Rulebook draft · first pass · 2–4 players · cooperative, with secret agendas
Cornelius Ashworth never stopped rebuilding his house, and he never showed anyone the plans. You enter through the Foyer, lay the mansion down one blind-drawn room at a time, and push toward the Last Vigil, a sealed room that takes two Golden Keys to open. The house takes a little of your sanity every night. Whoever reaches the end can finish the game on the spot, and then each player answers for their own secret objective.
Chapter I
Ashworth Manor is a cooperative, tile-based exploration game. You play guests of a dead man, walking into his house through the Foyer and pushing deeper into a mansion nobody has ever mapped. The house is built from room tiles you draw and place as you explore, so no two games share a floor plan.
Two pressures squeeze you the whole way. Your sanity drains every night, and the house's resources keep running out: room tiles, item cards and rare keys all deplete over the course of a game.
Getting into the Last Vigil takes two players, each spending a Golden Key at a different door. Nobody opens it alone.
Getting in doesn't win the game on its own. The room prints an Activate icon, and any player standing inside may spend 1 action to trigger it. The game ends immediately. No one else has to be there, and no one else gets a say.
When the game ends, the will is read. Each player checks their own secret objective cards: what you managed is yours alone, whatever the rest of the party did.
Each player holds two objectives, and every card carries a score from 1 to 5 for how much it asks. Complete either one and you keep your place in the will. Add up the scores of the ones you completed: the highest total takes the estate, equal totals share it, and if nobody completed anything the house keeps the lot.
So setup is a wager made twice. Two cheap cards are insurance. One cheap and one dear is a hedge. Two dear ones win the house or leave you with nothing at all.
This is where the semi-cooperative tension comes from. Everyone works toward the same door, but a player who has finished their objective may want to end the game the moment they arrive, whether or not anyone else is ready.
If every player has been removed at 0 sanity before anyone ends the game, the whole party loses.
You work together for as long as it suits you both. Or you work along in public and quietly set up failure for the others. Wherever the design can create a moment that needs cooperation and leaves room for sabotage, it should.
A dead end, a sealed-off wing, a lost party: these are supposed to happen now and then. Think of a run like a game of solitaire. Sometimes it just doesn't come together, and there's always the next game.
Chapter II
Cornelius Ashworth was a wealthy, reclusive collector who spent the last decades of his life expanding, walling off and re-locking his own home, often overnight and without telling anyone what he'd changed. The house never had a complete floor plan, and it's never the same twice.
His will says his heir can only claim the estate by reaching a sealed room deep inside the house. It also names, by trade, three people who must go in with the heir. They aren't strangers hired for the occasion. They all knew him.
Cornelius was obsessive about privacy. Ordinary Keys open the everyday household locks, the routine cost of his paranoia. Golden Keys guard the rooms that held whatever he valued, or feared, most.
His sanctum needs two Golden Keys, turned by two different hands, because he trusted no one, not even his own blood, to open it alone. That's the shape of the whole game: nobody gets there without help. What's inside is deliberately left out of the rules. The table decides.
A player at 0 sanity isn't simply out. They're lost to the house, however your group wants to picture that. Whatever they carried stays behind for someone else to find.
Gothic Victorian, played straight: candlelight, aged wood, portraits, old-world dread. The nature of the haunting is never explained. The horror works better when the explanation stays just out of reach.
