Please give feedback.

All normal rules of play apply unless otherwise indicated.

Games are intended to have four players but could potentially have 3-5.

Decks may contain up to 50 cards. Conflict decks may include up to 12 characters.

Players randomly determine the first player by means of a die roll or other random selection.

All actions opportunities proceed clockwise.

Phase 2 (Draw) - After setting Honor dials, players compare their Honor dial to the player to their left. Only give honor to the player to your left (you wil receive honor from the player to your right). These Honor transfers are done clockwise, starting with whoever has the First Player token; this may cause someone to win by Honor (in which case the game ends) or lose by Dishonor (in which case that the next player in line cannot receive honor that round). For example, Adam, Betsy, Charlie, and Dana are around a table in that order. Adam bids 1, Betsy bids 4, and Charlie bids 5. Betsy will give Adam 1 Honor and take 1 Honor from Charlie.

Phase 3 (Conflicts) - As long as there are three or more players, players may only declare one Conflict as the attacker each turn, and may only declare a Conflict against the player to their immediate left or right. This may be a Military or Political Conflict and must utilize one of the remaining rings. When a Conflict is declared, the attacker may invite one other player as an ally, offering the potential ally one Honor or Fate (attacking player's choice); if accepted the attacker must give the ally the offered Honor or Fate and the ally must declare exactly one eligible character as an attacker; if the offer is rejected the attacker may invite another potential ally who may accept or reject. The Province is then revealed and Reactions applied (provinces such as Night Raid will affect the attacker and any allies). The defending player has the first opportunity to declare defenders, then may invite allies just as the attacker did and defending allies must declare exactly one eligible character as an additional defender. Only the attacker, defender, and allies may play cards in a conflict. Conflicts resolve normally. While there are 4 or more players remaining, Ring effects that target 1 player or card may target 2 players (Air, Earth) or 2 cards that belong to separate players (Fire, Water, Void) but may still only be resolved for a single effect (i.e. Fire may be used to Dishonor two players' characters but not to Honor your character and dishonor someone else's), and Air may be used to gain 3 Honor.

Phase 5 - The first player token passes to the left.

Any player who reaches 0 Honor or has their Stronghold Province broken is eliminated from the game and all of their cards, including those attached to other players' cards, are removed from the game. Any player who reaches 25 Honor immediately wins the game, otherwise the last remaining player wins.

12 minutes ago, suburbaknght said:

Phase 2 (Draw) - Players compare honor dials to the player to their left. For example, if the players are arranged Adam, Betsy, Carl, then Dana, during round 1 Adam will compare his Honor dial to Betsy's and then give or take honor from her accordingly. Meanwhile Betsy will compare her honor dial to Carl's, and so on.

Betsy reveals 5,. Adam and Card both reveal 1. Betsy's down 8 honor and as she's playing Crab, she's only got 2 honor left. Adam plays Backhanded Compliment and continues to declare an Air ring attack on her. Carl and Dana join him and of course, Betsy loses that conflict. Adam steals her last honor. Now go and get us some beer, Betsy!

17 minutes ago, suburbaknght said:

Any player may play cards in a conflict regardless of whether they are participating or not.

Two small problems with that.

1st That's more like a personal preference. I like to see some thematic logic in the cards I play. I could see how in a conflict between Adam and Darla another player may interfere with Court Games, telling the story how his courtiers try to influence the outcome of the conflict. Or send one of their assassins to help out. However, I can't see how Carl's Banzai! could be thematically justified. But that's not a real problem.

2nd Bullying the leader. As soon as someone gets just a little bit ahead, the other three player will join together to take him down. Maybe they won't eliminate him/her outright, but it may very well happen. This leads to a completely different way players approach the game. At first you won't play to win, but instead you're trying NOT to be the one in the lead. Only after it's come down to 1vs1, you start playing for real.

In conclusion: I think it's a nice idea and I applaud the effort, but it needs more work.

1 minute ago, Yakamo no Oni said:

Betsy reveals 5,. Adam and Card both reveal 1. Betsy's down 8 honor and as she's playing Crab, she's only got 2 honor left. Adam plays Backhanded Compliment and continues to declare an Air ring attack on her. Carl and Dana join him and of course, Betsy loses that conflict. Adam steals her last honor. Now go and get us some beer, Betsy!

