How to play Hadrian's Wall

Whoops - I let a group of invading Picts  ransack the town, and everyone’s angry at me.   I guess the only solution… is to take a bath.  Hi! It’s Ryanl from Nights Around a Table. Here’s   how you play Hadrian’s Wall. You and your friends play Roman   Generals in charge of a milecastle, or chunk,  of a massive fortification called Hadrian’s   Wall.

Emperor Hadrian Augustus got sick of  the Picts invading from the north of England,   so he ordered this huge wall built from  coast to coast to keep them out. The wall   was apparently only two feet tall, because the  Picts were very short. Your job is to build and   manage your section of the wall over six years,  keeping the invading Picts from getting through,   and if they do get through, bribing officials  so that your boss doesn’t hear about it.

  This is a roll n’ write game where you get  two big sheets of paper to mark up. The left   side generally describes your defenses  along the wall that you’re building,   and the right side has different areas portraying  the lives of various Roman citizens who can help   you keep out the Picts.

There are four scoring  tracks, representing Renown, Piety, Batmans,   and Discipline. At the top of your defense  sheet, you have three sections of the wall   called cohorts - left, center, and right - that  you have to fill in to defend your milecastle.   The game clock is up here. A game of Hadrian’s  Wall lasts 6 years, or rounds.

At the end of each   round, you’ll flip over a certain number of Fate  cards that show you which sections of the wall the   Picts have attacked - left, center, or right. If  you have enough boxes in your cohorts filled in,   and you fully or partially defend against the  attack, you’ll earn some Batmans.

But for each   attack you let through, you’ll earn the disdain  of the people you’re sworn to protect, and that   disdain will grind against your score at the end  of the game. But don’t worry: there are ways to   defend against the Picts even when your cohorts  aren’t up to snuff, and you can even convince   people to forget about certain bygone years when  the Picts ransacked the area behind the wall.

  At the beginning of each year, you’ll get some  wood workers: black soldiers, blue builders,   yellow civilians, and purple servants, which  the game’s rulebook admits represent slaves,   but it manages to address that unpleasant piece  of history in a paragraph that sensitively and   sensibly acknowledges those people’s role  in the story.

I hope you’re taking notes,   Puerto Rico! There are also these resource  pieces that represent wood, brick, sheep,   neutronium - anything you need to build things.  All these wood pieces are the currency you’ll use   to fill in the empty boxes on your sheets. Every box you want to fill in has a cost (and   the game calls every white shape a “box”).

So for  each box you want to fill in to build your Wall,   you have to pay 1 resource. To hire a Performer,  you have to cash in a yellow civilian.   Some boxes cost you multiple workers or  resources, or both. So to build the Large   Gardens, you have to pay a purple servant,  a blue builder, and two resources.

  On top of that, certain boxes have a prerequisite  before you can fill them in. It costs one servant   and one civilian to build the small precinct, but  this blue flag with a “3” on it means you must   have attracted three Traders before you can fill  it in. But with each box you fill, you may gain   some kind of reward printed inside that box, and  those rewards can cascade into satisfying combos   if you orchestrate everything cleverly.

Certain spaces have hash marks in them,   which means you have to write in the current year  number. So the Training Grounds let you turn one   of your builders into a Wall Guard once a year.  You write the current year number into the space,   so that when you go do other stuff and  come back to it maybe a few minutes later,   you don’t forget that you already  trained a wall guard this year.

  Finally, there are a few weirdo boxes,  like these hexagons in the market,   the round gladiator hit points in the  arena, and the Tetris puzzle down here   next to the Scouts. I’ll explain all of that  eventually. For now, let’s look at how your   turn works. YOUR TURN   At the beginning of every new round, you  flip over one of these Fate cards.

Ignore   everything else on the card - all that matters  right now is this section, which describes the   workers and resources that all players will  receive at the beginning of this round.   Now, everyone has an identical deck of 12 cards  that you shuffle off the top of the game. At the   beginning of every year, you draw two of those  cards.

You get to keep one, and you tuck the   other one behind your player board in the slot  for the current year. At the top of each card   is some sort of end game scoring condition. The  bottom left corner depicts one or more workers   and/or resources that you alone stand to gain at  the beginning of the round, in addition to the   stuff from the Fate card that everyone gets.

So maybe you choose to tuck this card - we call   that a Path card - and keep this one  face-up beside you, where we call it   your Prospect card. You’re using the Path  card for its end game scoring condition,   and are foregoing its resources. And you’re  counting yourself out of this endgame scoring   condition at the top of your Prospect card, but  you get to take a builder and a civilian from the   supply to bolster your collection of wood.

