Teach The Night Cage in ten minutes

On your turn

1. Stay or Move. Stay: discard 1 Draw Stack tile; gain 1 Nerve at the end of your turn.
2. Move: go 1 space along a connected Passage. Only Gates hold more than one Prisoner.
3. Staying draws a Monster? It must replace a tile connected to you instead of being discarded.
4. You light one space around, no diagonals: fill newly lit Passages, discard tiles nobody lights.
5. Crumbling tiles (cracked edges) become Pits on your next turn after stepping on them. Stay and you Fall.
6. Falling: next turn, land on a fresh tile in an empty, unlit space in the Pit's row or column.
7. Move or Fall in a Wax Eater's straight line and it attacks every Prisoner still in that line.
8. Spend Nerve to Move Again, Block, Charge, Sustain, or Stay while Lights Out.

Setup

1. Remove the advanced tiles. Keep 6 Keys and 12 Wax Eaters (5 players: 7 Keys, 10 Wax Eaters).
2. Use the 6x6 board side (7x7 for 5 players). Key and Nerve tokens go on their corners.
3. Each Prisoner gets a status card, a candle token, a Start tile, and 1 Nerve.
4. Set aside 4 T, 2 four-way, 2 straight Passages (5, 3, 2 for 5 players). Shuffle them.
5. Shuffle the rest Pit side up into the Tile Holder. Put the set-aside stack on top.
6. The host goes first; play goes clockwise. First turn: place your Start tile on any empty, unlit space.

Scoring

• Step onto a Key tile: take a Key token. One Key per Prisoner. Adjacent connected Prisoners may pass Keys.
• Hit by a Monster: discard 3 tiles from the Draw Stack and go Lights Out.
• Lights Out: see only your tile, Move every turn, relight when a Passage connects you to a lit Prisoner.
• Win: every Prisoner on the same Gate at once, each holding a Key.

Game end: When the Draw Stack runs out, Final Flickers begins: after every turn, remove one more lit tile from the board unless Nerve is spent to Sustain. Escape before the dark isolates anyone, or you lose together.