How to play Luthier

Here’s the deal: i’m going to make you a really nice guitar, no strings attached. Hi! It’s Ryan from Nights Around a Table. Here’s how to play Luthier. Or, for my American friends, Lootheeur.

You and your friends play families of musical instrument makers through the baroque, classical, and romantic eras of western musical history.

You’ll be attracting the attention of notable composers, performers, nobles, and royals, who will shower you with gifts and money as long as you do things for them, but if your output is low and their patience runs out, they’ll desert you and you’ll lose prestige. To keep them happy, you can gather or purchase materials and spend them roughing in and then putting the finishing touches on a variety of instruments, including special rare ones. You can fix musicians’ broken gear, and you can show off your exquisite handiwork in orchestral performances, with the hopes of gaining the coveted first seat in each section of the Orchestra. The patrons you impress can give you permanent powers for the rest of the game that will sometimes help you earn public awards and climb three different skill tracks. By the end of the sixth round, whichever family has earned the most prestige points wins the game, and joins the ranks of the most famous luthiers in history, like Antonio Stradivari, Jerome Bonaparte Squier, and… Jean Francois Kazoo.

ALL IN THE FAMILY

You begin the game as a certain luthier family with three discs that represent your family members: your big powerful 5, your younger and less experienced 3, and little baby 1, who keeps calling this thing a “double bass”. Where are family members 2 and 4? Well, they’re somehow imprisoned by the game clock (helllp usss!), and you won’t unlock them until the round track token moves from here to here, and then later from here to here. There are also three apprentices you can unlock, who will make your turns more powerful, but they’re hanging out at the market, ready to hire. Waiting in the wings are these three special worker discs that you can use to give your family members extra abilities. We’ll see how those work a little later on.

You start with one patron to impress, and one instrument to build, and your choice of two starting tiles kicked you off with some initial cash and resources, along with a special family ability. As usual, i’ve saved the setup instructions for the end, but if you’re really curious, you can zip over there and watch them, and then join me back here to learn how to play.

Before you can make your name as a luthier, you’ll need cash, and materials to craft your instruments. Those materials are wood, metal, and animal, which represents things like horse hair in violin bows, or the little dehydrated squirrel eyeballs they put in maracas. Ole! So, stripey box, solid box, and empty box if you want to know their associated icons. There are also these inspiration tokens you can use in a variety of ways throughout the game, usually to boost your musical performances, or make up a money shortfall.

Your board has three award tokens blocking some peekaboo powers. Once you earn those awards later in the game, you’ll remove the tokens and unlock those abilities.You also kick things off with a couple of personal goal cards that you keep secret until the end of the game.

Instead of going around the table clockwise, Luthier follows a turn order track that’s determined at the beginning of the game – first player, second player, third, and fourth.

There’s an initial Start of Round phase to kick things off that goes like this: you collect any prizes from benefits marked with this flame icon, and you probably won’t have any of those, because the game’s just beginning. Then, you advance each patience cube beneath your patrons one space to the right, and claim the prize marked above the cube.You do this even if it’s the first round in the game.

Your patrons are happy to shower you with gifts, but you’ll have to work hard to keep them happy. If you have any instrument cards in your hand, then at the beginning of the round, you can place up to two of them on the left side of your board to start building those instruments. You start the game with one Instrument card, and it usually makes sense to lay it down right away.

Once that’s all done, the Planning Phase begins.

PLANNING PHASE

There are five different areas on the board where you can place your worker chips. When it’s your turn, you get to secretly choose one of your chips and place it face-down in one of those five areas – the Salon, the Balcony, the Guild, or the Perform or Repair areas. You’ve also got two worker placement areas on your own personal workbench, for roughing in and finishing new instruments. During the planning phase, you can place your workers in those spots on your own board, but not on other players’ boards.

As you might have guessed, the higher the number on the chip you place, the more powerful your worker is, and generally you’ll be able to do more and better stuff at the location you choose.

