Dwaalhof

In the hall

The dice

Ordinary six-sided dice only, in two rolls a turn. The walking roll is always two dice; the pips are your steps and you split them freely across three pawns. The court roll uses your dice pool: two at the start, more as your Reputation grows, six at most. That single roll settles all your actions at once. Favour lets you bend it after it has landed — reroll the lowest die, nudge it up by one, or add a die.

The court market

Four cards lie face up, shared by both players, and at the start of your turn you take one. What you leave is there for your opponent: taking is also denying. Beside them runs a second row of commissions — the nearest is free, and every place deeper costs a Relation. A card is only activated after the roll, at a fixed cost in pips taken off that same total.

The board

A hex grid of 91 tiles, cut into its own coastline afresh every match. Ten tiles do something: the Town Square at its heart, where all six pawns start, and nine houses that move every match. Between them lie shuffled path tiles — straight, bend, T-junction, crossroads — and you turn those yourself as you play. If there is no road where you want to go, you turn one towards you. Lakes and woodland are not walls but expensive crossings: go round, jump over, or find a bridge.

The manuscripts

Three leaves lie here in the case; two more hang on the wall. All five are public domain, and the game itself uses all five. What follows is about the leaves themselves — where they come from and what is actually depicted. What the game does with them comes last. Roundel Bible moralisée, 13th century. Public domain. A Bible moralisée is a picture Bible with a fixed recipe: every page stacks roundels in two columns, each a scene from Scripture with the moralisation beneath it — what that scene means for the reader. This is one of those commentary roundels, not the scene itself. On a gold ground two couples embrace. Behind them stand two devils: a small horned one holding something aloft, and a larger one with an ass's head in a red cloak, leaning over the right-hand pair. Those devils are not part of any story and nobody in the picture sees them. They are the gloss: they are there to say what the embrace is — desire prompted from outside. That is the genre's standard device, and it is why such roundels are so full of devils. Which manuscript this leaf comes from is not recorded. Several thirteenth-century Bibles moralisées survive, and the source of this fragment did not travel with the file. In the game this is the picture on the court cards that strike your opponent: the sting comes from the side. Marginalia Thirteenth- or fourteenth-century manuscript, illuminator unknown. Public domain. In the margin beside a blue initial lies a creature with an animal's hindquarters — tawny, clawed, long-tailed — joined to a human arm in a blue sleeve with the index finger extended. Two things meet here. The creature is a drollery: the half-beast, half-something-else figures illuminators drew in the margins, busy with things the text never mentions. Often that is the only trace of the artist's own humour in an otherwise solemn book. The pointing hand is a manicula, the medieval reader's “this is the bit” — added by hand in the margin, and the ancestor of the arrow in a bulleted list. Here they have become one figure: the pointer has grown a body. This leaf's source is not recorded either. In the game it sits beside the rulebook's contents, where a pointing finger still does what it always did. Sea serpent Olaus Magnus, Carta Marina, Venice 1539. Public domain. A red serpent coils around a ship and rears its head over the deck. Beside it lies a second monster like a crested crocodile; further off two ships sail along the coast of “Hegalandia, terra nobilium”, and a sounding is marked in the water. The straight lines crossing the sea are rhumb lines, which a helmsman laid his course along. Olaus Magnus was an exiled Swedish archbishop, and the Carta Marina is the first detailed map of the Nordic countries. The monsters on it are not decoration and not a joke. He meant them as warnings and published a separate key explaining each beast in turn; sailors' accounts of whales, squid and walruses reached the page as monsters by that route. This is how, in 1539, you put on a map that a stretch of sea is dangerous. In the game, the lake monsters on the board are drawn from this.

The rulebook

The full court regulation sits inside the game itself, as an illuminated parchment leaf with contents, initials and real fragments of play as illustration. Thirteen chapters: aim, materials, setup, the four phases, the nine houses, the court events, the court cards, the court, and the final count. What is on these walls is the summary you can sit down with; the page beneath this hall carries the rest.

Four phases, six rounds

Every turn runs through four fixed phases, always in the same order: draw, walk, choose an action, roll. At each house where a pawn stands you pick one of two roads. The low road pays a resource and has no threshold; the roll only decides how much. The high road pays Standing against a threshold of 9, 11 or 13, for 1, 2 or 4 — miss it and you get 1 Favour. After six rounds, whoever holds the most Standing wins. Relations, Reputation, Money and Favour are worth nothing at the end: they are tools, not score.

The harness

Not a historical object but hall dressing, built here out of simple shapes. It stands here because this hall is dressed as medieval; the game itself has no knights. What is genuinely medieval in this room hangs on the wall and lies in the case.

The sea serpent

Eight and a half metres, slung from the hall's beams the way a natural history museum hangs a whale. It comes from Olaus Magnus's Carta Marina, Venice 1539 — that leaf is in the case — and reached this room by way of the game: the lake monsters on the board are drawn from the same picture. On the map it is two centimetres long and coiled around a ship. Here it is at the size Olaus claimed for it himself. Vermilion over a pale belly, and a row of separate spines along its back: that is how the map colours it, and it is why the back has no continuous ridge. Nothing else about it is genuine — it was built here out of one swept tube. What is genuine is the print it came from.

On the wall and in the case