Chapter III
| Component | What it does |
|---|---|
| Game board | The mansion's footprint. The Foyer and the Last Vigil are printed on it, surrounded by 42 empty room slots and 7 exterior slots, with printed garden paths and their travel markers. See The Mansion tab. |
| Room tiles | Uniform 7 × 7 cm squares. Each has 1–4 doors, at most one per side. Drawn blind, one deck each for the west wing, the east wing and the grounds. |
| Investigation Deck | Searched in ordinary rooms. Item cards, coin from the supply, a healthy share of nothing, and a few traps. |
| Rare Investigation Deck | Searched only in Golden-Key rooms. Better rewards for the harder way in. |
| Item decks | Every item card, in two decks: the Common Item Deck (common and uncommon) and the Rare Item Deck (rare and very rare). Rooms draw from them and the Peddler sells from them. |
| Night Event Deck | One card drawn each night. 24 cards in the first pass. |
| Objective cards | Twenty in the first pass. Three are dealt to each player at setup, who keeps two. See the Objectives tab. |
| Player boards | Portrait, ability, Sanity track (0–10), Actions track, Prayed marker, Shielded counter. |
| Game Die | A d6 with 3 Skull, 2 Shield and 1 Monster faces. Rolled at a locked door with a Lockpick, and by the Coin Purse. |
| Calendar | Day-of-week tracker, Monday to Sunday, advanced each night. |
| Mansion Flags | Board-wide switches: Water Restored and Power Restored, both starting off. |
| The supply | A face-up bank beside the board: Sovereign cards, spare Keys, and the game's Golden Keys. Coin and keys are taken from here and spent back into it. |
| Stash tray | One shared off-board mat holding whatever the party has stashed. |
| Starting player marker | One token, held by whoever starts the current day. It passes one seat clockwise every dawn. |
| Markers | “Done” tokens for used icons, and personal markers for claiming Rest icons. |
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Everyone shares one day/night clock. A day isn't one long turn per player. It's many short turns going round the table until everyone has used up their actions.
You have 6 actions a day. On your turn, take one action, then play passes clockwise. Moving is an action like any other, so every step through the house is a search you didn't make.
| Action | Cost | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Move | 1 | Go through an open door into an adjacent explored room, or step onto the next travel marker on a garden path. |
| Reveal | 1 | Draw a room tile and place it beyond an open door. If a door lines up, step in for free. |
| Use an icon | 1 | Investigate, Rest, Prayer, Stash, Peddler or Activate. Some cost extra; see Chapter VIII. |
Only one token tracks turn order: the starting player marker. Whoever holds it takes the day's first turn, then play goes clockwise, round and round, one action each time. A player with no actions left is skipped, so the circle gets smaller as the day wears on until nobody can act and night falls. The marker moves one seat clockwise at dawn, and it carries two other powers with it: its holder chooses when a night event says to choose, and its holder may do the dawn's nightwork (see Chapter IX).
Abilities, items and night events can add actions, take them away, or limit what you spend them on. The Torn Blueprint makes moving into a Passage room free, and that move doesn't end your turn. Locked In stops you moving at all for a day.
Chapter VI
Stand in a room with an open door leading to an empty slot, and spend 1 action. Draw the top room tile blind. Every room costs the same flat action to reveal, because every tile is the same size.
Place the tile in the slot beyond that door, in any rotation you like, whether or not any of its printed doors line up with yours. Nothing is ever discarded because it doesn't fit. A room tile only leaves the game when something says so, and one card in the box says so: Imogen Vane's second draw.
The outside slots aren't next to the house. Garden paths are printed on the board to link them:
Each path carries travel markers. A marker is a space: stepping onto it is a Move action, and so is stepping off the path into the room at the far end. A lawn or a back path (2 markers) takes 3 actions to cross; a short side path (1 marker) takes 2. Each step ends your turn, so you'll stand out on the path while the others play, and maybe still be there when night falls.
A path works like a long doorway, so the rooms at both ends need a door facing it.
You can always see the whole grid, every empty slot and every existing door before you choose. Hidden information lives in the decks, never on the board.
Draws two tiles on every Reveal and places either one. The other goes back on top of the deck, so the next player gets what she left, or into the discard pile, where it is out of the game. Both choices say something about who she is helping.
The house splits down the middle into a west wing and an east wing of 21 slots each, plus the grounds outside. Each area has its own room deck: when you Reveal, draw from the deck of the area the new slot belongs to.
The west is the family wing, with Chamber and Sacred rooms: rest and prayer. The east is the service wing, with Storage and Utility rooms: loot, water and power. Passage connectors and Commerce stalls go into both, so every wing has corridors and somewhere to trade. That makes the two decks the same size, and leaving the Foyer a choice between recovering and gathering.
