Pax Penning
Pax Penning Rulebook
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Map Legend
- A. Printed chess piece
- B. Market Bowl value
- C. Starting Star
- D. Road space
- E. Difficult Road space
- F. Top of the Hierarchy
- G. Bottom of the Hierarchy
- H. Sigtuna
- I. The King's Path
Setup
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Unfold the map. Place the King/Queen in Sigtuna, and the 3 matching pawns on the lower 3 starting stars.
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Place the Knight, Bishop, Rook, and last Pawn randomly in the top 4 market bowls (1 per bowl).
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Each player seats themselves around the board and takes the following: a screen, all stones in the matching color and 2 coins. Place the stones behind your screen and your coins in front of your screen with a random side up. This is your House.
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Fill the Hierarchy with 1 stone from each player in a random order. Place 1 coin at the bottom with the Silver side up.
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The last player in the Hierarchy order rolls 1 die and places it on an empty Road Space as a Roadblock.
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In Hierarchy Order (top to bottom), each player places 4 stones in Sigtuna, 2 stones in every other player's House, 1 stone at an empty Crossroads as a Runestone, and rolls and places 1 die on an empty Road.
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Begin play, starting with the player at the top of the Hierarchy Order. Then continue Clockwise.
At 3 players
Start with 1 more coin. Place 2 more stones in the other players' Houses and 1 more stone at an empty Crossroads.
On Your Turn
1. Gathering — Roll the Dice
Roll 1 die per Silver you have plus 1 die per stone you choose to move from Sigtuna to your House. With another player's blessing, you may move their stones to your House. If you cannot get any dice, you still roll 1 die.
Generosity was one of the great virtues in the old society. Rulers hosted great feasts and gave beautiful gifts to fuel the political economy. To make things happen, you have to spend more than the minimum.
2. Feast — Check for Pairs
For each set of pairs rolled, move 1 stone from your House to another player's House and choose one:
- Change Standing — Swap 2 adjacent pieces in the Hierarchy.
- Announce Loyalty — Flip any player coin to its other side.
3 of a kind counts as 1 pair. 4 of a kind counts as 2 pairs.
Rolling sets of doubles means that your generosity had the intended effect, and you reap the rewards.
3. Leverage Two Royal Connections
Choose 2 market bowls. You cannot choose market bowls whose value exceeds the amount of Pennings you have. Take 1 chess piece from each, assign them 1 die you rolled, and resolve them (if you only have 1 die, choose 1). If a bowl is empty, resolve the printed chess piece instead (King or Pawn). You may choose both zero-cost bowls.
The chess pieces represent people unknown and unnamed. There were bishops and peasants, and violent people. While traces of their actions remain, their names do not.
4. Clean Up
Move all chess pieces 1 bowl down (they gather in the zero value King bowl), then place the chess pieces you used in the top bowl. Return remaining dice to the general supply.
You can always place and give stones of any color from your House. When sending stones to another House, keep them secret!
Resolving Royal Connections
X refers to the value of the assigned die. You must resolve the full value unless a piece cannot walk any further or you have no more stones in your House.
King or Queen
Place a stone from your House on an empty Crossroads as a Runestone, then move the King X player coins clockwise. You can only take the King's action once per turn.
Additionally, the coin that the King is standing on is blocked (it gives no bonus dice nor does it increase your market reach).
The King was a traveler who spent his life on horseback with his itinerary court. He didn't have taxation rights here, so instead he gathered tributes through Guesting.
The King's Path starts in Sigtuna and continues clockwise along the player coins (starting with the player sitting to the left of Sigtuna). Each coin takes 1 step and when the King has walked all the way around he returns to Sigtuna to Hold the Thing. The King stops when he reaches Sigtuna, regardless of how many steps he has left.
Rook
Place the die on an empty Road space. If you place the last die, the game ends and everyone loses.
The blockades mean many things, but usually boil down to absence of maintenance or presence of violence.
Knight
Remove a die with value X or less from a Road space.
We're still a while away from actual Knights, but folks upheld order, road maintenance, and controlled lands. Sometimes even in the Crown's name.
Bishop
Move X stones from your House to another player's House.
We know very little of how the christianization happened, but the runestones tell us that at this point the people in power had already converted. Why else would they put God and crosses on their runestones?
Pawn
Move a pawn X Road spaces towards Sigtuna. Difficult Road spaces count as 2 steps and dice cannot be passed. For each runestone you pass, its owner places 1 stone from their House in Sigtuna.
If the pawn reaches Sigtuna or lands on another pawn, place 1 stone in Sigtuna, return the pawn to a starting star of your choice and stop moving.
In Swedish, the Pawn is translated as "peasant." They handle goods and labor and connections, the real economy.
Example of a pawn moving 4 steps: a Road is blocked. The Difficult Road costs 2 steps. The yellow player places 1 stone in Sigtuna.
Holding The Thing
When the King returns to Sigtuna, hold the Thing at the end of the player's turn.
The Thing is an old germanic term for a folkmoot where legal and military matters were discussed and maybe resolved. It's still in use in Scandinavian courts.
1. Vote On Supporting Royalty
In Hierarchy order, each player decides if they want to support Olof Skötkonung. If they do, they roll 1 die. If the highest rolled die is equal to or greater than the number of dice on roads, flip the Hierarchy Coin to the Penning side. If it's already on the Penning side, the game immediately ends in the Thegn's Victory.
