In Regnum, the kingdoms with the most inhabitants and the best resources are the most prosperous. In this game you must get the most valuable characters to settle around your castle. You will have to develop your strategy by taking into account the advantage of your castle and the standards.

Be wary of the other castles, as they will all want to steal your best characters. Will you be able to make your kingdom the most prosperous and proclaim yourself victorious?

Each player receives a castle card at random and places it in front of them. Each castle has a particular advantage that must be used wisely.

Randomly put the number of standard on the table that is equal to the number of players plus one (3 banners for 2 players, 4 for 3 and so on). The standards are displayed for everyone to see and will be scored at the end of the game.

Next, shuffle the character cards and place them face down to form a deck. Next, turn over the first 4 and line them up next to the deck. These are the inhabitants available for populating your kingdom.

Shuffle the resource cards and deal 4 cards to each player. The rest are left face down on the table in a deck, on the other side of the character line-up. The first card is turned over and used to start the discard pile. The player with the most regal bearing starts.

How the game works

The person whose turn it is must perform these two actions in the following order:

Draw resource cards. You can choose to draw two resource cards from the top of the deck (unseen) or take the top card from the discard pile.
Add a character to your realm. To do this, select one of the available characters and pay for it by discarding cards from your hand that show the resources indicated. If you can do this, take the character from the line and place it in front of you. This makes them an inhabitant of your realm. If you cannot, or do not want to add a character to your realm, you must discard a resource card from your hand. You can buy as many characters as your resources allow.

Each character has a resource cost and an effect on the game that is shown on the card. This effect must be implemented immediately after acquiring that character. Caution: some characters affect other cards.

At the end of your turn you must always replace any characters that have been bought from the line-up on the table by taking more cards from the character deck. This way, there will always be four characters available for the next player.

The game ends when there are no cards left in one of the two decks (either resources or characters). When the last card is drawn, a final round is played.

Once the round is over, each bonus score standard is assigned to the player who best fulfils its condition. If there is a tie, no one wins that standard (unless you have Montreaux Castle). Each standard won adds 3 points to the final score.

To find out who the winner is, the players must add up the points earned by the characters in their realm plus the points awarded by any standards they have won.

If the final score is tied, the player with the most inhabitants in their kingdom wins.

—description from the publisher