If you’ve unlocked any of your three apprentice chips, you can sweeten the deal by adding one or more of them on top of your worker. We’ll see what apprentices do in a sec.

If you want to place on a location that already has one or more discs from other players, you just plunk your chip down on top of theirs.

And yes, you’re allowed to put a worker in a location where you’ve already got someone in the stack. But when it’s your turn to place, you only get to place one worker at a time. The apprentices don’t count as workers. So yellow goes, you go, red goes, along with 1 apprentice, and then green goes. Then yellow goes, you go, with three apprentices, and then red, then green with 2 apprentices, and so on.

You’re allowed to put more than one worker, along with any apprentices, on each of the workbench spots on your board. There’s really no advantage to placing more than two workers here, and we’ll see why in a sec.

When everyone’s placed all of their chips, you move on to the Resolution Phase.

RESOLUTION PHASE

To resolve all of the spots where everyone placed their worker chips, you once again follow the turn order established on this track. One by one, players grab this Resolution Board, and choose a location where they have at least one worker chip – could be the main board, could be their own player board. So the yellow player goes first, and let’s say they decide to crack open the Guild pinata full of worker chips.

You arrange the chips across the Resolution Board in the order that they were stacked, with the bottommost chip to the left, and the rest following in their stacked order.
Each apprentice adds 1 to the strength of the Worker they’re assigned to. So a 3 with two apprentices becomes a 5.

If you’ve placed more than one worker chip at a single location, any accompanying apprentices have to stay with their original family member… you can’t suddenly decide to shunt them over here to another worker.

Then, the active player re-orders the chips according to their strength. The highest numbered chips move to the left, and the lowest numbered chips go to the right. If there are two or more chips with the same value on them, you maintain the order they’re already in. Apprentices count, so in this case, these 3 apprentices buff this 1 chip to a strength of 4, so that chip takes the leftmost spot because it’s the strongest.

Once all of the chips are properly arranged, you bomb down the row from left to right, and everyone who has a chip there gets to do the thing at that location. We’ll look at what those options are in a minute.

If you have multiple worker chips at a location, whether or not they’re bolstered by apprentices, you have to treat them as separate people, who take separate, distinct actions at that location. You can’t add your number 3 worker and your number 1 worker together to take a single action with a strength 4 frankenworker.

If you’re the only player at a location, you’re the only one who gets to do stuff there. But you still have to resolve your actions in priority order, starting with your strongest chip and working your way down to the weakest.

As each player puts their chips to work in order, they retrieve their worker. Any apprentices they used go back to the Market at the bottom of the board.

When the resolution board is cleared, that player’s turn is over. Then the next player in turn order takes the board, chooses a location where they have one or more chips present, smashes that pinata open, re-orders the chips, and then once again, everyone does the thing at that location in that priority order.

If you can’t or don’t want to use your worker chip to take any actions at a particular location, you can forfeit its ability and just take 2 bucks instead, but that’s probably not your best move.

Play keeps cycling through the turn order track.

When it’s your turn and you haven’t got any chips left, or you decide not to activate a location, you can pass. A passed player is out for the rest of the phase. When everyone has passed, the Resolution Phase is over.

MARKET

Instead of busting open a location pinata, once every round – so six times in the entire game – you can take a trip to market. You’ve got a little horse-and-cart token to keep track of this: move it from here to here when you decide to go to market.

At the market, you can do three different things: buy and sell goods, hire apprentices, and train up your family members.

There’s a little card that gets dealt out every round to the market that randomly determines the price of goods. In the first round, it always looks like this, but in future rounds, who knows? When you go to the market, you can buy and sell goods at these rates. You’re just not allowed to buy and sell the same type of good in a single trip to the market. So if you sell a piece of metal, you can’t buy any more metal on that trip.