Chapter VII
A room tile's bottom line shows what it takes to get in. Rooms without a requirement are free to walk into.
| Requirement | Opened by | Found |
|---|---|---|
| Key | A Key card (used up), a Master Key (reusable), or a lucky Lockpick roll. Silas Crane begins the game with three Keys in hand. | The Common Item Deck, and reliably at a Peddler. |
| Golden Key | One Golden Key. The whole tile is gold-locked, every door. | The Rare Item Deck, some Night Events, and rarely, at a steep price, a Peddler. |
| Water | The mansion flag Water Restored, set once in the Boiler Room. | See The Mansion remembers. |
| Lantern | A Lantern in someone's hand. Some rooms are pitch dark and nobody walks into one without a light. The Lantern is never used up, so it opens every dark room its carrier reaches. A room can ask for two things at once: the Coal Cellar is locked and dark, so it wants a Key and a Lantern. | The Rare Item Deck, and the Peddler's rare stock. A single-use Candle is common and does the same job once. |
A locked room is drawn, placed and turned like any other. The lock only matters when somebody wants to walk in.
Nobody is ever forced to open a room. A locked room nobody opens is simply a wall, and walls are part of the house. The Master Key is the exception to the second step: it opens a Key-locked room and stays in your hand afterwards.
The same Golden Keys open the optional gold rooms and the Last Vigil. Spend a hard-won key on a tempting side room now, or save it for the ending you know is coming?
The Vigil has three doors: one on its top edge, facing the grounds at the back of the house, and one on each side, facing D2 in the west wing and G2 in the east wing. None faces the Foyer. To open it, two different players each spend a Golden Key at two different doors. The third door is leeway: if the room drawn beside one door has no door facing the Vigil, there are still two ways in.
Both keys turn at the same time. Nobody unlocks one door and waits: the two players have to be at their doors together and commit together. Keys can be traded, so it doesn't matter who found them, only who is standing at the doors when it counts.
That makes the Vigil the game's sharpest moment of trust. Your partner can walk all the way to their door and then decide it doesn't suit them yet.
On your turn, standing at a Vigil door with a Golden Key, name another player standing at a different Vigil door. If they agree, you both spend 1 action and a Golden Key, and the Vigil opens. This counts as their action for the rotation. If they refuse, nothing is spent and your turn ends.
Opening the Vigil takes two players. A later item or mechanic may let one player do it alone, but that should always be rare or costly, never a reliable plan.
Across the whole house: roughly half of all rooms Key-locked, 10–15% gold-locked, the rest open. Gold rooms always carry above-average Investigate icons to make the key worth spending. Commerce rooms are never locked. Merchants want customers, not gatekeeping.
Chapter VIII
Rooms print action icons. Triggering one costs 1 action, but each type behaves differently afterwards.
| Icon | Cost | Afterwards | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Investigate | 1 action | Used up for the whole game. Mark it done. | Draw 1 from the Investigation Deck, or the Rare deck in a Golden-Key room. |
| Rest | 1 action + ends your day | One player per icon per night. Claim it with your marker; markers clear at dawn. | You skip tonight's passive sanity drain, and you wake in that room. |
| Prayer | 1 action + 1 Sovereign | Each icon is used up once triggered. | Gain 1 Shielded charge. |
| Stash | 1 action | No limit. Anyone, any day. | Move any cards between your hand and the shared Stash. |
| Peddler | 1 action | Reusable. Stock runs down as it's bought. | Reveal the room's stock: so many common cards, and at the better stalls, rare ones too. |
| Activate | 1 action | Every tile prints its own limit: once, twice, or no limit. | Printed on the tile. Each one is different. |
| Entry boon | free | Every time you enter. | A passive printed on the tile. The Kitchen restores 2 actions once the water is on, so walking in pays for itself. |
Around a quarter of the Investigation Deck is “found nothing”, so searching is always a gamble. The traps live here too, not on a separate hazard icon, because nobody would willingly trigger a hazard. A few great pulls are mixed in for the thrill of it.
Resting late in the day, when you have little left to spend, is cheap. Resting early is a real sacrifice. Rest does two things at once: you skip tonight's drain, and you wake in that room instead of back at the front door.
There are no beds in the Foyer. Every bed in the game is out in the house, one player to an icon per night, so the party's forward camp is only ever as deep as the beds it has found, and the last free bed in a room is worth arguing over.