Next, you check this section of your left sheet   for any extra income you’re entitled to. Off  the top of the game, everyone has this leftmost   Resource Production box filled in by default,  so right now, you and all the other players   get another resource to add to your wealth of wood  pieces.

As the game progresses, you may be able to   fill in more of these boxes to gain additional  stuff at the beginning of each round.   Now that everybody has their starting  digs, you all play simultaneously,   paying wood pieces to the main supply to fill  in different boxes on your sheets. Eventually,   everyone will either exhaust all of their wood  pieces and/or will run out of moves to make.

At   that point, you’ll flip over a certain number of  Fate cards to see which cohorts the Picts attack,   and take your rewards and penalties as they come.  Then, you begin a whole new year, flipping another   fate card to determine everyone’s starting wealth,  drawing two cards from your deck, tucking one,   getting extra wood pieces from the bottom left  corner of the other, and then making your moves   simultaneously alongside the other players.

Keep  going until you finish year 6, and then count   up the scores - including any extra points these  tucked Path cards earn you - to see who’s won!   Now we can drill down to what’s going on on  these sheets, starting with the left one.   THE LEFT SHEET At the top of the left sheet are your three   cohorts - left, center, and right - that the Picts  will be attacking.

But notice there’s nothing you   can pay to fill in these boxes directly; the  only time you can fill in a cohort box is if   you fill in some other box with a red shield  symbol on it - say, this one, after spending a   soldier - and then you get to choose which cohort  you want to fill in.

Many of the areas in the game   require you to work from left to right, so you  can’t just jump over here and fill this box in…   you have to do this one first, then this one,  then this one. So if you fill in a box with a red   shield in it, you pick one of the three cohorts,  and then fill in the leftmost empty box.

  Now at the end of the year, that section of  Hadrian’s wall will cancel out one attack   by the Picts if the direction on the  flipped fate card matches that cohort.   We’ll go into that in depth a little later. Notice that as your cohorts get stronger, you get   to start filling in boxes on the Discipline and  Batmans tracks to earn some endgame points.

  These two sections below the cohorts - mining  & foresting and the wall guard - get filled in   left to right straight across the sheet.  For each servant you send into dangerous   Pict territory to gather resources, you fill  in a box. If you fill in a box like this one,   you get to take a resource from the supply,  and you get to fill in one of the Resource   Production boxes, which are represented  by a hammer.

With that box filled in,   you’ll get more starting stuff at the beginning  of the next year, and every year after that.   It costs 1 soldier to fill in each box along  your Wall Guard, which regularly strengthens   your three cohorts. You can also spend a sword  - we’ll see how to get swords in a moment.

  These three areas - the cippi, the wall,  and the fort - work a little differently   than the ones above. (By the way, Cippi were  pits filled with, like, wooden barbed wire.)   The fort sets the pace for these other  two tracks. You build your fort from   left to right by spending a builder or a  soldier for each box you want to fill in,   and neither your cippi nor your wall  can ever extend past your fort.

  What’s more, the fort is in three sections, which  are supplied by your granaries. You begin the game   with a small granary. You’re not allowed to  spend a dude and start filling any boxes over   here until you spend a servant, a builder,  and a resource to build the medium granary.   And likewise, you can’t build this section of the  fort until you’ve constructed a large granary.   Remember, the flags are prerequisites - so as  soon as you’ve built this section of your fort,   you meet the infrastructure level required to  build the medium granary.

And as soon as you   build out to infrastructure level 5, you meet the  prerequisite to construct the large granary.   The Rules Gremlin wants you to know  that even after you’ve built a granary,   you still have to fill in the  fort boxes from left to right.   You can’t reach infrastructure  level 1, build the medium granary,   and then start working on this part of the fort.  You need to build this whole thing first.

  Down here is your income area. We already saw one  way to earn the hammers that let you fill in these   boxes. In the Training Area, you can train one of  your blue builders to become a Wall Guard, but you   can only do it once a year. Spend a blue guy and  write in the current year number, which gets you   a sword, and a sword, you’ll remember, lets you  fill in one of your Wall Guard boxes up here.

  Down here, as long as your fort has reached or  surpassed infrastructure level 2, you can pay a   servant, a builder, and a resource to fill in this  box - plus this box at the same time, which gets   you a yellow civilian immediately. Now for the  rest of the game, you’ll also get an extra yellow   civilian during the income phase.