The attempts at nation building are condensed into two factors: The support of the local movers and shakers, and the connection trade goods and traders.
2. Welcome the Vikings Home
Each player takes 1 coin from the supply and places it in front of their screen with a random side up.
If this is the third Thing, the game ends in the Thegn's Victory if the Coin is at the top of the Hierarchy, or the Jarl's Victory otherwise.
The coins here come from a variety of sources — gifts from the King, Danelaw taxes, Balkan and Volga trade, Byzantine employment, Arabian silver, and piracy. These options closed up in the new millennium, culminating in the disastrous Ingvar Expedition in 1036. Over 25 runestones mention people joining Ingvar and dying on the journey, but none are dedicated to Ingvar himself.
The End of the Game
Thegn's Victory
The player with the most Pennings wins. Ties are broken in Hierarchy Order. If the Thegn is in a Coalition, the entire Coalition wins.
The Thegn (or Thane) was the King's Man, and the King's success became his own. The eyes and hands of feudalism; tax collectors, knights, and heralds of a new age.
Jarl's Victory
The player highest in Hierarchy Order wins, excluding the player(s) with the most Pennings. If the Jarl is in a Coalition, the player with the most stones in their House wins.
The Jarl title has been used in a number of different ways throughout Scandinavian history. Here it represents the independent chieftains who rejected unity in favor of their own strong but local position. They were still Christian though.
Heir's Victory and Coalitions
If you have the most stones in the winner's House, you steal their victory as their Heir. If another player then has the most stones in your House, they become your Heir and steal your victory (and so on). If there's a complete circle of Heirs, those players form a Coalition. You break ties in your House as you wish.
The monk's legal contracts to regulate things like this were still 200 years off. So for now, the most important bonds are family and loyalty.
Components and Art
21 coins
Each one has a Penning side and Silver side.
The Penning arguably is the game's inciting incident — Olof Skötkonung inviting the English coin master Godwine to mint money in his name. The kings of Denmark and Norway did the same thing at the same time. New currency, a new town at the edges of their kingdom, and a new type of society.
The Penning side is adorned with the King's face.
It's actually the English king, but royalty was fungible. The important part was that his name and face on the coin increased its value. You should trust the king, and not weigh his coins.
The Silver side is blank.
Silver came in many shapes and sizes back then. Arabic, English, and Byzantine coins, jewelry and religious artifacts. When the value of silver was measured in weight, all shapes were welcome.
What's important to know is that in Pax Penning, you never actually spend your coins.
This is because at this point in time, Sweden did not have a coinage economy. Everyone used debt, credit, and trade goods, which included silver as an intermediary. In practice this meant that the King's coins were more akin to tiny tokens of loyalty instead of a serious currency.
Your coins are your allegiance and your economic means.
Tying yourself to royalty meant paying taxes through Guesting, but in exchange you gained access to the new systems of society. King, knight, bishop, peasant. Components of feudalism. Tools for exploitation. A societal pyramid with you at the top. Or at least second-in-command.
8 Chess Pieces
The 8 chess pieces (Knight, Rook, Bishop, King or Queen, and 4 pawns) included in the game are split into two colors. One color has all of the action pieces that go in the market bowls, and one color has the moving pieces traveling to and from Sigtuna. Which color is which will vary between copies.
The Lewis Chessmen used in the game are not completely historically accurate — they're a few centuries younger than the game itself. Still, their strong connections to England, feudal titles, and Christianity makes them excellent vessels for the imported ideas (even if they're a bit ahead of time).
105 Glass Stones
Each player gets 21 stones in their House. Their function varies with location.
The glass beads included here are obviously not historically accurate, glass pearls were in high demand among the vikings — some records even indicate 1 glass pearl being equal in value to 1 silver coin. Wine glasses, carafes, bowls, and more were highly regarded status symbols. A far shot from the stereotypical imagery.
5 Player Screens
The player screens included each feature a runestone from the lands around Sigtuna. They also have a translation on the back.
Do they feel cryptic? Do they help you figure out who you play as? These are our major primary sources from the period.
12 Dice
The game's dice determine the Strength of the Royal Connections, make the feasts truly come to life, and block up roads.
They're labor too, of course. The countless invisible hands that make society turn.
The Överhogdal tapestry
The various figures adorning Sigtuna are from the Överhogdal tapestry, a collection of 5 tapestries from the year 1040-1170, and were found in a church attic in 1910. It features both Christian and Pagan motifs.
The church where it was found is about 400 km away from Sigtuna, but it still hints at the same social anxieties about a changing society and religion.
Lies by Omission
We know pretty much nothing about how the actual conversion to Christianity happened. The proto-nobility's runestones already feature God and Christ and their symbols, but we cannot know what the general populace thought of it. Uppsala probably continued to be a strong seat of Pagan influence for at least another 50 years after the game's end or it had brief surges of both faiths waxing and waning. We will never know.
The game is also uninterested in the things going on outside — Olof Skötkonung's war with Norway, the Viking's journeys through Europe, and so on.
Component List
- 1 Game Board
- 1 big rulebook (this one) and 1 small rulebook
- 5 player screens and 5 little standees
- 1 folder for the screens and the small rulebook
- 21 Coins (with 1 Penning side and 1 Silver side)
- 105 stones (21 in each player color)
- 12 dice
- 8 chess pieces (Royal, Knight, Rook, Bishop, 4 Pawns)