20 Strong: Tanglewoods Gold Rulebook

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

• Contents
• Winning & Losing
• Setup
• Components
  • Hero Cards
  • Map Cards
  • Table Diagram
  • Minion and Fable Cards
  • Item Cards
• Round Structure
  • Map Phase
• Ambush Effects
• Forest Phase
  • Wild Direction Icons
  • Tableau Example
• Bribery Phase
• Engagement: Strategy Phase
• Engagement: Resolve Phase
  • Additional Cleanup Instructions
• Day and Night
• Item Cards
• Visiting the Merchant
  • Merchant Card Actions
• Gold
  • Item Limit
• The Bears
  • Papa Bear
  • Baby Bear
  • Mama Bear
• Universal Heroes
• Difficulty Scaling
• Round Flow

Contents

This rulebook, 5 hero cards, 3 bear cards, 44 forest cards (26 minions and 18 fables), 15 item cards, 15 map cards, 1 Merchant Card, 1 Brothers Grimm Card.

Winning & Losing

To win Tanglewoods: Gold, you must defeat three bear bosses: Baby Bear, Papa Bear, and Mama Bear.

As in all games of 20 Strong, if your Health is ever reduced below 1, you lose.

Setup

0. Dized. For a quick start use the interactive DIZED Tutorial. It will walk you through the setup and game rules step by step while you play! Simply scan the QR on page 2.
1. Choose a Hero. Choose freely among the five hero cards. Some require you to begin on one side of the card or the other, but if the one you choose does not, you may freely select a starting side as well. Place it on the table as shown in the Table Diagram on pages 12-13. Return the rest of the hero cards to the box.
2. Stats & Gold. Set your Health, Strategy, and Recovery dice to the values on your hero card and place them next to it. Turn your chip — called a gold tracker in Tanglewoods: Gold — to its numerical side. Then, set it to 20 minus the sum of your three starting stats.
3. Prepare the Play Area. Lay out the various cards and decks as shown in the Table Diagram and described below.
   • Stock the Shop. Shuffle the item cards into an Item Deck with their ordinary (brown) and upgraded (yellow) sides facing the same direction. Place them on the table as shown with the ordinary sides face-up. Put the Merchant Card on top of them.
   • Cultivate the Forest. Shuffle the fable and minion cards together into a single deck, making sure that all of the daytime (sun icon) and nighttime (moon icon) sides face the same way. This is the Forest Deck. Place it on the table as shown with its daytime side face-up.
   • Ready Your Map. Shuffle the map cards with their daytime (green) and nighttime (purple) sides facing the same way. Place this Map Deck as shown with its daytime side face-up.
   • Bears Abound. Set the three bear cards in a stack as shown with their enemy sides, rather than their modifier sides, face-up. The order doesn't matter.

Components

Hero Cards

Each hero card shows a Name, an Ability, a Flip Trigger, and its Starting Health, Starting Strategy, and Starting Recovery.

Map Cards

Each map card has a daytime side (green) and a nighttime side (purple). The daytime side shows Directions and Effects. Some map cards also show a Merchant Icon.

Table Diagram

The Table Diagram (pages 12-13) shows where each component goes. Its labelled areas are: Map Deck, Active Map Card, Forest Deck, Tableau (Active Area: Minions & Fables), Stat Dice, Hero Card, Gold Tracker, Dice Pool, Exhausted Dice, Banished Dice, Three Bears Cards, Item Deck (with Merchant on Top), Item Deck Discard, Map Deck Discard, Forest Deck Discard, and Inventory.

Minion and Fable Cards

Minion cards show a Day/Night Icon, a Direction, a Name, Health, Damage, Bribe, an Effect, and a Reward. Fable cards show a Direction, a Name, and Effect(s), with a Daytime Side and a Nighttime Side.

Item Cards

Each item card has a Name, an Effect, and a Cost. It has an Ordinary Side and an Upgraded Side.

Round Structure

Each round in Tanglewoods: Gold has the Activation and Engagement parts that are common to the core 20 Strong rules. Each step of these two parts is described in the sections that follow.

Map Phase

Map cards represent the twisting paths you must navigate to find your way through the forest.

At the start of each Activation, draw a number of map cards from the top of the deck equal to your Strategy. Then, choose one of them to activate and discard the others into the Map Deck discard.

Every map card has two sides — daytime (green) and nighttime (purple) — and three potential pieces of information.

