The 3 Commandments First Impressions

“Once you depart from the Commandments as being the foundation of right and wrong, you are in a free fall.”

Torches are blazing, mists are wafting … in the Holy Circle, the High Priestess celebrates her ritual with her novices. They sing with all their heart, cuddle the artefacts, and rearrange them in ever new patterns. But what if you do not know the religious rules? The best thing is to watch what the others are doing and imitate them. But cautious: Maybe your neighbour just violated a taboo and made the High Priestess angry.

In each round in The 3 Commandments, one player is the High Priestess… They have cards to pick from which they put on stands…

These cards describe certain actions that range from the normal to the frankly very weird 🙂 Only the Priestess can see them.

Of these 4 cards, the first 2 are positive actions that score positive points if that action is taken. The 4th penalises the player if they perform that action with negative points. The 3rd is just a divider between these 2 types of cards.

The Priestess then sets up these wooden pieces on the board in anyway they like…

Players (called Novices) in turn move a Wooden piece on the board after each move the Priestess rewards points depending on how they did based on her 3 Commandments. They place wooden tokens in front of any cards they ‘trigger’ so Novices have some information to go on and say their score out loud.

These are the cards someone picked so you have an idea of how varied they are…

(If you offend another Novice, If you remove the last Artefact from its starting area and the number of colours in the target area)

Scoring

Scoring is fairly complex… considering how silly the game is…

If play gets around the table twice the round ends and Novices score the points they earned. The Priestess then scores the same as the highest scoring Novice.

Every time a Novice takes their turn and scores 0 or negative points a card is flipped over from a row of 4 cards… If someone scores these cards are reset back face down. If this ‘timer’ runs out and ALL Novices score 20 points, the Priestess gets nothing.

After each player has been the Priestess the game ends, and most points win.

The 3 Commandments Positives

An interesting take on a deduction game where the rules change round to round.

The way the game works, the Priestess needs to make the rules difficult but not impossible. Ideally, you want one person to get it and no one else 🙂 (Like Dixit in a way)

Nice pieces 🙂

The 3 Commandments Negatives

With so many actions to take (Use left hand, talk to the piece, dance, insult someone etc) some players take as many as possible on their turn… On one hand, it takes ages for them to take their turn but also, they’re not singling out any particular action so no one wins here.

Dull pieces 🙂

Summary

Interesting game but  I think it would be better if no one knew any of the cards or everyone knew all of them… I’d even consider taking some of the sillier ones out.

I’d play it again though.

Jesta ThaRogue