If you manage  to reach or surpass infrastructure level 6, you   can fill in this box (plus this box, which gets  you a renown point and a civilian immediately).   From that point on, you’d earn two extra civilians  during the income phase of every year.   It’s the same story over here with the  workshops, which you can build by paying   a certain number of resources after you reach  infrastructure levels 3 and 7 along the fort.   They instantly earn you blue guys, and this one  gets you a renown point to boot.

They also get you   extra blue builders during the income phase. The small and large roads cost this and require   this, and get you this. The slash means “or,” so  if you build the small road, you fill in the box,   and earn either a piety or discipline point.  During the income phase, each road you’ve built   lets you fill in the leftmost empty box of your  choice along one of the four scoring tracks.   Incidentally, any time you see a small thing  and a large thing, you have to build the small   thing before you can build the large thing.

The Forum is sort of an inefficient way to get   the exact dude you need. You spend two dudes of  any colour to get one dude of any colour - so   for example, spend a purple servant and a  blue builder to get one yellow civilian.   You can only do this once a year, so you have  to write the current year number in the box to   remember that you did it.

The other limitation  is that the trade can never involve black   soldiers - so you can neither pay soldiers,  nor receive soldiers, in a Forum trade.   Once one of your four scoring tracks reaches or  surpasses the 15 point mark, you’re eligible to   build one of these Landmarks. There’s a different  Landmark for each track - renown, piety, Batmans,   and discipline.

So if you reach or surpass 15  in Piety, at any point you can pay one builder   and two resources to build the Monolith,  which gets you two discipline points.   At the bottom of the left sheet is this area,  which plays into the Pict invasion at the end   of the year. Let’s see how that works.

THE PICT INVASION   At the end of the year, once there are  no more moves anyone can afford to make,   you have to flip over a certain number of  Fate cards to see where the Picts attack.   The number of cards you flip depends on the  current year, and your difficulty mode - easy,   medium, or hard.

In the first year, on easy mode,  you only have to flip over 1 Fate card. But this   part’s easier to understand the more cards you  have to deal with, so let’s skip ahead to year 6,   when you’re flipping over 8 cards. You flip the cards and sort them by   which cohort the picts are attacking.

So  in this example, the Picts are attacking   the left cohort twice, the middle cohort  once, and the right cohort five times.   For each box you’ve filled in the affected cohort,  you successfully block one of the attacks. To   block all of the Pict attacks on the left cohort,  you’d need to have filled in 2 boxes in that   cohort.

So take a look, and figure out what you’ve  blocked, and what you’ve let slip through.   There are three possible outcomes: you  blocked everything, you blocked nothing,   or you had a mixed result. If you blocked everything,   you gain as many Batmans as are in the  grey flag - so in this case, 4 Batmans.   If you blocked nothing, you have to take as  many thumbs-down disapprovals as are in the   grey flag - that means you have to draw a  circle down here for every disapproval.

  If you blocked some attacks, and let some  others through, circle your disapprovals first,   without exceeding the number on the  grey flag. If you haven’t reached the   grey flag number in disapprovals, you earn the  remaining number in Batmans. So if you let 3   attacks through and blocked the rest, you take  3 disapprovals, and one Batman, to make 4.

  And now, you’re ready to play Hadrian’s Wall. (pause)   What? … There’s a whole other sheet?? (sigh) THE RIGHT SHEET   Okay, the right sheet is where  things go a little bit bonkers.   You have five sections depicting different  roles in Roman society: Traders, Performers,   Priests, Apparitores, who are like your governor’s  civil servant entourage (and one of them looks   strikingly like Alfred Molina) and Patricians,  who are the fancy-pants one percent of Roman   society.

You can attract any of these personages  to your cause by spending a yellow civilian,   and the more of these people you woo, the more  nutty stuff you get to build and do over here.   Notice that each type of person has its own symbol  - the money bag, the janus masks, the grey moose,   the scales, and the signet ring.

Each coloured flag you trigger   reminds you that you’re eligible to  build or do something interesting   over on the right side of the sheet. So for example, acquiring Traders lets you   build these precincts. The prerequisites here are  3, 6, and 9 traders to build the small, medium,   and large precincts.

They all cost a certain  number of additional servants and civilians,   and they let you fill in these entire boxes  and get all the rewards inside in one shot,   which include a piety point… a resource  production circle… and a wooden resource   piece! And like before, you have to build the  small precinct before you can build the medium   precinct, and the medium before the large.