This legend up here gives you an idea of the highest and lowest amount of money each resource type can possibly go for, so if you see metal being sold for 6 bucks apiece, you know that’s as expensive as it’ll ever get. You can reduce your shopping bill by spending Inspiration tokens; each one you cash in gets you a buck off an individual good.

While you’re at the market, you can also hire up to three apprentices for 4 bucks apiece, or pay 15 bucks to move your marker up either the Performance or Craft skill tracks – the two vertical ones.You can use your Inspiration tokens to shave down your expenses with those actions, too. This icon reminds you that usually, when you’re sitting at the top of these tracks and you get to move up, since there are no more prizes left, you earn some points instead. There are various ways to move up those tracks, but if you pay money to move up at the market, you don’t get to earn those points. When you decide to go to Market, you can take as many actions as you want or can afford to.

Let’s take a look at what you can do at the different locations around the game.

WORKBENCH ACTIONS

You’ve got one worker placement spot on either side of your workbench. Nobody else can place their tokens here, so these spots are free from competition.

Place a worker here on the left side of your board to rough in any instruments you wanna build, and place a worker on the right side of your board to put the finishing touches on them, like writing “this machine kills fascists” on a harpsichord or whatever.

At the beginning of every round, you get to place one or two Instrument cards from your hand onto your roughing board, and there’s also an action on the main board that lets you place an Instrument card on your roughing board as soon as you acquire it. You’ve got space enough to keep two instruments on the go at a time. If you decide to activate this location on your turn, you flip over your chip, pick an instrument, and finish roughing it in by paying the resources on the silver side of the card. Then, you move that roughed-in instrument to the right side of your board, your finishing bench, where it’s ready to be Bedazzled.

If you activate a worker here with a strength of 3 or more, you get to take 2 Inspiration tokens from the supply. If you activate a worker here with a strength of 5 or more, you can reduce the cost of roughing in an instrument by one material of your choice. And these perks stack, so activating a 5+ worker gets you both the discount and the 2 Inspiration tokens.

If you’ve placed a second worker on your roughing bench, you can rough in a second instrument, as long as there’s room for it over on your finishing bench, and as long as you activate your workers in priority order. There’s a perk on the Craft Skill track that’ll let you rough in two instruments with a single worker. If you goofed up and you don’t have enough materials to rough something in, or your roughing bench is empty, or your finishing bench is full, you can take a mulligan by grabbing two bucks and reclaiming your worker.

It’s a similar story on the finishing side of your workbench: choose this location on your turn and activate a worker here to pay off the gold side of the card. With that, the instrument is finished. You’ll earn this many prestige points for it, and you may even be able to impress a patron with it, which we’ll look at in the next section. Then, you get to place an Instrument token in the Orchestra in the spot matching whichever instrument you just made. There are two different spots for violins – if you finish one, you get to choose which spot to place your token in. There’s a little more going on in the Orchestra – prizes and majority control and all that sort of thing – that i’ll cover off later.

Just like with the roughing bench, you get bonuses for employing higher-skilled workers here: a 4+ strength worker lets you reduce an instrument’s material cost by 1, and a 6+ worker – that’s obviously a worker who’s bolstered by performance-enhancing apprentices – gets to double the prizes they earn when placing their instrument token in the Orchestra. And like the roughing bench, those two perks stack, so a 6+ worker also gets the 1-material discount on finishing.

As with the roughing bench, you can activate two workers here to finish two instruments in one go. Or, you can climb the Craft Skills track and gain this two-for-one finishing ability. Either way you slice it, the material discount that you earn for employing a 5+… or 4+ worker only counts for one instrument you rough in or finish at a given location, not both instruments.

SALON & PATRONS

For each worker chip you’ve assigned to a location, you get to do a thing. The five locations on the main board all have a main thing, one or more alternate things, and a bonus thing. For each chip you send to a location, you get to do either the main thing or one of the alternate things, and if you placed a chip with a strength of 4 or more – which includes workers who are bolstered by apprentices – you additionally get to do the bonus thing.

