Unreliable Narrators
Unreliable Narrators is a two-player card game inspired by games like Magic: The Gathering. You play as an author fighting for control of the narrative. You will take turns with your rival as you play characters, cast spells, challenge and oppose your rival’s characters, and gain score. You can open packs to add new cards to your deck.
We designed this game to share with you the fun moments we have playing card games with each other. We encourage you to get to know new people at this wedding by playing this game together. Good luck, have fun!
The Golden Rule
If you and your rival cannot agree on how something works in the game, please consult Alana, Naomi, or a knowledgeable third party for advice. Failing that, roll a die to determine which interpretation is right.
How to Win
Your goal is to have the highest Score Total at the end of the game. Your score total starts at 1, and you can gain score by "scoring" with your characters, defeating opposing characters in duels, or by adding cards to your score pile.
See the Abridged Rules here.
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To play, you need:
a Deck - your starter deck plus any cards you have opened from your booster packs or traded.
a Score Die - 20-sided die (d20) to track your score
a Turn Die - 6-sided die (d6) to track the current turn, shared with your rival
Extra dice - you should have received a set of d6s, d12s, and d20s with your starter deck. These are used to track changes in power for your characters.
To start playing, each player shuffles their deck and places it to the side of their play area, sets their Score Die to 1, and their shared Turn Die to 1.
Roll a die with your rival to determine who gets to challenge first. The player who rolls the highest challenges first.
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As you play, you will be drawing and playing cards in areas in front of you.
Here's a quick rundown of what those areas are:
Your Deck is a face down pile of cards and is where you draw cards from each turn
Your Discard Pile is a face up pile of cards and starts empty.
When characters die or spells are played, their cards go into the discard pile.
Certain cards will ask you to place cards into the Score Pile.
You place all cards in the score pile face-down.
Your Hand is where you keep cards you have drawn, hidden from your rival.
You can play any card from your hand.
When you play characters from your hand, they go onto The Page face up.
There are no limits on how many cards can be in any of these areas.
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All cards have:
A Score - This is used when the card is in the score pile. Generally, more powerful cards have a higher score! All cards have a score number from 1 to 5, located to the right of the card name.
Rules text - When you play a card from your hand, perform the actions associated with the rules text when appropriate.
Some starter cards have no rules text.
Rules text either happens immediately when played or, for many characters, when a trigger happens. When the trigger in the rules text occurs, perform the action.
Example Rules Text: "When I die, gain 1 score."
The trigger is when the character dies, and the action the player takes is increasing their score total by 1.
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There are three main types of card: characters, transform characters, and spells.
Characters are the main type of card you will play. Character cards have a Power value, which determines how strong they are when dueling. The power value is located in the bottom right of the character card, inside a diamond-shaped frame.
When a character gains or loses power, use one of your extra dice (given to you along with the starter deck) to track its current power value. If a character's power is reduced to 0 or lower, it dies and is moved from the Page to the Discard Pile.
Transform Characters are a special kind of character that can be played from the hand either as a regular character or by Transforming an existing friendly character.
When you transform a character, place the transform card on top of the existing character and add the new card's power to the existing card's power. A character can be transformed any number of times. You always only use the rules text of the top card (and ignore the rules text of any cards under the top card).
Spells are the final card type. Unlike characters, they don't stick around on the page. Spells are played, their rules text happens, then they are immediately put into the discard pile.
You can differentiate the three card types either through their layout or by the unique border that separates the card name from the rules text.
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Each turn has five steps that both players go through sequentially:
Draw Step
Play Step
Challenge Step
Tricks Step
Duel Step
During each turn, one player is the challenging player and one player is the opposing player.
In the draw step, each player draws 3 cards. They may redraw any or all of those cards once. To redraw, the player puts the chosen cards on the bottom of their deck, then draws and keeps that many new cards. When there aren't enough cards in your deck to draw or redraw, shuffle your discard pile, then put your discard pile on the bottom of your deck and keep drawing.
In the play step, starting with the challenging player, each player may play any number of cards from their hand. They can then pass to the other player who can play any number of cards from their hand. When both players decide to pass back-to-back, the challenge step starts.
In the challenge step, the challenging player may choose one of their characters to issue a challenge. The challenging player indicates this by moving their character closer to their rival. The opposing player can either choose one of their characters to oppose the challenger or leave the challenger unopposed. They indicate opposition by moving the opposing character forward, touching the rival's challenging character card. The challenging player can repeat this process for any of their characters until they either run out of characters to challenge with or decide to pass.
Unopposed challengers are now scoring, indicated by turning the character sideways.
Opposed challengers will duel their opponents in the duel step.
The tricks step works exactly the same as the play step, but occurs after challenges. The challenging player can play any number of cards from their hand, then they can pass to the opposing player who can play any number of cards (and so on). When both players pass back-to-back, the duel step starts.
