Paladin (2004)

Theme
Brave knights are gathering to plan their honourable endeavours and to find out who will be the bravest Paladin facing the most honourable missiona.

Goal
To collect as many honour points as possible by winning mission cards.

Setup
Each player gets 5 player tokens of one colour.

The 18 mission cards are sorted into two stacks, according to their honour point values (1-6). Each stack is shuffled separately, then the stack with the lower value mission cards (queen's deck, values 1-3) is placed on top of the other (king's deck, values 4-6).

Mission cards equal to the number of players are laid out, face up.

The card dealer shuffles the 42 paladin cards and hands out 4-6 (depending on the number of players) cards to each player. Paladin cards have values from 0-9.

Game play
Each player, beginning with the start player, puts one of his/her paladin cards next to one of the mission cards, face down, and marks it with one of his/her player tokens. This paladin is called the leading paladin. When each mission card has a leading paladin, players continue playing cards clockwise until each player has placed a card beside each mission.
Before placing a card, players may look at one of the cards another player has already placed. Each player can only play one paladin per mission.
When each player has only one card left, the paladin cards are resolved, starting with the first mission and the first card that was placed there. Each player has the following options:

• Beat the leading paladin if your card has a higher value (or in case they are equal, if it is a red number).
• Take the face-down paladin card back on your hand.
• Discard the face-down paladin card.

This continues until all cards at the first mission have been dealt with. The player whose card is the last to stay wins the mission and places it, together with the winning paladin card, in front of him/herself. The same is done for the other mission cards.

The player with the fewest honour points is the dealer of the next round and hands out paladin cards until everyone has the same number of cards as in the first round. The dealer then lays out new mission cards and determines a start player.

The game ends when there are not enough mission cards left for another round. Each player counts the honour points from the missions he/she won and adds bonus points for all paladin cards with red numbers that the/she has in front of him/herself. The player with the most points wins the game.