The main thing happening at the Salon is claiming a patron as one of your benefactors. As long as you have at least one spot free on your board, you can take one of the patron cards from the Level 1 section. If you want to take a level II or level III patron card, it’s gonna cost you – it’s 4 lira extra for the level II’s, and 8 lira extra for the level III’s. You can pay this fee in pure lira, or in Inspiration tokens, or a combination of both.

Incidentally, if you’ve gone far enough on the horizontal reputation track to reach this spot or this spot, those tiers become free for you.

If you absolutely, positively need to have a very specific card to suit your strategy, and your worker taking the action has at least one assigned apprentice, you can go the nuclear route and pay a combination of 10 money or Inspiration tokens to rifle through the deck and grab the card you want. You have to declare the type of card you’re looking for when you do this. You only get to look at the back of the card – so you only get to see limited information. When you find the card you want, pull it out and return the deck without shuffling it. The apprentice who helped you do this dirty deed gets summarily executed – remove that chip from the game – no, not back to the market! i said “executed!” So each time you pull this stunt, it means you’ll have a smaller pool of apprentices to hire from for the rest of the game. Serves you right for committing muirdé… or, for my American friends, murder.

The patrons are all based on real people, like the guy who invented my favourite ice cream flavour, Schubert. You’ve got rich and famous performers, composers, nobles, and – if you unlock the right perk – royals, and each different class of patron will give you different prizes every round as their patience markers advance. As soon as you gain a patron, you move this patience token on the leftmost spot and claim the prize printed in the spot you choose: 4 bucks, a material of your choice, or an apprentice. Each round, the token moves farther to the right, and usually gives you another valuable goodie, depending on the patron. Sugardaddy Nobles and Royals may be more likely to give you money, for example.

But the cube represents the patron’s patience. As it creeps along, you’re running out of time to satisfy that patron’s demands, which are here.

All patrons have a primary requirement, which is to make them an instrument. That is your whole business, after all. There are three different instrument types the patrons are interested in: stringed instruments, wind instruments, and percussion & keyboard instruments, which is one type despite being two words.

Some patrons have one or two secondary requirements as well. So for example, Chopin wants you to make him a really nice stringed instrument, and he also wants you to make him either a keys & percussion instrument, or he wants you to repair a keys & percussion instrument, or give a performance in his chosen style, romantic. We’ll see how you can actually do all this stuff shortly. Here, you have to make a stringed instrument, and also make another stringed instrument, repair a stringed instrument, or give a performance in the baroque style if you want to impress Canon in D composer Pachelbel. Or, for my American friends, Taco Bell.

As soon as you satisfy all of a patron’s requirements, you’ll gain this completion bonus. So in the case of Taco Bell, you get 4 prestige points, and you advance 1 spot on the reputation track.Then, you flip that patron’s card and tuck it up here, where it unlocks a new ability that you’ll have for the rest of the game. Some completed patrons give you an endgame scoring bonus instead of an ongoing ability, like the Mendelssohns, who give you a bonus point for every public goal you’ve earned by the end of the game.

Whenever you satisfy any of a patron’s requirements, you reset the clock on their patience by moving the token all the way to the left, buying yourself a little more time to satisfy their desires.

But if you keep a patron waiting such that when it comes time for the cube to advance at the beginning of the round and it moves into this spot, the impatient patron storms out in a huff, and you get docked three prestige points for each of their requirements you failed to meet.

That’s the main action at the Salon, but when you take an action there with one of your worker chips, you can alternatively just take 2 Inspiration tokens and hire an apprentice for free from the market.

If your worker’s strength is 4 or more, you additionally get to choose one of your patrons and move their patience cube back one step to the left, and then you get to pick any prize the patron offers along this row and claim it. You can claim this bonus even if the cube is already all the way to the left.

