12DR Explained 3 of 4

The Hands are “good cards” containing useful tools, useless items and charmed artifacts. The Severed Hand symbol on the cards represents the Hand of Glory—at least the initial stages of its construction. Want to know more? You know how to Google, cha-cha-cha. Suffice to say, the Hand cards are meant to help players defeat The Dark and all its denizens and devices. Players begin the game with only two Hand cards selected from a random draw of 3 to 7 cards depending on how many players participate in a given game. Players can hold no more than 5 Hand cards at a time. To find additional Hand card items, players must declare a 'Search' and can roll to search only as many times as the room occupied has ‘X’s. Roll above 12, you find a Hand card. Good for you! Hand cards can be categorized as useful (15), useless (13) and charmed (8). Useful tools are both obvious (e.g., Butcher Knife and Hand Axe) and not so obvious (e.g., Salt Shaker and Length o’ Rope). The Schulman’s Guide suggests ways to use these useful items in unexpected ways. However, should you come up with an interesting use for a Hand card, you need only convince the other players and the Host (owner of the game) then complete whatever conditions they see fit to impose on you such as roll 9 or better, sacrifice a vital or pay for tacos. Creative thinking and persuasive negotiating are all part of the game. When playing Twelve Dark Rooms, Useless items are just that—or are they? For example, a Skull card that directly effects each player’s ability to hang on to their hard-won items is the Loser Weepers devious trap. A supernatural wind blows through the dark rooms taking one item each from every player. In Twelve Dark Rooms, players decide which of their Hand cards to discard. Those Useless items don’t look so very useless now, eh?

Charmed Items. These very special eight cards each list a magickal property which the possessor may activate as needed. In the Milner Incident, Schulman seemed to know how to use the powers of each of these items—presumably by experience and experimentation. For game purposes, many of the more benign powers Schulman used are written on the card—the idea being that the player’s character learns of these by psychic contact with the object. The more powerful uses Milner documented, and Schulman subsequently elaborated, have been relegated to the Schulman’s Guide. A player must possess the Schulman's Guide Hand card in order to find and activate these magicks.

The Skulls are “bad cards” containing wicked hexes, dark entities, devious traps and bad scares. Roll below 9 at any time, for any reason, you must draw a Skull card and do what it says immediately. Skull cards make up the bulk of The Dark mechanisms, and can seem frustratingly random at first. Seasoned players, however, understand the shifting probabilities of the draw as the game continues and move to bolster their Hand cards early—not always by searching. Additional stratagems become obvious after a play-through or two, while some subterfuges (as in poker) require exceptional mastery of both game mechanics and human nature.

Masking. The most important and immediate interaction between the Hand and Skull cards is ‘masking.’ Players can ‘mask’ the effects of Bad Scares and In The Dark cards by covering them with one of their Hand cards. The In The Dark cards can only be ‘masked’ by a Hand card which emits light, such as the Flashlight. All other useful and charmed Hands can ‘mask’ one Bad Scare except those marked ‘Probably Useless’ at the bottom of the card. The only exception is the Fuzzy Wuzzy teddy bear. This charmed item can mask any number of Bad Scares. If the player loses the teddy bear, however, then all those Bad Scares come crashing down on the player at once, potentially leading to insanity! But what of the devious traps, wicked hexes and dark entities, can these by ‘masked’ as well? The short answer is ‘no,’ while the slightly longer answer is ‘maybe, after many careful studies of the Schulman’s Guide.’

Insane. So what happens if you cannot ‘mask’ your Skull cards? Once a player accumulates five unmasked Skull cards, the player goes insane—possessed by The Dark. The player casts aside all Hand cards—except one sweet weapon—and rolls 4d6 to move through the maze in the dark and attack the nearest player. If the insane player had a weapon, then he or she attacks at 5d6. Yikes! Many play-tests ended like this as novice players selfishly allowed one or two players to quickly succumb to bad rolls and the accumulation of Bad Scares. One memorable play-test in 2010, the first ever of the newly revamped and renamed NoxMaze, had the soon-to-be-insane player pleading for help as he read the consequences of ‘going insane’ to the other players from the Rule Book. His pleas were ignored. Subsequently, after drawing his sixth Skull card—only one of which was ‘masked’ by his Butcher Knife—he went insane. He dispatched the other four players inside 20 minutes, though the bulk of that time was spent trying to ‘find’ the last player who had rolled 5d6 to ‘hide’ in a dark, one-door room. The players were laughing and cutting up throughout the experience, though each 'victim' later reported that the experience was pretty intense—with just a touch of dread—especially when the insane player affected a spooky voice and started quoting Jack Nicholson’s character from The Shining.

Next time… Rolling Dice, Turn-Taking & Between-Turn Play