The Master Suite is the only room where resting gains ground: +2 sanity on top of skipping the drain. Dr. Eleanor Voss takes 1 sanity from any Rest icon in the house, so a night in a bed leaves her a little better than she was. It costs her the whole day to do it.
Each Shielded charge blocks exactly one sanity loss from a Night Event card, Global or Targeted. Charges stack if you pray more than once before taking a hit. The Chapel gives 2 charges for the same donation, and the Bell Tower gives everyone 2 at once.
Five is the ceiling. The track on your player board is all the shelter there is. Charges beyond the fifth are simply not gained, however they were earned, so ring the bell when the party has room for it.
The first time you pray, mark Prayed on your player board. It never goes back, even after your charges are gone.
Rest holds the line against the nightly drain. Prayer dodges whatever the house throws at you next.
Every Stash icon in the house reaches the same shared pool: deposit at one, collect at any other. Items, Sovereigns and keys all count. There's no mundane explanation. The house just seems to connect these spots. The Foyer always has one.
For rooms that change other rooms or the house itself. The Boiler Room and the Generator Room switch the water and the power on, and off again. The Reliquary trades a Sovereign for one card drawn at random from the item discards. Outside, the Greenhouse gives 1 sanity a day, the Wishing Well sells you an item card for a Sovereign, and the Mausoleum lets one player keep vigil against the night (see Chapter IX).
Every Activate tile prints how often it works. Most say no limit, a few say once or twice, and a couple add a pace: the Greenhouse gives its sanity once a day, and only one keeper can hold the Mausoleum vigil each night. An action is the cost either way, so a room with no limit is only as repeatable as the party can afford.
The Turning Hall is the one room that rewrites the map. Spend 1 action there to rotate the tile a quarter turn clockwise: its two doors swing to face different neighbours, opening a way that wasn't there and closing one that was. It only ever turns one way, so reaching a particular arrangement can cost two or three actions rather than one. Anyone standing in the room stays in it; only the doors move. It never runs out, so the corridor can be turned as often as anyone is willing to pay for it, by whoever gets there first.
Nearly every room type has a room whose Activate icon waits on a specific item from the item decks. The Wrench and the Boiler Room came first, and the rest follow it: a Lantern or a single-use Candle for the dark rooms, a Fuse for the Generator Room, Laudanum for the Sickroom, a Bell Rope for the Bell Tower, a Ledger for the Counting House, a Shovel for The Rose Bed, Coal for the Coal Cellar. The Lantern is different again: it is a light rather than a key to one door, so it opens any dark room, and it is never used up. Every other tool is spent on use. What you dig up is free, which is why it is one card rather than an armful.
The Lumber Room and the Coal Cellar go a step further: both are pitch dark, so without a Lantern you cannot even walk in. Drawn without one, either is a dead end on the board, and with two doors each can wall off whatever lies past it. That is the risk of a house that hands out its rooms at random.
Most tool rooms carry no limit on their Activate icon, because the tool is the limit: a Fuse, a Bell Rope, a Shovel or a phial of Laudanum is spent the moment it is used, so the room waits for the next one to be found. The Lantern is the exception. It is never used up, so it opens the Lumber Room and the Coal Cellar for as long as its holder keeps it, which is why the Lumber Room stops after two searches.
Both the tool and its room have to turn up in the same game, and often they won't. That's the point: the house is different every time. Three things keep it from being a dead draw:
The Crowbar is the exception that proves the pattern: it isn't tied to a room at all. Discard it in any Passage room to open a new door on any side of that tile, which is how a sealed-off wing gets rescued.
Chapter IX
When nobody has any actions left, the house takes its turn.
A player who used a Rest icon, or kept vigil at the Mausoleum, begins the next day in that room. Everyone else wakes in the Foyer, with no memory of walking back.
So a bed is not only sanity. It is ground held. The party's reach into the house is measured by the furthest room somebody can sleep in, and every morning the people without beds start again at the front door. It also means nobody is ever stuck: a player sealed into a dead end simply wakes up at the door, because the house does not keep what it has not been asked to keep.
