Twelve crowned enemies stand between you and victory. You all win together — or you all fall together. This is a guided walk through the court, one beat at a time.
Slay all twelve royals in order — four Jacks, then four Queens, then four Kings. The damage you deal sticks to an enemy across turns, so chip away as a team. Drop the final King and the whole table wins.
Every turn the enemy strikes back, and you must discard cards to pay. The moment anyone can't cover the damage — or can't even play a card or yield — everyone loses.
Twelve royals wait in the Castle deck — Jacks on top, Kings buried at the bottom — so the climb only gets steeper. Each has a fixed attack and a pool of health you whittle down together.
Your hand and your Jesters scale with the table — fewer players, bigger hands:
| Players | Jesters in deck | Max hand size |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 (set aside) | 8 |
| 2 | 0 | 7 |
| 3 | 1 | 6 |
| 4 | 2 | 5 |
By tradition, the player who most recently committed regicide takes the first turn. Make of that what you will.
Before any detail, learn the shape of a turn. It never changes: four steps, same order, every time. Remember them as the four P's — then everything else has a place to land.
The loop is your compass for the rest of this tutorial. When a new rule appears, you'll always be told which P it lives in.
Every card carries a power tied to its suit, and the card's number sets how big that power is. There's one trick to remembering all four: Red = stuff for us, now. Black = stuff against them, later. Powers are mandatory — you always fire them, even when the timing stings. Tap each card.
Don't front-load the rules — play. The first enemy is a Jack: 20 health, 10 attack. Walk one full loop and the four P's stop being words and become muscle memory. Follow the prompts.
These never get a lecture — they're taught the instant they come up at the table. Here's the moment each one surfaces.
Play two, three, or four cards of the same number together, as long as they total ≤ 10. They strike as one attack and every suit power fires at the combined value — a 3♦ + 3♠ + 3♣ draws 9, shields 9, and deals 18. Aces can't join a combo, and whenever Hearts and Diamonds resolve together you always heal before drawing.
An Ace is worth 1 and can stand alone or pair with one other card — even another Ace, but never a Jester. Both suit powers fire at the combined value: A♣ + 8♦ is 9 damage, doubled to 18, with 9 cards drawn. Pair two of the same suit and that power fires only once. And as a 1 in the discard, it's handy when you're scraping to pay a counter.
Each royal ignores the power of its own suit. Against the Queen of Diamonds, diamond cards deal damage but trigger no draw. The number still counts as damage — only the power is switched off.
Worth 0 and played alone, the Jester cancels the enemy's immunity — and then skips both the damage step and the counterattack, so you suffer nothing. Best of all, you hand the next turn to any player you like. While it resolves, the table may even hint, in general terms, who'd like to go next.
Reduce a royal's health to zero or below and it's defeated, joining the discard to return to a hand later. As a card it's powerful: Jack = 10, Queen = 15, King = 20, each carrying its own suit power — and those values count whether you attack with it or discard it to pay a counter. (Notice the symmetry — a royal's card value equals its attack.)
Land the killing blow on exactly the enemy's remaining health and it doesn't hit the discard — it slides facedown onto top of the draw deck, so that defeated royal returns to a hand within a turn or two. Overkill still wins, it just discards. And whoever lands any kill skips their counterattack and immediately attacks the next enemy — a free continued turn.
Tap cards of the same number (total must stay ≤ 10) and watch the combined attack form.
Figuring out the right play together — silently — is the entire heart of Regicide. The instant someone says "play a heart so I can…", the puzzle solves itself and the magic drains out.
One narrow exception: right after a Jester is played, until the next turn begins, players may speak in general terms about who should go next — "I've got a strong play," or "I'd rather not." Even then, you still never name a card.
Here's the heart of skilled play: not how to act, but why one move beats another. The enemy is the Queen of Hearts — 30 health, 15 attack — and she's immune to Hearts. You hold three tempting plays. Try each.
Once the loop is second nature, these are the moves that turn a losing board into a triumphant one — and the ones you'll be retelling afterward.
Spade shields stack and persist for the whole fight. Chip a King's 20-attack down with spades across a few turns and his counterstrikes shrink to nothing — you out-last him while barely paying a card. Slow, patient, and devastating against the big crowns.
A combo is matching numbers across different suits — so it never holds two of the same card. But slip a single club into one and its doubling applies to the whole total. Pair the 5♣ with the 5♠: a single 10-point strike, doubled to 20 damage in one blow — enough to behead a Jack outright, or gut a King.
Hold the Jester until an immunity is choking you. Play it to kill the immunity, then use its choose-the-next-player power to hand the turn to whoever's sitting on the perfect follow-up. A one-two punch that bends the turn order to your will.
A high diamond refills everyone's hands. Time it just before a tough King and the whole table walks into the fight loaded — fresh clubs to strike, fresh spades to soak. Generosity that pays the group dividends.
Defeating a royal on exactly its health drops it onto top of the draw deck — so it returns to your hands within a turn. Read the running damage total and thread the final blow to the number, and you don't just win the fight, you recruit the corpse.
A defeated King is a 20-value card with a suit power — lethal as an attack, and a 20-point cushion when discarded to pay. A Hearts heal can also fish a fallen royal out of the discard and back into the deck. Either way, the court turns on itself: a dead King fighting his own heir.
The richest learning comes after the final card. Replay the arc in your head against the loop — most losses trace to one identifiable phase. Here's a typical first game.
You bulldozed the four Jacks with raw club damage and barely thought about the counters. Good — that's the on-ramp doing its job.
Hearts fizzled against the Queen of Hearts and the table stalled, bleeding cards to pay attacks for nothing. Lesson: the Jester was sitting unused — that was the moment.
You spent hearts on damage instead of recycling them. By the Kings, hands were empty and the Pay step — Step IV — is where the game finally took you.
Shield earlier, hoard the Jester for immunities, and treat every Hearts card as deck fuel, not a throwaway. The loss lived in one phase — name it, and you've already improved.
The questions every table asks — answered.