Two small problems with that.

1st That's more like a personal preference. I like to see some thematic logic in the cards I play. I could see how in a conflict between Adam and Darla another player may interfere with Court Games, telling the story how his courtiers try to influence the outcome of the conflict. Or send one of their assassins to help out. However, I can't see how Carl's Banzai! could be thematically justified. But that's not a real problem.

2nd Bullying the leader. As soon as someone gets just a little bit ahead, the other three player will join together to take him down. Maybe they won't eliminate him/her outright, but it may very well happen. This leads to a completely different way players approach the game. At first you won't play to win, but instead you're trying NOT to be the one in the lead. Only after it's come down to 1vs1, you start playing for real.

In conclusion: I think it's a nice idea and I applaud the effort, but it needs more work.

These are significant issues.

I'd considered only giving honor to the player on the left and only taking honor from the player on your right. Thoughts?

As for bullying, I agree that's an issue in any free-for-all game. I'd considered doing team-based first but thought this would be simpler to at least try something. I'm all for ideas to fix it. Maybe a player who has had one province broken may not be targeted with an attack again this Round?

Furthermore, the issue of deck size has to be addressed.

(both the Dynasty and the Conflict deck need to be upped, correct??? ??‍♂️

(I would say increasing the Dynasty deck to 50 cards minimum, and the Conflict deck to the same number or higher... which would mean that we would have to wait for the Dynasty packs to be released for the purposes of including additional cards into our decks)

If possible, as I have been thinking about multiplayer for a good while, I feel that the number of Provinces might need to be extended to (possibly) 5 or 6, including your Stronghold. Yes, this will alter the game, but you are already playing a modified version with multiplayer rules, so...,

How about predator-prey alliances? You can't ally with players on your left or right but you can attack or defend against them with the player across from you. Once there are only 3 players, no more alliances.

Here is another thought:

A Player may only attack those Players sitting to their left or right... this means you can only attack with your Dynasty characters, Conflict characters and Conflict cards only those to your immediate left and right, not those sitting across your table (to your front)... As Players are beaten (through honor loss and/or loss of Provinces), you then ‘shift Players and you might have a “new” Player to your right and left, against whom you may attack and be attacked.

4 minutes ago, HirumaShigure said:

How about predator-prey alliances? You can't ally with players on your left or right but you can attack or defend against them with the player across from you. Once there are only 3 players, no more alliances.

LOL!!!

I just posted the complete opposite of your suggestion.

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer... cause they're always right there beside you!

16 minutes ago, suburbaknght said:

These are significant issues.

I'd considered only giving honor to the player on the left and only taking honor from the player on your right. Thoughts?

As for bullying, I agree that's an issue in any free-for-all game. I'd considered doing team-based first but thought this would be simpler to at least try something. I'm all for ideas to fix it. Maybe a player who has had one province broken may not be targeted with an attack again this Round?

These are just out of the top of my head, since I'm pretty tired and may not think straight. I might think about it more sincerely tomorrow.

Honor loss through card bidding: How about only the players with the highest and lowest bid exchange honor? In case of a tie, the start player decides who loses/wins the honor tokens.

Conflict participation: This is mainly inspired by Munchkin. First the attacking player may invite another player to participate as a second attacker. He must ask each player individually and can only invite another one, after the first one denied the invitation. As compensation for the additional strength, the attacking player has to pay one honor (maybe fate?) to that player.

Example: Adam attacks Betsy. First, Adam invites Carl to join him. Carl refuses. Now Adam may invite Darla. She agrees and Adam gives her one honor.

After that, the defender may ask for allies. He too must pay one honor.

Additionally, allied attackers/defenders may only send one character and are not allowed to play any cards into that conflict. However, the main participants of a conflict (in our example Adam and Betsy) may play cards like Banzai! on those "borrowed" characters. For the remainder of the conflict and for all purposes those characters are considered to be owned/controlled by them.

Maybe: attachements played on borrowed characters get discarded after the conflict ends.

That's all I have for now.

2 minutes ago, Yakamo no Oni said:

Additionally, allied attackers/defenders may only send one character and are not allowed to play any cards into that conflict. However, the main participants of a conflict (in our example Adam and Betsy) may play cards like Banzai! on those "borrowed" characters. For the remainder of the conflict and for all purposes those characters are considered to be owned/controlled by them.