In the duel step,
First, for each scoring character, the challenging player gains 2 score and can choose to put a card from their hand into their score pile (face-down). Scoring characters are turned right-side-up.
Second, each pair of challenging and opposing characters duels each other. Each dueling character loses power equal to the other's power (which generally means the weaker dueling character dies and the stronger character's power is reduced by the weaker character's power.)
If the challenging character defeats the opposing character, the challenging player gains 1 score, plus 1 additional score for each time the opposing character was transformed.
At the end of each turn, determine if the game is over (see Ending the Game). If not, increase the turn die by 1 and start a new turn. The challenging player is now the opposing player (and vice versa).
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At the end of each turn, if either player's score total is greater than 20 or it was the sixth turn of the game, the game is over. Each player reveals the cards in their score pile and adds the scores of each card to their score total. Then, whoever has a higher score total wins the game.
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As you feel comfortable with your deck after playing a game, we encourage you to add new cards to your deck by opening Booster Packs, which will be located in Booster Dispensers at the event. Add all cards in a booster you open to your deck. Do not pick and choose which cards to add.
Three important things about opening boosters:
Booster cards will generally add more complexity to your deck. It's OK to keep your deck simple by not adding booster cards!
If you just want to collect the cards, it's OK to open a booster and not add any cards to your deck.
Limit yourself to opening 8 boosters maximum during the event so that everyone has enough to open.
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We encourage you to trade cards with other players at the event! However, when you trade, always trade one card for another card of the same score. Remember, all cards you acquire from packs or trading should always be added directly into your deck.
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Transforming a card is considered "playing" the transform character (for the purposes of "When I'm played" triggers).
If an opposing character dies or otherwise leaves The Page after the Challenge Step but before the Duel Step, the challenging character is not considered "scoring" and are still considered "opposed".
Order of combat resolution should not matter. All triggers on cards that would impact the combat resolution order should specify that they happen at the end of a step. If we overlooked an interaction and combat resolution order does matter, the challenging player determines the order.
"Start of Turn" and "End of Turn" triggers happen in the chosen order of the player who owns the cards. It shouldn't matter whose triggers go first, but in case it does, the challenging player's triggers resolve first.
If a card says to sacrifice a character, the character immediately dies. This does not count as power loss.
If any card's text would ask you to interact with the top of your deck (drawing, discarding, looking at, etc) and you do not have enough cards on the top of your deck to complete that action, you may shuffle your discard pile and put in on the bottom of your deck.
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With Black Jack-o-Lantern's card trigger, if the combined score is 8, you get to both draw one of the cards and gain score.
Corgi Packmate's effect applies to each power gain instance by Laboratory Lycanthrope individually.
Players can use Counterspell to negate another Counterspell.
Players cannot play Counterspell without another valid rival card they are negating (Counterspell cannot just be played normally like other spells).
Coven Leader and Cursed Marionette specifically have their effects occur after all dueling has been resolved, so they do not impact the order in which duels resolve.
For the purposes of Coven Leader's effect, all characters dying while dueling die simultaneously, so Coven Leader triggers for each character death. The order in which Coven Leader died does not matter.
The owner of Cursed Marionette determines the moment when they "count" the number of hands touching the card. They don't have to always keep their hands on Cursed Marionette "just in case".
When playing Goose Hydra's Revenge with Dream Eater in play, the lost power increase only occurs once per character affected.
Characters that die from Goose Hydra's Revenge die in the chosen order by the player playing the card.
With Laboratory Lycanthrope, you can use any kind of dice to stack. The dice stack has to still be standing at the end of the 10 seconds. If part of it falls, only the tallest stack of remaining dice is counted as "successfully stacked".
You only have to continue using a spooky or abnormal voice while Mysterious Medium is on the page. If it dies, you can go back to using your normal voice.
Jewelry, glasses, and other accessories are considered "worn" for Pompous Plutocrat.
For Probing Partygoer, your rival must tell you a statement that has a definitive true or false state.
For Pumpkin, Corgi Monarch, the following other cards are considered Corgis: Syr Corgi, Witchlet Corgi, Captain Corgi, Faerie War-Corgi, Corgi Packmate, and Dr. Corginstein.
Pumpkin (the real life Corgi) counts as a pumpkin for Pumpkin's Blessing.
Sacrificial Ritual only cares about the "top card" of a transformed character and its current power.
Any time means literally any time for Scry-Cam Operator, even during the resolution of a another card's rules text.
If a character is transformed after chosen by Soul Shepherd, it will still trigger Soul Shepherd's card effect if it dies. It is considered the "same character".
Uncanny Double will trigger "When I'm played" effects from the card it copies as it is played to The Page.
Uncanny Double cannot be played transforming another character by copying a transform character. It must always be played as a regular character.