• Map Directions. Each map card shows a series of direction icons (north, south, east, and west) you must match to enemies and fables in order to complete the card.
• Map Effects. Each map card also has an effect. Ambush effects arise immediately when selected. Special effects proceed according to their instructions. After effects activate during the After Effects step, as in other 20 Strong games.
• Merchant Icon. Some map cards have a merchant icon, indicating that you may visit the merchant at the end of the round.

Ambush Effects

Tanglewoods: Gold has a new effect type called ambush. It appears on certain map cards, minion cards, and fable cards.

Any time you draw a card with an ambush effect, you must immediately resolve it. There are two exceptions to this general rule:

• If an ambush effect causes a new ambush effect to be revealed, such as requiring a card to be flipped or forcing a new draw, those new effects do not activate.
• If a card with an ambush effect is removed from your hand before it can be resolved, or flipped to conceal its effect before it can be resolved, the corresponding ambush effect is not activated.

Anytime you draw several cards — such as when you draw several map cards to choose one — you must resolve all drawn effects, even though only one drawn card will remain in play. Multiple effects drawn at the same time can be resolved in the order of your choice.

If an ambush effect forces you to add that card to your tableau, adding it satisfies the Forest phase's requirement that you add a drawn card to your tableau. That is, you do not add another card beyond the forced one (exception: if multiple cards flipped at once have effects that require adding them to your tableau, you must add all of them).

Forest Phase

In the Forest phase of Activation, you must build a tableau of cards from the Forest Deck that meet the direction icon requirements of your map card.

To build this tableau, you'll draw, choose, and place cards, one at a time, until you complete your map.

1. Draw & Choose. Each time you're ready to add another card to the tableau, begin drawing cards from the Forest Deck.

   • Draw cards one at a time from the bottom of the Forest Deck. If you draw a card with an Ambush effect, it must be resolved immediately (see "Ambush Effects" on pages 16-17).
   • After each draw, either place one of the cards you've drawn so far into the tableau, or continue and draw another card to expand your options.
   • You can draw up to a total number of cards equal to your Strategy before you are forced to stop drawing and place one of the cards you've drawn.
   • If you would draw a card and the Forest Deck is empty, shuffle the Forest Deck discard to create a new Forest Deck. Do not flip the discard over or change the facing of any of the cards, as the side discarded face-up is the side you are meant to face when you draw them again.

   As you continue to draw or choose not to, you'll be balancing the flexibility of increasing the pool of cards you can choose from with the peril that any given card you draw might have an ambush effect with an undesired effect.

2. Place & Check. Place the card you chose into your tableau. Discard the other cards you drew but did not select, with the drawn side face-up. Then, check to see if the direction icons on the cards of the tableau collectively satisfy the roster of direction icons shown on your map card.

   • If some icons on your map are still missing from your tableau, return to the "Draw & Choose" step to select another card, checking the map icons again after each forest card you add to the tableau.
   • On the other hand, if you check your new card and your map is now complete, finish any immediate action it requires and move on to the Bribery phase. You cannot continue drawing once the map is complete.

As forest cards join your tableau, their special and ambush effects activate immediately. These may affect how you can continue to build your tableau.

You will often add more cards to your tableau than are needed to satisfy your map. This leads to more difficult engagements than are strictly necessary, but can also grant beneficial rewards!

Some forest cards do not have a direction icon on them. They complicate your encounter (or sometimes, help you!) without any potential to help satisfy your map.

The physical order of the map cards in your tableau doesn't matter. You can arrange and rearrange them as you wish. They do not need to be lined up in the order you drew them, nor arranged in the order shown on your map card.

Wild Direction Icons

Some forest cards have wild direction icons (a leaf symbol). A wild icon can be used to satisfy any of the glyphs on your map, and wild icons can be re-assigned as needed over the course of a round (if, for example, your map card changes due to some effect).

Different wild icons in your tableau can be used to satisfy different directional icons. That is, all of your wild icons don't need to stand in for icons of the same direction.

Wild icons are allowed to be assigned sub-optimally. That is, you may choose to assign a wild icon as a map direction that the map does not require in order to keep drawing more cards to add to your tableau.

Wild icons never count as one of the four directional icons for the purposes of other effects. This is true even when a wild icon is currently "standing in" for an icon of the specified type.

Tableau Example

In this tableau, four forest cards have been drawn, from left to right. Card 1 fulfilled one of the three requirements of the map card. Card 2 was no help because there is no east on the map. Card 3 did not satisfy the map, but its wild icon made future draws more flexible (because the wild can fill either south or west).

Card 4 completes the tableau if you choose to assign the wild as a west map icon.