GUILD & INSTRUMENTS

The main action you can take at the Guild is to claim the plans for a new instrument you want to… uh… luth. This works the same way as the cards at the Salon: you can grab anything at level 1, but you need to be far enough along the rep track to unlock levels II and III… or, you can pay the difference in money and Inspiration, or pay 10 money or inspiration to take a hit out on your apprentice and lose him for the rest of the game in order to fish for the card you want.

If you perform the main action, the instrument card goes into your hand, and you can place it on your roughing bench at the beginning of the next round.

The alternate action here is to take 1 metal. Seems stingy, but metal is the most valuable material in the game.

The 4+ skill bonus gets you any 1 material cube of your choice, and you can rough in one of the instrument cards from your hand on the left side of your board, as long as you have space for it. It could even be the Instrument you just obtained by taking the Guild’s main action. Remember that the roughing side of your workbench only has space for 2 instruments you’re building.

PERFORM

The Perform location lets you demonstrate to the world how awesome and well-made your instruments are by rocking out on them. Choose a card from the row following the same rules as before. Then, roll the two white performance dice. You take the number of music notes you rolled, plus the strength of your worker, plus the strength added by any apprentices you used, to get your final performance score. If you’d like to tweak it even higher, you get another note for every Inspiration token you spend. Then, you look up your score on the card’s key, and collect the prizes in whatever range you hit. Obviously, you’ll get better stuff if you perform well than if you totally whiff it. If your performance is in either of these two tiers, you get to additionally place one of your performance tokens somewhere in the Orchestra.

The orchestra is divided into three columns, by era: baroque, classical, and romantic. If you perform on a classical-era card, you can only place your token in the classical-era section. There’s a little more to it than that, but i’ll explain the Orchestra in more detail a little later.

As you place your token, be mindful of what your patrons want you to do for them, because as we saw, some patrons’ secondary requirements are for you to perform their preferred era of music. So if Handel wants to hear baroque music, and you perform well enough on a baroque card, you can satisfy his requirement by placing your performance token anywhere within the green baroque section – for example, this lute. Ohhh… lute. Luthier. i get it now.

If you do satisfy one of your patron’s requirements by giving a performance, you tuck the performance card behind them to help you keep track of what you’ve already done for them. And, as we saw, whenever you check off one of their requirements, their patience marker gets completely reset, buying you more time to please them.

Now hang on one Kentucky fried minute. You mean to tell me that performance involves risk, and i have to roll dice to see the outcome? Playing a musical instrument isn’t deterministic and 100% predictable? Well, yes! And the fact that you asked that suggests that you might be more of a board game player than a musician. Performing is risky, and the game strives to simulate that. But for the board gamers among us, it also gives us some options to mitigate those rolls.

The higher you climb on the Performance track, the more dice mitigation perks you get. For each of these spots that you reach or pass, you get to pick one of the performance dice and re-roll it. And when you reach these two spots, you get to swap out one of the white dice for one of the black dice before you roll. The black dice have more notes on them, so you’ll have a better chance at turning in a good performance. We’ll take a look at what this perk does a little later.

How do you move up that track? Well, we’ve already seen that you can buy your way up it for 15 bucks a bump when you go to market. You also get a bump up that track as your 4+ worker strength bonus at the Perform location.

Finally, the alternative action at this location is to take 3 animal materials.
REPAIR

When you take an action in the Repair location, you grab one of the repair cards from the row, following the same rules that we’ve seen before. You just straight-up pay the materials on the card to fix the instrument, and you can sub in two Inspiration tokens to act as any one material.

Fixing an instrument gets you a certain number of prestige points right away. It also lets you place one of your repair tokens on a matching instrument in the orchestra. So if you repaired a wind instrument, you can place your repair token on any instrument in the middle row.

