Citadels of Achiles

Introduction
Citadels is a card game of bluffing, deduction, and city-building for two to seven players, ages 10 and up.

Object of the Game
In Citadels, you and your opponents play the leaders of rival cities increasing their prosperity by building new districts. The game ends after one player builds eight districts, and the players receive points based on what districts they have in their cities. The player with the most points wins.

District Cards
These cards represent the various districts that you can add to your city. Each district card has a cost, represented by a number of gold coins along the card's left edge. In order to put a district card into play, you must pay its cost in gold. Each district card also has a color in the bottom left corner, which tells you what type of district it is:

Color	Type
Yellow	Noble (provides income to the King and Emperor)
Blue	Religious (provides income to the Bishop and Abbot)
Green	Trade (provides income to the Merchant)
Red	Military (provides income to the Warlord and Diplomat)
Purple	Special (provides special benefits described on the cards themselves)

Character Cards
These cards represent the leaders of the players' cities. There are 18 character cards in the game, eight of which are used in the basic game. The other 10 characters are bonus cards, which are used in the expansion game (described later in these rules).
Each character card has a rank number from 1 to 9.

Setting up the basic game
1. Shuffle the eight (or nine) character cards together into one deck. This is called the Character Deck.
2. Shuffle the district cards together into one deck. This is called the District Deck.
3. Deal each player four random district cards from the District Deck.
4. Each player receives two gold from the bank.
5. A player choosen randomly receives the Crown.

Playing the game
Playing the game with 4-6 players is described below. If you are playing with 3, 7 or 8 players, see the special rules on the next page. Citadels is played in a series of rounds. There are four steps in each round.

Step One: Remove Characters
• Draw one card from the Character Deck and set it aside, face-down in the center of the table, without looking at it. This card will not be used this round.
• Draw up to three cards (depending on the number of players, see below) from the Character Deck and set them aside face-up. These cards will also not be used this round.
Note: If you draw the King or the Emperor card to be set aside face-up, immediately replace it with another card from the Character Deck, then shuffle the King or Emperor back into deck.

# of players	# of face-up cards
3	3
4	2
5	1
6-8	0

Step Two: Choose Characters
The player who has the Crown takes the Character Deck and secretly chooses a character. He then passes the remaining character cards to the player on his left, who also chooses a card, and passes the remaining cards to the left. This continues until each player has chosen one card from the Character Deck. The last player chooses from the two remaining cards, and places the last card face-down in the center of the table.

Step Three: Player Turns
once each player has drawn a character card, the player who has the crown calls out the names of each of the char-acters, in the order of their rank numbers. (He first calls out "Assassin" (#1), then "Thief" (#2), and so on.) If none of the players has a given character, the player with the crown moves onto the next character.
When the name of your character card is called, you must reveal your character card, place it face-up in front of you, and take your turn. When your turn is over, the player with the crown calls the name of the next character card. In this manner, play proceeds in the order of the character cards. On Your Turn
On your turn, you must first take an action, then you may build a district card.
1) Take an Action: At the beginning of your turn, you must either
• take two gold from the bank,
• or draw two district cards from the District Deck, choose one to put in your hand, and put the other on the bottom of the deck.
2) Build a District Card: You may build one district card into your city (that is, play it from your hand onto the table in front of you). In order to do so, you must pay the cost of the district, in gold, to the bank. You may choose not to build a district card if you wish.
You may never have two identical districts (two castles, two markets, etc.) in your city.
Each character also has a power. You may use your character's power once during your turn. (The powers of each character are summarized on their cards and detailed at the end of these rules. Be sure to familiarize yourself with the detailed powers before playing.)

Step Four: End of Round
After all the characters have been called, the players return their cards to the Character Deck, which is shuffled, and a new round begins.

Game End
When a player builds an eighth district, the players finish the round. The game ends at the end of that round. At the end of the game, each player receives points as follows:
• Points equal to the total costs of all the districts in a player's city
• + 3 points if a player has districts of each of the five colors
• +4 for the first player to build eight districts
• +2 for each subsequent player to build eight districts

Seven-player Game
During the "Choose Characters" step of a seven-player game, when the seventh player gets one character card from the sixth player, he also takes the face-down discarded card. He then chooses one of these two cards and discards the other one, face-down.
The same is applied to eight players with a ninth character.

Expansion game
This game also includes 10 extra character cards (each marked with a star) which you can add to your Citadels game for more fun and variety. You may include these bonus characters in one of two ways:
1. Before the game, the players agree to remove one or two of the original character cards and replace them with expansion characters of the same rank numbers. For example, you may agree to remove the Merchant (#6) and replace him with the Alchemist (#6).
2. If you use one of the #9 characters, you can play with eight players. When playing with eight players, discard no face-up character cards and use the seven-player rules listed above.
If you decide to use one of the #9 characters in a four- to seven-player game, you must discard a number of cards face-up at the beginning of each round, as detailed below:

# of players	# of face-up cards
3	4
4	3
5	2
6	1
7-8	0