How to Play The Night Cage

The Night Cage is a cooperative game about being lost in the dark with nothing but a candle. You and your fellow Prisoners crawl through a labyrinth that only exists where your light reaches. Step forward and new Passages appear. Step away and the old ones vanish for good. Somewhere out there are Keys, Gates, and Wax Eaters, monsters that hate the light. Everyone needs a Key, and everyone must reach the same Gate together.

This lesson walks the The Night Cage teach sheet in order. It follows the official rules on Dized, which the publisher maintains, and the official FAQ. Chris Chan, Chris McMahon, and Ross Saunders designed the game, and Smirk & Dagger Games published it in 2021 under its Smirk & Laughter imprint. It plays 1 to 5, ages 14 and up, in about 50 minutes.

What is in the box

• A double-sided board: a 6x6 grid for 1 to 4 players, a 7x7 grid for five.
• Labyrinth tiles: three kinds of Passages (Straights, T’s, and four-ways), Wax Eaters, Keys, and Gates. Every tile has a Pit printed on its back.
• Five candle-shaped Prisoner tokens, five two-sided Prisoner Status cards, and five Start tiles.
• Key tokens and Nerve tokens, a discard board, and a candle-shaped Tile Holder that holds the face-down stack of tiles, called the Draw Stack.
• Advanced tiles (Keepers, Pit Fiends, The Pathless, Omens) that stay in the box for your first games.

Setup

1. Put the advanced tiles back in the box, along with one extra Wax Eater, one Key, and two Crumbling T Passages. Then remove two more Keys. You play with 6 Keys and 12 Wax Eaters. With five players, remove one Key and two Wax Eaters instead, for 7 Keys and 10 Wax Eaters.
2. Lay out the board, 6x6 side up (7x7 for five players). Key and Nerve tokens go on their marked corners. Set out the discard board.
3. There are always four Prisoners in a 1 to 4 player game and five in a five-player game. Each Prisoner gets a Status card, a candle token, a Start tile, and one Nerve. Solo, you run all four. Two players run two each. Three players share the fourth.
4. Set aside 4 T, 2 four-way, and 2 straight Passages (5, 3, and 2 with five players). Shuffle them face down, Pit side up.
5. Shuffle every other tile Pit side up and stack them into the Tile Holder. Put the set-aside Passages on top. Those are the first tiles anyone draws.
6. The host goes first. Play goes clockwise.

On each Prisoner’s first turn, place your Start tile on any empty, unlit space, turned however you like, and put your candle on it. Your Start tile has two exits. Draw a tile for each exit and place it so its Passage connects to yours.

Your candle and the edge of the world

Your candle lights one space around you along connected Passages. Diagonals stay dark. Whenever an open Passage leads from your tile into an empty lit space, you draw a tile, look at it, and place it there so it connects back to you.

When a tile is no longer lit by anyone, it goes to the discard board, gone forever. Walk back the way you came and you will find new Passages. Adjacent tiles that are not connected to you are discarded too, unless they form a wall blocking one of your Passages: you can still see that wall, so it stays.

The board has no edges. Go off one side and you come back on the opposite side, and the Wax Eaters can see across that seam too.

On your turn: Stay or Move

Move one space along a connected Passage onto the next tile. Only one Prisoner fits on a tile, except on a Gate. Then discard tiles nobody lights anymore and light your new Passages. You draw nothing for a Passage another Prisoner already lights.

Stay where you are. Staying burns wax: discard the top tile of the Draw Stack face up. If that tile is a Monster, it is not discarded. It must replace one of the tiles connected to you. You also gain 1 Nerve, up to a limit of 2. That Nerve arrives at the very end of your turn, so you cannot spend it until a later turn.

Nerve lets you bend the rules: Move Again, Block an attack, and more. A later lesson covers each one.

Dangers in the dark

Wax Eaters. These Monsters watch in four straight lines, as far as an unbroken Passage runs. If you Move or Fall in that line, the Wax Eater attacks, and every Prisoner still in its line is hit. Each one hit discards 3 tiles from the Draw Stack and goes Lights Out: their candle stops lighting anything beyond their own tile. A Lights Out Prisoner is relit as soon as they are next to a lit Prisoner through a connected Passage. Staying never triggers a Wax Eater.

Crumbling tiles. Start tiles, Straight Passages, Key tiles, and two of the T’s have thin crack lines. On your turn after you step onto one, it collapses into a Pit. Move off and you scramble to safety. Stay and you Fall.

Falling is not death. Your token waits at the board edge in your row or column. On your next turn, choose an empty space in that line, draw a tile to land on, and carry on.

Keys, Gates, and the end

Step onto a Key tile to take a Key token. Each Prisoner can hold one, and Prisoners next to each other through a connected Passage can pass a Key on either Prisoner’s turn. To win, every Prisoner must stand on the same Gate at the same time, each holding a Key.

When the Draw Stack runs out, Final Flickers begins. No new tiles come in, and after each turn you must remove one more lit tile from the board. If all four Gates are lost, if you cannot each get a Key, or if the dark cuts someone off, you all lose together. The game is meant to be hard. Our list of the best cooperative board games has gentler co-ops for a warm-up.