed

    The layout was not designed on a screen and then sent to a printer. It was measured against the printer first, and the game changed to fit.

    A taller card than you own

    63 × 118 mm: 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.

    One caption height, on all of them

    Thirty millimetres 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.

    Lines, not tints

    The seam above each caption is 45° hatching at 0.18 mm — ruled lines rather than a grey fill, because grey goes muddy on a press and lines stay lines.

    Black from a single plate

    A press builds black from four inks by default, and at the 0.15–0.22 mm pitch this hatching prints at, four plates out of register smear the line work into grey. Every sheet goes to the printer with cyan, magenta and yellow at exactly 0.00%.

    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: enough shrines to stand all five rites up at once, twelve of each answer, three sheets of runes. 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.

    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. The companion app is free and you never need it.

    Printed and shipped by our press. 7–14 days, worldwide. Paid through Polar. Card or bank, VAT handled at checkout.