Cornelius rebuilt this house overnight and told nobody what he had changed. The habit outlived him. At dawn, the player taking the starting player marker may do one piece of nightwork.
| Nightwork | Cost | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Turn a room | free | Rotate one room tile a quarter turn clockwise. Anyone inside stays where they are; only the doors move. |
| Pull a room | 2 sanity | Take one room out of the house. The tile goes to the bottom of the deck it came from, and its slot stands empty, ready to be revealed again another day. |
| Nothing | free | The house is quiet tonight. |
Pull a dead end and you free its slot for something better, which the whole party wants. Pull the corridor holding a wing together and somebody is walking the long way round for two days. Both look identical at the table, and the cure for either is already in the deck: a Crowbar opens a new door in any Passage room, and the Turning Hall turns for anyone who pays the action.
The one room that can hold the house back, if someone is willing to stand out there and choose.
An action every day you want it, spent in a gold-locked room out at the edge of the grounds, a long way from anything else you might be doing. Choosing between the two cards is the cheap use. Burying both costs 2 sanity on top of the nightly drain, so a keeper who shuts the house out night after night is lost within a few nights.
The table sees the card that resolves, never the one discarded beside it. The keeper can wave through Whispers in the Wall because it lands on a rival and quietly drop the card that would have cost them, and nobody can check. Two cards means the choice is always theirs to spin.
The deck mixes seven kinds of card, so a draw is never simply “lose sanity or don't”. When it runs out, shuffle the discards into a fresh deck.
The haunting arrives entirely through the Night Event Deck. Nothing roams the halls, so there's no monster to move or track.
Chapter X
Everyone starts at 10, which is also the maximum. You lose sanity to the passive drain every night, to Night Events, and to bad luck while exploring.
You're removed from the game, lost to the house. Everything you carried drops in the room where you stood, and any other player can pick it up later.
Chapter XI
Sovereigns are the house's currency. They come out of the supply when a search, a sale or a night hands you coin, and they go back to it through Peddlers, Prayers, the Wishing Well and the Reliquary.
Sovereign cards are not shuffled into anything. They sit face up beside the board as a bank, along with the spare Keys and the Golden Keys. Whenever the house pays you, whether by selling to a Peddler, digging up coin, or a night that turns generous, take the cards from the supply. Whenever you spend them, they go straight back.
Golden Keys are the exception. The supply holds a fixed number of them for the whole game, and a Golden Key that opens a door is gone for good rather than returned. When the supply is empty, the house has no more to give.
The Peddler travels with two cases, the same two decks the house itself deals from. The Common Item Deck, holding common and uncommon goods, comes out everywhere. The Rare Item Deck, holding rare and very rare, is only opened at the bigger stalls, which is the real reason to wait for the Bazar rather than buy at the first table you find.
The Peddler is a recurring, unsettling traveller who somehow always has a stall set up somewhere in the house. Reginald Ashworth pays 1 less for everything (minimum 1). The Appraiser Loupe adds 1 to every sale, and Peddler's Favor swaps one revealed card.
The Calendar starts on Monday and advances every night. Each Commerce room only trades on its printed days. The bigger the stall, the narrower the window, and everything is shut on Sunday. On a closed day the Peddler icon simply doesn't work.
Game board · in development · 7 cm cells
The house replaces the old three-rectangle board with a mansion silhouette: two wings around a central spine, the Foyer printed at the front door and the Last Vigil printed at the heart. Garden paths lead out to the grounds, and one reaches the Vigil's back door.
Hover a slot to name it. Columns run A–J from the left and rows 1–7 from the top, so the Foyer sits at the bottom of the spine.
Room tiles · 7 × 7 cm · six lines inside, one outside
Each line is a family that escalates one idea: more doors, more rest, more prayer, a bigger stall. The top room usually wants a Golden Key, and Commerce is the exception because it never locks. Most lines also have a tool room, which waits on a particular item from the deck rather than a key.
Each area of the board draws from its own deck. The west is the family wing and the east the service wing. Passage and Commerce go into both, because every wing needs corridors and somewhere to spend a Sovereign, which leaves the two decks the same size.