Bribery Phase

After you have built a tableau that satisfies your map, you may reduce the danger it represents in the Bribery phase of Activation by bribing enemies in your tableau to leave you alone.

Most enemies have a Bribe stat. To bribe them, pay that much gold from your gold tracker, flip the enemy to its nighttime side, and discard it to the Forest Deck discard pile. It leaves the active area.

Bribed enemies confer no rewards, nor have they been "defeated" for any rule that references defeat.

They have simply been removed as obstacles to your progress.

Next, proceed to Engagement's Strategy phase.

Engagement: Strategy Phase

In the Strategy phase, you use the dice in your pool to battle the active enemies until you overcome them or lose the game.

The steps of this phase — Commit Dice, Roll Dice, and Apply Dice — work as explained in the core 20 Strong rules, and you can repeat the phase's steps a number of times equal to your Strategy, also in accordance with 20 Strong's core rules. Refer to the 20 Strong General Rules of Play (pp. 12-14) if you need a refresher.

Engagement: Resolve Phase

In the Resolve phase, you realize the consequences of the Strategy phase.

The steps of this phase — Suffer Damage, After Effects, Exhaust Dice, Recover Dice, Gain Item Rewards, and Cleanup — work just like they do in the 20 Strong General Rules of Play (pp. 15-16) with three exceptions.

• There are a few additional Cleanup instructions for certain cards (see below).
• Tanglewoods: Gold has no Gain Item Rewards step.
• After Cleanup, there is a new step called Visit the Merchant. This step is optional but can only be taken if the completed map card had a merchant icon on it. Otherwise, skip this step.

Additional Cleanup Instructions

• Flip Enemies & Fables to Night. All enemies and fables with their daytime side face-up that remain in the active area at Cleanup are flipped to their nighttime side when they are discarded.
• Flip the Map to Night. Finally, if your map card's daytime side was face-up, flip it to its nighttime side as you discard it.

Day and Night

Many cards in Tanglewoods: Gold have daytime and nighttime faces.

All of these cards begin the game with their daytime side face-up. However, through the course of play, many will flip to their nighttime sides. This makes the game progressively harder.

Different cards can be in different daytime or nighttime states without issue. That is to say, just because some card or effect may instruct you to place or flip one forest card to daytime or nighttime, no other cards are necessarily affected unless you are otherwise instructed.

Importantly, when you discard a card with daytime and nighttime sides, don't flip it over unless specifically instructed to do so, such as being bribed, or as with enemies and fables during Cleanup (see "Additional Cleanup Instructions" on page 29). Rather, leave it with its current side face-up, even though this creates discard piles with different cards faced in different directions.

Leave these discards' facings alone even when reshuffling them to form new decks. In this way, daytime will gradually be replaced by nighttime over the course of a game.

Item Cards

Item cards have an Ordinary Side and an Upgraded Side. Each item card has a Name, an Effect, and a Cost.

Visiting the Merchant

The merchant provides the opportunity to pay gold for items that may help you on your travels.

Each time you visit the merchant, do the following.

1. Stock the Shop. Reveal the bottom three item cards from the Item Deck. Set them out with their ordinary (brown) sides face-up. These become the shop and can be individually purchased with the buy merchant action. If the Item Deck is ever empty when you would draw an item, reshuffle the Item Deck discard into a new deck.
2. Pay Gold. You may spend gold on any of the five merchant actions shown on the Merchant Card. You may perform the same merchant action as many times as you wish and can afford per visit (exception: you can only Buy three times, for obvious reasons), and you may perform the merchant actions in any order. To perform a merchant action, simply pay the listed cost, which is deducted from the running total on your tracker. You can only choose options you can afford. You may also choose not to take any merchant actions.
3. Tidy Up. Once you are done taking merchant actions, discard any shop items you didn't purchase to the Item Deck discard pile.

Merchant Card Actions

Action	Cost	Effect
Mend	2	Recover one die.
Forge	4	Flip an item in your inventory to its upgraded side.
Bait	5	Shuffle any one set-aside bear into the forest deck.
Buy	X	Gain an item from the shop, paying its printed cost.
Forest Blessing	X	+1 to any stat. The cost is the current value of the stat x3.

Gold

Gold is a resource in Tanglewoods: Gold that's tracked with your 20 Strong chip. Generally, gold is spent to bribe enemies and buy from the Merchant, and gained by defeating enemies.

Using gold is straightforward — spending gold reduces your total, gaining it increases your total — but there are a few necessary clarifications and additional rules.

