Two players, two completely different jobs
Violet is walking through the night forest to meet her friend Ordep, and her lantern is burning down as she goes. Torech, a nisse who has decided the forest is his, spends the whole game making that walk worse. One player takes each role, and the two sides are not variations on one job — they have different win conditions, different decisions and a different feel. Every turn both players lay one card, and who wins it decides whether Violet gains ground or loses fuel.
Play Violet and the Grumpy Nisse free →
Only one of these has to happen, and all three are live at once:
The tension is that Violet cannot simply hurry. Every step costs fuel, and stopping to refill costs a turn she could have spent walking.
The deck is 36 cards: values 1 to 9 in four suits — lake, forest, mountain and crystal. There is no following suit and no restriction of any kind: on your turn you may play any card in your hand.
The comparison has one rule and a short list of powers that override it. The rule is that the colour played first holds, and only two things beat it: a higher card of the same colour, or a card of the trump colour.
Trump is wherever Violet is standing. The journey track runs through four areas — the lake, the forest, the mountains and the crystals, one for each suit in the deck — and while she stands in one, that suit beats everything else. The first three and last three spaces are neutral, and there is no trump at all while she is on them. So the trump colour changes as she walks, and a hand that was strong two spaces ago can be worth nothing now.
Counting them is worth doing: nine cards of the trump colour plus the three other 5s, which are wild, makes twelve trumps in the deck at any moment.
Six of the nine values carry a power. A power is silent whenever its card is the same colour as the area Violet is standing in — except the 5 and the 6, which always work.
If Violet wins she chooses one of two things: walk on one space and burn one unit of fuel, or stand still and refill three. Both cards then go to the discard pile.
If Torech wins Violet is driven forward one space anyway and loses two units of fuel — and the two cards do not go to the discard pile. They go onto the fear slots.
That is the shape of the whole game: losing a turn still moves Violet along, so Torech cannot simply block her. What he is really doing is draining the lantern twice as fast and feeding the thing behind her.
Four of Violet’s friends wait on the journey track at spaces 4, 7, 10 and 13 — the first space of each coloured area. If she wins a turn while standing on the space just before one of them, she steps forward without spending any fuel. The same applies to the final step into Ordep’s fire, which she can see from a distance.
Timing her steps to land on those free moves is the single biggest thing a Violet player can do. Space 18 is different: it is a shaky bridge over a precipice, and a turn lost there does not push her across — she stays put and still loses two units of fuel.
The cards from a turn Torech wins go face down onto the first fear slot. The pair already there slides to the second slot, and the pair on the second slot is pushed off and resolved. So the first two turns Torech wins only load the queue — the fear pawn starts moving on the third.
When a pair is resolved, the fear pawn advances by the difference between the two values. A 9 and a 2 move it seven spaces; two 6s move it none.
It gets worse as the light fails. Once the lantern pawn passes the eighth space every resolution adds +1, and from the thirteenth +2 — which also means a difference of zero is no longer safe.
Before the game Torech draws five trap tiles in secret, keeps three, and lays them face down on the 4th, 8th and 12th spaces of the fear track. When the fear pawn reaches or passes one, it goes off.
Some land on the board — a faery ring that pins Violet where she stands, a detour that makes the path two spaces longer, a change to the colour of a space she has not reached, a gust that costs her two units of fuel, a storm that shortens the lantern track, a howl that scatters Ordep’s helpers. Others Torech keeps in hand for the right moment: swapping a card out of the shared tableau, sweeping the tableau clean, or drawing an extra card when he refills.
Nobody draws blind. Four cards lie face up in a tableau between the players, and every card either of them takes is taken from there and replaced from the deck. That makes card counting real: you can see what your opponent picked up.
Starting hands are drafted the same way. Four times, Violet decides which player picks first; then each takes one card, refilling the tableau between picks. After the turn is resolved, the winner draws first and the loser second, and the winner leads the next turn.
There are also four advantage tokens, one per coloured area. Whoever holds one may spend it to throw the whole tableau away and deal four fresh cards. Violet earns an area’s token by crossing that area without ever stopping to refill; the moment she does stop, it goes to Torech instead.
Two, and only two. It is built as a duel between asymmetric roles: one player is Violet trying to cross the forest, the other is Torech trying to stop her. There is no solo mode in the printed game, though this browser version will happily play either side against you.
Yes. This version runs in your browser with no download, no account and no payment, and includes online play against a friend over a room code.
The colour played first holds. It is beaten only by a higher card of that same colour, or by any card of the trump colour — and trump is whichever coloured area Violet is standing in. On the neutral spaces there is no trump at all. Card powers can override this: a 1 beats any 9, and a 6 played first cannot be beaten by trump.
By reaching Ordep’s fire, the 19th space of the journey track. She moves one space at a time, and she moves whether she wins a turn or loses it — the difference is that winning costs one unit of fuel and losing costs two.
Two ways. Either Violet’s lantern runs out of its 20 units of fuel, or the fear pawn catches up to her on the track. Torech wins turns to drain the lantern two units at a time, and the cards from those turns are what feed the fear.
Yes, but it costs her. Refilling gains three units of fuel but spends a turn she could have walked, and it hands the current area’s advantage token to Torech. Published analysis of the game found that longer games favour Violet and shorter ones favour Torech, so pacing the walk is most of her skill.
Pedro Pereira, published by Agie Games in 2022 with artwork by Karina Duncan. It was nominated for the 2022 5 Seasons Portuguese Game of the Year.