Light and Darkness in The Night Cage

The Night Cage has no round track, no timer, and no countdown cards. It has a stack of tiles sitting in a candle-shaped Tile Holder. The rules call those tiles the Draw Stack and say they represent the remaining candlelight and any hope of escape. Their advice is short: conserve their use. This lesson is about what that means in practice.

The Draw Stack is your clock

When the last tile leaves the Draw Stack, Final Flickers begins. No new tiles can reach the board, and at the end of every Prisoner’s turn one more lit tile is removed from anywhere on the board, unless the Prisoner whose turn it was spends a Nerve to Sustain. From then on, the labyrinth only shrinks.

The stack measures two things at once. It is how long your light lasts, and it is where the Keys and Gates you have not found yet are hiding. Every tile that leaves the stack without helping you is a little less time and possibly a Key or Gate you will never see.

Every tile out of the stack is wax

Tiles leave the Draw Stack in several ways, and they all spend the same candle.

• Moving: one tile for each open Passage leading from your new space that no Prisoner already lights.
• Staying: one tile discarded face up.
• Monster hits: three tiles for each Prisoner hit, or two for a Prisoner who spends a Nerve to Block.
• Falling: a tile to land on, then tiles for the unlit Passages around you.

Seen this way, a Wax Eater attack that hits two Prisoners costs six tiles. A single Move draws at most three tiles for your own light, since one Passage of your new tile always leads back to where you came from. Relighting a friend adds more. Avoiding Monsters is not only about staying lit. It is about wax.

Discards go face up onto the Discard Board, sorted by type, so the whole table can see what was lost. Glance at it often. It tells you which Keys and Gates are gone for good.

Light fewer new Passages

Because a Move draws one tile per open, unlit Passage from your new space, the tile you step onto sets the price. A Straight Passage usually opens one new space ahead of you. A T can open two. A four-way can open three. Remember that the edges wrap: a Passage that runs off one side of the board lights the matching space on the opposite side, and that space costs a tile too.

This does not make four-ways bad. More Passages mean more choices next turn and more chances to turn up a Key or a Gate. Straights have their own cost, since they are Crumbling and you will have to Move off next turn or Fall. The point is to know the price before you pay it. When two Moves get you equally close to where you want to go, the cheaper one is usually the better one.

Share light with your neighbors

No tile is drawn for a Passage another Prisoner already Illuminates. So when Prisoners work near each other, part of every Move is already paid for. Shared tiles also last longer, because a tile is discarded only when no Prisoner lights it.

Spreading out has its own value: more of the board gets explored, and a Key or Gate is more likely to turn up near someone. But every Prisoner on their own pays full price for their patch of light. Neither choice is always right. Talk about it as a group, the way you would plan any shared budget. Staying near each other also matters for Lights Out, since a dark Prisoner is relit by becoming adjacent, through a connected Passage, to a lit one. Lesson 9, Lights Out and Relighting, covers that.

Dead ends are walls that stay

Your candle lights one space along each connected Passage. Diagonal spaces are never lit. Adjacent tiles that are not connected to you by a Passage are discarded. There is one exception: a tile that blocks one of your Passages stays on the board, because you can still see the wall it makes.

That dead end costs nothing to keep. No tile is drawn for that Passage, since the space is already filled. It also stays when the Prisoner who first placed it walks away, as long as your Passage still faces it. The tradeoff is that you cannot go that way. A dead end is cheap light and a closed door at the same time.

Going back means a new maze

Any tile that passes out of every Prisoner’s light is discarded forever. So if you retrace your steps, the Passages you meet will be new ones, drawn fresh from the stack. Going back is never a return to a known, safe place. It costs new tiles, and the path may not be there anymore. Plan routes forward when you can.

If you want the full turn order beside you while you play, the teach sheet has it on one page.