How to Play
A game of trade, expansion, and defense. Build a realm across the hexes, hold it against the berserker, and be first to claim the crown.
points
Be the first to reach thirteen victory points on your own turn. They come from the settlements and cities you build, the longest road, the guildmaster, founding a metropolis, defending the realm, and certain progress cards.
Your Realm
Three or four players share one board of hexes, each producing a good when its number is rolled. A settlement collects one good from every hex it touches; upgrade it to a city and that output doubles — and from forest, pasture, and mountain cities the second good arrives as a commodity (paper, cloth, or coin) to power city improvements. You spend resources — brick, lumber, wool, grain, and ore — to build. Your pieces are roads, settlements, cities, city walls, and knights.
Setup
The game opens with two placement rounds. Each player places a settlement and a road, then — in reverse order — a second settlement (which becomes a city) and another road. You receive starting resources from the hexes around that second placement. Settlements must always be at least two intersections apart.
A Turn
Every turn unfolds in three phases.
- Roll — play any pre-roll cards, then roll the two production dice and the event die. On its three ship faces the event die advances the berserker ship one step toward its attack; on a science, trade, or politics face it may grant you a progress card.
- Production — everyone collects goods from hexes matching the rolled number. On a 7, players holding more than seven cards discard half (each city wall you hold raises that limit by two), then the robber moves onto a hex — halting all its production until it leaves — and steals a card from a player there.
- Action — trade, build, recruit and move knights, and play progress cards, in any order and any number of times.
At certain moments — discarding on a seven, placing the robber, answering a trade, or choosing a city to pillage — the game pauses for your choice before play continues, even during another player's turn.
Trade
On your action phase you may propose trades to other players, who can accept, decline, or counter once. You can also trade with the bank: 4:1 by default, 3:1 at a generic harbor, and 2:1 at a matching harbor or through the guildmaster — a marker won from a progress card that grants a 2:1 rate on its hex's good and is worth a victory point, held until a rival plays the card to seize it. Commodities trade at the same ratios.
Building & City Improvements
Roads extend your network, settlements claim new intersections, and cities upgrade a settlement in place. Typical costs:
- Road
- 1 brick · 1 lumber
- Settlement
- 1 brick · 1 lumber · 1 wool · 1 grain
- City
- 3 ore · 2 grain
- City Wall
- 2 brick
A continuous road of five or more segments claims the Longest Road (+2 points), held until a rival builds a longer one — or severs yours by building across it.
Cities also let you advance three independent improvement tracks — science (paper), trade (cloth), and politics (coin). Each level costs that track's commodity equal to the level you are climbing to — two to reach level 2, three for level 3, and so on — and unlocks stronger powers and more progress-card draws. The first player to reach level 4 on a track raises a metropolis there, making that city worth four points and immune to pillage — though a rival who climbs the same track to level 5 can seize it.
Knights & the Berserker
Knights stand on intersections, not roads. They are recruited inactive and must be activated before they can defend, move along your roads, displace weaker enemy knights, or chase off the robber. Promote them from basic to strong to mighty to raise their strength.
- Recruit
- 1 ore · 1 wool
- Activate
- 1 grain
- Promote
- 1 ore · 1 wool
They matter most when the berserker ship reaches the realm and attacks. Its strength is the count of every city and metropolis on the board, set against the combined strength of all active knights — a shared danger, so falling behind your rivals on defense is what gets one of your cities pillaged.
The realm wins. The single strongest defender earns a Defender-of-Vorryn token worth a victory point — a tie draws a progress card instead.
The realm loses. The players who contributed the least defense have a city pillaged back into a settlement. Metropolises are spared.
After every attack the ship resets and all knights become inactive again.
Progress Cards
You earn progress cards by improving your cities. When the event die shows science, trade, or politics, you draw from that deck — but only if you hold a city and your level on the matching track is at least the number on the red production die. Climbing a track is what makes those draws frequent and reaches its stronger cards.
They are powerful and varied — build discounts, free placements, monopolies, targeted steals, and more. A few are victory-point cards, revealed the instant they are drawn for +1 point and never lost. Your hand limit is four cards, but there is no cap on how many you may play in a single turn.
Winning
The moment you have 13 or more victory points on your own turn, the game ends and you win. Points gained off your turn — from a defended attack or an opponent's card — do not end the game immediately, but they count the instant your next turn begins.
Field Your Own Champion
Any programmer can seat an AI at the table. A Vorryn bot is one small HTTP service: each turn it receives the game state and a list of moves that are already legal, and answers with the id of the one it wants — it cannot make an illegal play, and you never need to have played the game. The open-source starter bot bundles the protocol guide and a complete rules reference; fork it, replace one function, and deploy in any language.
When it is ready, enlist your envoy and invite it to games against your friends — then tune it until it stops losing gloriously.