So where performing lets you place your token in a certain column, repairing lets you place it in a certain row. Once again, keep an eye on your patrons’ requirements when you place your token. If you fix the type of instrument they wanna see fixed, you can tuck that card behind the patron to remember you’ve met that requirement, and reset the Patron’s patience marker. Incidentally, if you ever complete a card that doesn’t satisfy one of your patrons’ requests, you just discard it.

The alternative action here is to take 2 wood. The 4+ worker strength bonus gets you a bump up the Craft Skill Track.

BALCONY

Throughout the game, there are these public awards you can compete for. Taking the main action at the Balcony lets you claim one of those awards, as long as you qualify for it. So this one rewards you for completely satisfying patrons from the baroque era. If you’ve satisfied one baroque-era patron, and you take the main action at the balcony, you can choose a reward token from your player board and place it here to get one point. This one rewards you for having 2, 3 or 4 repair tokens in the orchestra, and this one rewards you for crafting 1, 2, or 3 romance-era instruments. It’s that type of thing.

As soon as you claim one of these awards, you’ve locked it off to yourself – you can’t place another award token on that tile. But other players can. However, each spot is exclusive, so in a 4-player game, someone’s getting the door slammed in their face.

Notice that in a 4-player game, there are four public award tiles, but you’ve only got three reward tokens to place. So you’re gonna have to prioritize.

Notice also that when you remove one of these tokens, you’re unlocking a different peekaboo power underneath each one. If you expose this ability, you can store three extra materials – ordinarily, you’re limited to storing only 9 cubes, and if you gain any extras, you have to pick some to go back to the supply to keep from going over that limit. Uncovering this power also gets you a free material of your choice at the beginning of every round.

Uncovering this power lets you pick a patron from the ultra-good Royal Patrons deck. There are only player count plus one cards here, so it’s a race to claim the best ones. You don’t even get to look at them until you unlock this perk, so first-movers get a distinct advantage.

If you uncover this peekaboo power, then every time you give a performance, you also get to roll the purple performance die, which gets you extra money or resources. Crazed fans are so smitten with you, they throw their catgut on stage.

The alternative action at the Balcony is to take 6 moneys from the supply. And the balcony actually has a different alternate action you can choose to take: you can hire two apprentices from the market for free. But any apprentices you used when you placed your worker chip here aren’t freed up yet – only the ones that are currently in the market are available to you when you take this alternate action.

The 4+ worker strength bonus here is to bump yourself along the Reputation track.

Sending workers to the Balcony also messes with turn order. Instead of taking your workers back from here like you would at the other locations, you leave them there until the end of the round, where they rearrange these turn order tokens according to how the worker chips are lined up. Then, everyone retrieves their worker chips from the Balcony – the apprentices you used go back to the Market – and you play the next round in that new turn order.

THE ORCHESTRA

i’ve hinted all along that there’s more at stake in the orchestra than i’ve explained. Here’s what’s up.

Whenever you place a token in the Orchestra – either an instrument, performance, or repair token, you want to claim first chair. If you’re the first to put a token on the spot, you get the first chair bonus listed there. If you’re late to the game, you get the booby prize, which is 2 bucks or an Inspiration token.

Some tokens can bump other tokens out of the first chair.

Instrument tokens are more important than performance or repair tokens, which are equal to each other in importance.

That means if someone has a performance or repair token in a spot, and you come along with an Instrument token, you bump that lesser token out of first chair and claim the first chair bonus. This player also claimed the first chair bonus when they originally took first chair, but they don’t have to give resources back or anything. And they don’t get to claim the booby prize just because they were bumped. You can even bump yourself out of a first chair this way.

If someone has a lesser token here and you come in with one of your own lesser tokens, you don’t bump them out of first chair. Unless you come in with a lesser token and you’ve got the majority of tokens on the spot. In that case, dethrone whichever player holds first chair and take the bonus.