• Your stockpile of gold can never exceed 20.
• You can never reduce your total below zero.
• If an effect or opportunity requires you to pay some amount of gold and you don't have enough, you neither spend any gold nor receive the effect or opportunity.
• If an effect says you must "lose" or "subtract" gold, this is not optional unless otherwise stated. If you don't have the amount specified, reduce your gold to zero, losing as much as you can.
• Gold is not a stat. Your store of gold can't be modified by effects that increase or decrease stats.

Item Limit

As in the 20 Strong General Rules of Play, your Strategy limits the number of items you can have at once.

The Bears

The bosses in Tanglewoods: Gold are the three bears, a looming trio of enemies you must defeat before they defeat you.

The three bear cards begin the game in a separate stack. Before they can be defeated, they must be drawn out — that is, shuffled into the Forest Deck — using the Bait merchant action. Once in the Forest Deck, they enter play as normal for forest cards.

The bears are considered bosses, but Engagements where they are active are resolved as normal Engagements. That is, they do not use the endgame rules (there is no endgame, per se, in Tanglewoods: Gold).

When you defeat a bear, flip its card over and place it near your hero. It provides both a positive and negative modifier for the rest of the game. Flipped bear cards are not items; they do not count against your item limit.

Undefeated bears are discarded as normal, but do not flip to nighttime during Cleanup, as they have no nighttime side.

If you defeat the third bear, you win the game immediately!

Papa Bear

Enemy side: Health 7, Damage 2.

• Ambush: Set aside all exhausted dice. Exhaust the same number of ready dice (or as many as possible). Then, add the set-aside dice to the dice pool.
• Ambush: Deal 1 fewer damage to all enemies for each bear that has been defeated this game.

Modifier side:

• Positive modifier: You may treat every map as if it has a merchant icon.
• Negative modifier: At the end of each Activation, if no daytime cards were drawn this Activation, -1 Health.

Transcription note: the card symbols on the modifier side are small pictograms. The positive modifier's symbol is read here as the merchant icon, the same icon that appears on map cards.

Baby Bear

Enemy side: the card's stat values are printed as 4 and 1 on the thumbnail.

• Ambush: Immediately draw four forest cards. For each enemy drawn, either add the enemy to your tableau or -1 to any stat.
• Ambush: Baby Bear has +1 (droplet symbol) and +1 Damage for each non-boss enemy in the tableau (including defeated enemies).

Transcription note: the Baby Bear card appears in the rulebook only as a small thumbnail on the Table Diagram page, partly covered by its label. Which printed value is Health and which is Damage, and the droplet symbol, are not legible in the rulebook and should be checked against the physical card. The Baby Bear's modifier side is not printed in this rulebook.

Mama Bear

The rulebook does not print the Mama Bear card's stats, effects, or modifier side. They are on the physical card.

Universal Heroes

When playing with a non-Tanglewoods universal hero, take note of the Brothers Grimm Card. Any time a game effect would cause your hero to flip, instead replace it with the Brothers Grimm.

Difficulty Scaling

The difficulty table on the following pages runs from 0 to 10. These 11 levels allow you to make Tanglewoods: Gold easier or harder, to take it easy or to challenge yourself.

You must choose your difficulty level during setup; it can't be altered during play.

If you are a beginner to 20 Strong, try your first game at zero. If you have played 20 Strong before, try your first game at 5. If you succeed, move up a level until you can beat the game at 10, and if you're finding the game too difficult, feel free to move down a level.

Difficulty Level	Effect
0	Choose and defeat one bear of your choice.
1	+1 to two different stats, if able.
2	Gain and upgrade a random item.
3	Start with 20 gold.
4	Increase your Health by 1.
5	Look at the top two cards of the Forest Deck. You may put them on the top or bottom in any order.
6	Banish two dice of different colors.
7	-1 to any stat.
8	Start with 0 gold.
9	In the first round of the game, flip all drawn map cards to nighttime when drawing them.
10	Take 20 random forest cards, flip them to nighttime, and shuffle them back into the Forest Deck. In campaign play, do this before adding the campaign enemies.

Round Flow

1. Activation
   • Map Phase
   • Forest Phase
     • Draw & Choose
     • Place & Pick
   • Bribery Phase
2. Engagement
   • Strategy Phase (Repeat = Strategy stat)
     • Commit Dice
     • Roll Dice
     • Apply Dice
   • Resolve Phase
     • Suffer Damage
     • After Effects
     • Exhaust Dice
     • Recover Dice
     • Cleanup
     • Visit the Merchant (if map card has a merchant icon; optional)

The reference sheet prints "Place & Pick"; the Forest Phase body text calls this step "Place & Check".