Lights Out and Relighting in The Night Cage

Sooner or later a Wax Eater catches someone, and their candle goes out. Lights Out is not the end of the game or of that Prisoner. But it changes how they move, what they can see, and what the group should do next. This lesson covers the rules, how to move well in the dark, and how to get a candle burning again.

What Lights Out does

When a Wax Eater’s attack hits you, you go Lights Out. Flip your Prisoner Status card to its Lights Out side. Your candle is gone, so you can no longer see anything beyond the tile you stand on. Every tile you had been Illuminating is removed, unless another Prisoner with a lit candle is still lighting it.

If you were alone, the board around you shrinks to the single tile under your feet.

Going Lights Out also brings two lasting penalties:

• You must Move every turn. You are panicked, and you may not Stay. The one way around this is Nerve: spend 1 Nerve to Stay while Lights Out. You do not gain a Nerve for that Stay.
• You move blind. You cannot see the danger ahead.

Moving blind

When a Lights Out Prisoner moves, the rules are different from a lit move. You draw a tile only for the space you move into, not for every open Passage around it. Orient the new tile so it connects to the tile you came from. Then discard the tile you left, unless someone else is still Illuminating it.

So a blind step costs one tile from the Draw Stack, where a lit step can cost several. The catch is that you commit to the step before you know what is there, and the tile you draw might be a Monster.

If you move onto a Monster tile, it attacks at once. You stay Lights Out, discard 3 tiles, and scramble onto an existing adjacent tile or a newly drawn one. The rules also say the attack can hit other Prisoners, so a blind step near friends can cost the group more than one penalty.

Because a Lights Out Prisoner has to move every turn, think one step ahead for them. Ask which way leads toward a lit Prisoner, and which way only leads deeper into the dark.

Relighting

Here is the good news. When a Lights Out Prisoner becomes adjacent to a Prisoner with a lit candle, along a connected Passage, the dark candle relights automatically. No action, no Nerve. Flip the Status card back to the lit side.

Two details make relighting easier than it looks:

• It can happen on either Prisoner’s turn. The dark Prisoner can walk to the lit one, or the lit one can walk to the dark one. Both work.
• Adjacent is not enough on its own. The two tiles must be connected by a Passage. Two Prisoners side by side with a wall between them do not count.

Who draws the new tiles

When a candle relights, it starts Illuminating again, and the empty Passages around that Prisoner need tiles. The player whose turn it is draws them, at the end of that turn. That is step 6 of the turn: after the unlit tiles are removed and the active Prisoner’s own new tiles are placed, the current player draws for the relit Prisoner too.

Relighting costs wax: every newly lit Passage pulls a tile from the Draw Stack. It is still usually worth it, since a lit Prisoner can Stay, see Monsters coming, and choose safe paths.

Regrouping as a team

The best answer to Lights Out is usually a plan the whole table makes together. A few ideas that follow from the rules:

• Pick a meeting tile. Find a space the dark Prisoner can reach on their next forced move, next to a tile a lit Prisoner can reach. Then both move toward it.
• Let the lit Prisoner do the walking when it is safer. A lit Prisoner sees Monsters before stepping near them. The dark Prisoner draws blind. If either could close the gap, the lit one usually takes less risk.
• Keep Nerve for this moment. A Lights Out Prisoner with Nerve can Stay in place and wait for a rescue instead of stumbling forward. See When to Stay and Spend Nerve for the full menu.
• Watch the lines of sight. A rescue route that crosses a Wax Eater’s line can put two candles out instead of relighting one. How Wax Eaters Work covers how to read those lines.

This is where table talk helps most. Talk it through together rather than let one voice decide; our article on the quarterback problem in cooperative games has ideas for keeping every player in the decision.

When everyone is dark

The official FAQ says the Prisoners can still win if they are all Lights Out. It also says that if this happens early in the game, a win is extremely unlikely, and it recommends starting over. Take that advice without guilt. A fresh game teaches more than an hour of blind wandering.