As in Highlander, so in the Orchestra: there can be only one. So if someone already has an instrument token in a spot, and you try to muscle in with your own instrument token, you don’t take first chair – they’ve already taken it. There are duplicate instrument cards in the deck, so if you build a trumpet and somebody else built a trumpet before you, your Johnny-come-lately instrument token doesn’t get to claim first chair.

The exception to this rule comes in when you’ve crafted a rare instrument, one with a little gem icon on it. In that case, place it in the appropriate space at the top of the Orchestra and take your prize. There’s no limit to the number of rare instruments that can claim first chair in these spaces. You all share first chair here – even with yourself.

The more first chair positions you hold at the end of the game, the more points you’ll earn!

SPECIAL WORKERS AND SKILL TRACKS

The last thing we’ll take a look at are those skill tracks, and the prizes you can earn there.

We already saw that on the Performance skill track, you get a one-die re-roll here, and an extra one here, to try to improve your performances. Here and here, you get to replace a white die with a better black die. On the Craft skill track, you can rough in two instruments with a single worker chip here, and you can finish two instruments with a single worker here. These two spots each spice up a worker chip by a strength of 1 when you go to rough in or finish an instrument. And these abilities stack, so if you get here, a strength 2 worker becomes strength 3, and if you get here, a strength 2 worker becomes a strength 4 worker – as long as that worker is roughing in or finishing an instrument.

Across the Reputation track, reach here to hire an apprentice for free. Here, you can draw three instrument cards, keep 1, and sink the others to the bottom of the deck, access tier II cards in the main board locations without having to pay the surcharge, and this spot lets you access the tier III cards for free. Here, you get two extra points for every instrument token you place in the Orchestra going forward, and reach here to complete a public award that you qualify for.

The rule for all three tracks is that if you’re already at the top of the track and you receive a bump, you get 2 prestige points – except if you buy a bump on the craft or performance tracks at the Market. And this public award perk also happens every time you’re at the top of the Reputation track and you receive a bump.

The three spaces i skipped over – this one, this one, and this one, let you turn one of your family members into a special worker. Choose a card from the deck matching the symbol of the space you just reached. There are only player count plus one of these in each deck, so like the Royal Patrons, the first players to do this will get the best pick. This isn’t a random draw – you get to go through the deck and choose a card. Then, at the end of the round, you choose one of your family members and put them on that card, and replace them in your lineup of worker chips with the one that matches the card’s symbol. Now, whenever you place this worker somewhere, it has a strength of this, and it also has this special power for the rest of the game. This is a permanent choice – you can’t swap this chip out for a different worker later in the game.

END OF THE ROUND

At the end of a round, after everyone has finished activating the workers they want to activate, and has optionally visited the Market, and has finally passed, you perform a few cleanup steps.

First, update the turn order track and take those worker chips back.

If anyone unlocked a special worker card this round, this is when you get to permanently assign a worker there.

Bop the Market cart tokens back to the left side, and reveal a new Market card for the next round.

On the main board, discard any card in each section that’s sitting in a tier I slot. Then, slide the cards over to fill the gaps, and deal out fresh cards to fill the spaces. At the end of round 3, you’ll get rid of all of the Patron cards that are marked level I from the draw deck.

Then, advance the round marker. If it crosses from here to here, everyone gets their strength 2 worker, and from here to here, everyone gets their strength 4 worker.

ENDGAME & SCORING

The game ends when the last player has passed at the end of the sixth round. Then it’s time to tally up the points you’ll earn in addition to the points you already racked up during gameplay.

Take a look at how the Orchestra seating shook out: in a 1-3 player game, you get 0 points for having three or fewer first chair spots, and then 1 point for 4, 3 points for 5, 6 for 6, 10 for 7, and 15 big points for claiming 8 or more first chairs. In a 4 player game, it’s 1 point, 3 points, 6, 10, and 15 points for claiming 7 or more first chairs.

Some of the patrons you completed can score you endgame points, like Bach, who gets you a point for every baroque rep air you completed – so a point for every repair token you have in the left baroque column of the Orchestra.