If you’ve filled in at least four traders,   you can build the Market by paying a servant, a  builder, and two resources. You immediately get   to fill in 1 box on your renown track. Once your  market is built, you can start trading for goods!   That’s where your Prospect cards come in. When you want to buy a Trade Good, you have to   look at the bottom right corner of the Fate card  that you turned up at the beginning of the year.   You can also look to the Prospect cards that  your neighbours kept at the start of the round:   to your left is Gargnog, Scourge of the  Pustular Mountains, Bringer of Lamentations,   who strikes terror in the souls of the  innocents, and to your right is Carl.   Gargnog is selling a 4, while Carl is selling  a 1, and the Fate card also shows a 4.

  When you buy a Trade Good, you’re buying the  actual number on one of these cards. So you’re not   buying four goods from Gargnog or the Fate card  - you’re buying the actual number four. Your goal   in the market is to fill these hexagons with as  many unique digits as possible. The cards contain   the numbers 1 to 6.

Lower numbers are more common  than higher numbers. If you want to buy Carl’s 1,   you pay one of your resource tokens to him.  If you want to buy Gargnog’s 4, you’d pay him   the resource instead. But if you want a 4, it’s  probably smarter to buy the 4 on the Fate card -   that way, you pay the resource to the main supply,  instead of giving it to one of your opponents.

  You can buy multiple copies of the same number  - say, two 4’s. The reason you might do that is   because trading goods in these two stalls gets  you an extra servant or builder. But generally,   you want to trade for unique numbers, because  for the first three unique numbers you acquire,   in any order, you earn 1 point of renown.

If you  buy a 4th or 5th unique number, you get two renown   points, and if you fill the final stall with a  unique number, you score three renown points!   And unlike the areas on the left sheet, you  can fill in these hexagons in any order,   as long as you meet the prerequisite number  of traders, and you pay the resource.

  Hiring at least one Performer lets you build  the Theatre for one servant, one builder,   and a resource. You get 1 point of renown. From  then on, you can put on one performance a year.   You have to meet the prerequisite number of  performers on the left, and pay one resource,   presumably to throw a brick at the actors.  Since you can only put on one show a year,   you have to write this year’s number in the  box, and you get the reward on the left.   You could get points, or extra dudes, or you  could even attract an extra trader or apparitor   or priest or patrician.

Like the trading  stalls, you can put on shows in any order,   as long as you meet the performer prereq. If you have three performers, you can build the   Ludus Gladiatorius, a school where you can train  up to two ferocious fighters. It costs this much,   and it gets you 1 point of renown. You have two  gladiators you can train - a red guy and a blue   guy.

You train them up by having them fight  either a servant or a civilian. For each dude   you feed to one of your gladiators, you get  to circle the leftmost box. Just make sure   you meet the performer prerequisite  on the space above each circle.   Now, these unfilled circles become hitpoints for  your fighters, and the more hitpoints they have,   the stronger they are.

Each year, you can enter  each of your gladiators in one proper match-up   against a purple gladiator. To run a fight,  you pick one of your gladiators, and write the   current year in the topmost empty box. Then, you  draw a card from the Fate deck and put it face-up   in the discard pile.

The Fate card has a purple  gladiator on it with a certain number on him:   that’s how many hitpoints the purple guy knocks  out of your fighter. So if your red guy had 3   circles, and the purple gladiator hit you  for 2, you’d fill in 2 of those circles.   Since your red gladiator doesn’t have all  of his circles filled in, he’s survived   the fight!

You get the reward in the victory  area beneath your rightmost circled box.   If the purple gladiator has as many  or more hitpoints than your gladiator,   and you have to fill in all the circles,  that means your gladiator died in combat.   You still get a reward of a certain number of  piety points beneath your fighter’s rightmost   filled box, but you can’t enter that gladiator in  any more fights, because that would be gross.

  If you attract at least 4 priests, you can  pay this much to build the small gardens,   which get you a piety point, a trader,  a performer, and another priest. And at   7 priests, if you already built the small  gardens, you can pay for the large gardens,   which get you a piety point, and one  of each personage all in one shot!

  With 1 priest in your population, you can  build the small temple for this much stuff,   which gets you a piety point. If you pay one dude  of any colour, you can fill in this box. And any   time later, if you pay another dude of any colour,  you can fill in this box to get a piety point,   and circle this Favour icon.

Favour icons can  block Pict attacks. If the Picts are going   after one of your cohorts, and you don’t have  enough boxes filled in to defend against them,   filling in one of your circled favours lets  you ignore one Pict attack card entirely!   If you have the small temple and at least  3 priests, you can build the medium temple,   and if you’ve built both of these, then at 6 or  more priests, you can build the large temple.   You can’t start filling in a larger temple until  you’ve completely filled in the next size down.   And remember that you have to fill these boxes in  one at a time, top to bottom - so if your small   temple is full, you can pay a dude of any colour  to fill in this box, and then pay another dude   to fill this box and get a piety point, and then  pay a third guy to fill in this box, and so on.