Doors are drawn on the tile as they're printed, in the tile's own orientation. You rotate the tile when you place it. Use the filters to highlight rooms by what they need or what they offer.
Twenty rooms sketched early on that haven't joined a line yet. Nothing here is cut, and nothing is settled. The four with more than four doors were drawn before the one-door-per-side cap.
Item cards · first batch · found in the Investigation Deck
Held in hand, traded in the same room, passed through the Stash. Eleven of them are tools, each the key to one room somewhere in the house, except the Crowbar, the Lantern and the Candle, which work on a whole room type. Every item sits in one of four tiers, and the tier decides both which deck it lives in and what it is worth. The coins along the bottom are what the Peddler pays when you sell the item, which is what a tool is worth when its room never turns up.
Items are dealt from two decks, and each deck holds two tiers. The aim is three of the lower tier for every one of the higher within a deck, which is a target to build towards rather than where the roster stands today.
| Deck | Tier | Sells for | Drawn from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Common Item Deck | Common | 1 Sovereign | Ordinary searches, the Lumber Room, and the common stock at every stall. |
| Uncommon | 2 Sovereigns | ||
| Rare Item Deck | Rare | 3 Sovereigns | Gold rooms, The Rose Bed, and the case the Peddler only opens at the Emporium, the Bazar and the Counting House. |
| Very rare | 4 Sovereigns |
Card text as printed. The line under the text says when a card works, and whether it's used up. The tier sits under the name, and the coins along the bottom are what that tier sells for.
The game's only die, rolled by the Lockpick at a locked door and by the Coin Purse every time coin changes hands. The prototype uses HeroQuest dice; themed dice are planned for production.
Night Event Deck · first pass · one card a night
The house's turn. Seven kinds of card, from direct sanity loss to omens that do nothing at all, so every draw keeps the table nervous until the card is read.
Filter by category. Any card can be stopped by an item that says so, and any sanity loss can be blocked by Shielded charges. Nothing here is immune to either.
Characters · first pass · one per player
Four the will names, and four the house already knew. Each is anchored in a different system, with one clean signature ability: easy to remember at the table, and no two competing for the same spotlight. Four play in any one game.
Start and max at 10. At 0 you're lost to the house.
Six a day, one per turn. Moving counts. Reset at dawn.
Flips once, never back.
+1 per Prayer, +2 at the Chapel or from the Bell Tower. −1 per blocked loss. Caps at 5; anything over is lost.
Cheaper donations, charges that outlast the ceiling, or a prayer said for somebody else.
Turning a room without holding the marker, or pulling one without paying the sanity.
Paths crossed for less, or a bed made where there is no bed.
Income rather than discounts: a Sovereign a day, or a cut of what the party sells.
Objective cards · first pass · dealt 2, keep 1
Your own reasons for being in the house, drawn in secret at setup and worth nothing to anybody else. You hold two, and every card carries a score for what it asks of you. Complete either and you keep your place in the will; the scores you completed add up, and the highest total takes the estate.
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| At setup | Each player is dealt 3 objective cards, keeps 2 in secret and returns the third to the box. Two cheap cards are insurance. Two dear ones win the house or leave you with nothing. |
| During the game | Nobody has to say what they are doing, and nobody has to tell the truth about it either. One card in the box, the Letter Opener, makes you show one of your two to whoever spends it. You pick which. |
| When the will is read | The game ends the moment somebody triggers the Last Vigil. Complete either card and you keep your place in the will. Add the scores of the cards you completed: the highest total takes the estate, equal totals share it, and if nobody completed anything the house keeps everything. |
Filter by what a card asks of you. Duel cards measure you against the others, so two players holding one are in a race nobody else can see.
Open threads · what the rules do not answer yet
Everything here is a decision waiting to be made, not a rule. The manual holds the game as it stands; this page is what still has to be settled before it is finished, and where a playtester's opinion is worth the most.
Missing pieces. The game can be played around them for now, but never finished without them.
First drafts, every one of them. Only a table settles these.
Situations that will come up at a table and have no ruling yet.
Rooms, cards and lines the game has room for and does not have.
Not questions yet. Places where the design is deliberately sharp and might cut too deep.