I will endorse this.

But again, what deck size are you considering here? I’d assume more than the max 45 that we currently have, right?

2 minutes ago, LordBlunt said:

I will endorse this.

But again, what deck size are you considering here? I’d assume more than the max 45 that we currently have, right?

That's not something we can say without playtesting to figure out how much longer a game with three or four player takes to finish. If it's only one or two more rounds, I'd change nothing. If it's like four or five extra game rounds, then yes, the deck size needs to be adjusted accordingly.

@suburbaknght , what I liked the most was players only declaring one attack per round. It makes the need for allies more important.

Edited to include some of the suggestions: honor can only be given to one other player and received from one player during draw, conflicts may only be declared against adjacent players (which means the current limit of losing two provinces/turn still applies), only one ally during a conflict (who may only send a single character), allies must receive an Honor or Fate, and only participating players (attacker, defender, declare allies) may participate in conflicts.

I considered turning over control of allied characters to the attacker/defender, but I want an actively-involved multiplayer so I wanted them to stay under the original player's control, and also serve as a window so the original player can play events.

2 hours ago, suburbaknght said:

Edited to include some of the suggestions: honor can only be given to one other player and received from one player during draw, conflicts may only be declared against adjacent players (which means the current limit of losing two provinces/turn still applies), only one ally during a conflict (who may only send a single character), allies must receive an Honor or Fate, and only participating players (attacker, defender, declare allies) may participate in conflicts.

Thanks for doing this.

All of the suggestions seem feasible at first glance. This should also work with odd and even number of Players in a multiplayer group, I think.

Follow up thoughts:

--> Let's say that we play multiplayer with the same deck size as is (meaning 40-45 Dynasty Cards and Conflict), same number of Provinces (5 total, including the one under your Stronghold), with first player chosen randomly at the beginning of the game-

- How will Imperial Favor work starting Turn 2? (how will it be chosen?)

- How will Events/Actions/Reactions/effects work in the group? (for instance, will Secluded Temple for example work against everyone playing?)

- Dials; how can those be managed?

57 minutes ago, LordBlunt said:

Thanks for doing this.

All of the suggestions seem feasible at first glance. This should also work with odd and even number of Players in a multiplayer group, I think.

Follow up thoughts:

--> Let's say that we play multiplayer with the same deck size as is (meaning 40-45 Dynasty Cards and Conflict), same number of Provinces (5 total, including the one under your Stronghold), with first player chosen randomly at the beginning of the game-

- How will Imperial Favor work starting Turn 2? (how will it be chosen?)

- How will Events/Actions/Reactions/effects work in the group? (for instance, will Secluded Temple for example work against everyone playing?)

- Dials; how can those be managed?

Thanks to everyone for their feedback. I'm sure we'll get official tournament multiplayer rules sooner or later, but right now I know that my casual play group wants something we can all take part in. To answer your questions:

- How will Imperial Favor work starting Turn 2? (how will it be chosen?)

The idea is to change as few rules as possible and only change the things that need changing (i.e. bidding honor for cards is a mechanic that as written directly addresses two players and thus must be modified for larger numbers of players). Imperial Favor goes to whichever player has the highest total of claimed Rings and Glory on Ready characters. If there's a tie for highest, the Favor stays in its current state whatever that may be, whether that's unclaimed or claimed by a player. I could also see a rule that if two or more players are tied for highest and the Favor is held by another player who isn't tied for highest, then the Favor must be returned to an unclaimed state. My concern is that that gets complicated; it's also going to be difficult to claim the Favor until you're down to two players if you can only attack once per round.

- How will Events/Actions/Reactions/effects work in the group? (for instance, will Secluded Temple for example work against everyone playing?)

Again, the intention is that nothing is changed unless it specifically needs to be. Secluded Temple has everyone speculating that FFG intends to do official multiplayer rules at some point since the wording on the card says, "each opponent who controls more characters than you," and thus no change is necessary. Most other cards specify a specific opponent or character in a Conflict or allow a choice, i.e. Way of the Crab says to sacrifice a character and then choose an opponent. I don't think specific cards need to be errata-ed for this.

- Dials; how can those be managed?

I thought I addressed this with the Phase 2 rules. What else needs to be managed?