  If you have at least 3 apparitores, you can build  the Baths for this much stuff, and earn a renown   point. The baths are where all your political  wheeling and dealing is done. Once the baths   are built, each year you can spend resources to  bribe up to two officials to forget about any past   slip-ups where you accidentally let the Picts past  the wall.

Write the current year in up to two of   these boxes, as long as you meet the prerequisite…  pay the resource cost, and then fill in that many   disdain circles on your left sheet. Once they’re  filled in, these circles will no longer count   against your score at the end of the game. If you have four or more apparitores and you   pay this stuff to build the courthouse and claim a  renown point, you can make 1 ruling a year in each   column - as long as you meet the prerequisite - to  either get a free servant, trade a builder for two   servants, or trade two servants for a builder.

And finally, spending civilians to attract   Patricians lets you deploy Diplomats to  different cohorts along the wall. With one   or more patricians, pay these guys and these guys  to earn a Batman and circle these two favours. The   difference between these favours and the other  ones we just saw is that you have to assign them   to one of your cohorts - left, center, or right  - by filling in one of these arrows.

If the Picts   attack at the end of any given year and you want  to fill in a favour to ignore one of their cards,   you can only use one of these favours if it  matches the cohort that the Picts are attacking.   So because this Diplomat is assigned to the  center cohort, you can’t use his favours to ignore   any attacks on the left or right cohorts.

And at the bottom right corner of the second   sheet, if you meet the Patrician prerequisites,  you can spend a Soldier to make him a Scout.   Scouting lets you choose a tetromino shape from  either your card, or the shapes on the cards   of the players sitting to your left and right.  So let’s see… that’s either Carl, or… Gargnog,   Scourge of the Pustular Mountains, Bringer of  Lamentations, who strikes terror in the souls   of the innocents.

If you choose to use Carl or  Gargnog’s shape, you pay your soldier to that   player. If you use the shape on your own card,  you pay the soldier to the common supply.   Then, you get to draw that whole shape into this  area. You’re allowed to move and rotate the shape,   Tetris-style, or even mirror the shape,  non-Tetris style.

You’re just not allowed to   hang any part of the shape out of bounds, or let  it overlap any squares you’ve already filled in.   And you have to fill in all the squares  in the shape. You could end up filling in   one or more boxes that earn you more servants or  resources, and any time you fill in an entire row,   you earn a caped crusader.

I AM JUSTICE! And now, we can finally look… at the third   sheet. … Naw - i’m just messin’ with ya. ENDGAME   The game ends when everyone is out of  moves at the end of the 6th year.   From there, you tally up the points  you’ve earned for renown, piety,   world’s greatest detectives, and discipline.  If you gain any workers from these tracks at   the end of the game, they just get wasted.

You’ll earn a certain number of extra points   depending on how well you’ve met the conditions on  the path cards you’ve tucked. So this one gets you   points for your trade goods, and this one gets you  points for having constructed landmarks. Finally,   you punch in the number of points you lost for  disdain circles that you failed to fill in and   forgive.

Add up all the positive numbers,  and subtract the negative. Whoever has the   highest score wins. If there’s a tie,  the player with the least Disdain wins,   and if there’s still a tie, whoever scored  the most points from their tucked Path cards   wins the game. And if there’s still a tie,  settle it with GLADIATORIAL COMBAAAAAAT!!

  2-PLAYER AND SOLO GAMES If you’re playing with 2 players,   or by yourself, you’ll need an extra set of cards  to act as a dummy player to give you more choices   of trade goods and scout patterns. In a solo  game, you’ll flip over 2 cards from the dummy   deck each round, and in a 2-player game, you’ll  flip just one.

If you buy a Trade Good or use   a scouting pattern from the dummy deck, you’ll  put the resource or soldier on the dummy card.   When it comes time for the Picts to attack, each  piece of wood sitting on a dummy card means you’ll   have to draw an extra Fate card, which will beef  up the Picts’ attack.

When the attack is finished,   send the wood back to the supply and discard the  one or two dummy cards you drew for this round.   In a solo game, you’re trying to beat a  certain score. If you crack 70 points,   especially on Hard mode, you’ve beaten the  game! But if you’re still clamouring for more,   you can download the official solo campaign  that i’ve linked to below this video,   which was created by the game’s designer Bobby  Hill, who i’ll show a picture of right now.

  … Nah - that joke is too obvious. And now,  you’re ready to play Hadrian’s Wall!