Any instrument stuck on your finishing board that you failed to complete gets you half of its prestige points, rounded up.

You began the game with some personal goal cards. Find the highest level you achieved on each, and score those points.

Each speciality worker you gained gets you a point.

Add up any of your leftover Inspiration, money, materials, and apprentices. You get 1 point for every 10. That’s why, if you can manage it, it may be worthwhile to sell your unused materials at market in the final round… because a metal cube only counts as one thing at the end of the game, but if you manage to juice it for 5 bucks, it now counts as 5 things. After you count everything up, set aside any leftover money that didn’t convert to points – that’ll be your tiebreaker if it comes down to it.

Whoever has the most prestige points wins! In the case of a tie, refer to that reserved pool of cash i just mentioned – whichever tied player has the most leftover money wins. And if there’s still a tie, all tied players share in the victory.

And if the player who loses the game gets salty about it, you can hand them the world’s tiniest violin.
SETUP

To set up the game, lay out the main board on the side matching your player count, and add the market and this thing and four random public award tiles up here. If you have fewer than four players, you’ll only use three of these.

Shuffle the tier 1 patron cards and tier 2 patron cards separately, and then stack 1 on top of 2. Grab player count plus 1 royal patron cards and set them aside. Put the patrons in the salon. You’ll also need to randomly grab player count plus one cards for the craft, performance, and reputation special worker decks.

Shuffle and place the performance, instrument, and repair cards too. Flip out the cards into each empty space. If you have fewer than four players, skip these last spaces closest to the Orchestra. Hitch up the scoreboard next to the main board.

Everyone takes a player board and all the pieces in their colour – the instrument tokens, repair tokens, and performance tokens. Everyone’s horse-and-cart tokens go to the left of the market, and put your apprentice tokens here too, ready to hire. Put the Market card with a little “M1” in the corner here to start. Shuffle the rest of the market deck and place it face-up beneath this card. Your patience tokens go here, and each of your public awards tokens covers up a spot on your board.

You need a scoring marker here, and your strength 2 and 4 markers can go here, along with the round marker. Stick a token each at the bottom of the performance, craft, and reputation skill tracks. Create supply piles of the money, inspiration, animals, wood, and metal, and rally the performance dice.

If you’re playing with 2 players, randomly draw one of these Orchestra setup cards. Pick a player colour you’re not using, and then pre-populate the Orchestra with tokens according to the card. A more crowded Orchestra will simulate competition from the missing players. For each instrument token you place, remove a copy of that instrument from the deck, and then reshuffle it and set up the Guild as usual.

These spots tell you to put a trophy token on the public award tiles to gum them up – so right, left, middle.

You can alternatively play a 2-player game with the third player acting according to the solo bot rules. Check the solo rulebook if that sounds like a fun time.

Deal everyone 2 instruments, two patrons, 4 private goal cards, and 2 luthier family tiles. You’re gonna keep one of those tiles – each family comes with its own starting resources and a one-time special starting advantage that you can claim during setup. Take the starting resources now. Keep two of the private goal cards, one of the instruments, and one of the patrons. The instrument you didn’t choose goes to the bottom of the deck. The patron you didn’t choose gets discarded. Then, you plunk the patron down on one of the three spots on your board and claim the introductory gift from that spot.

Whoever chose the family with the lowest number on it gets to go first, and then everyone else falls in line according to the numbers on their tiles.

That’s a lot of decisions to make for a game that you’ve never played before. Thankfully, you can follow the instructions in the Rehearsal book, which makes all the setup decisions for you and walks you through all the steps each player will take throughout the different phases of the first round of the game.

If you want to be an absolute control freak about it, you can conduct the other players through the Rehearsal using the included musical turkey baster.

And now, you’re ready to play Luthier.

Did you just watch that whole thing? Oh – hey! To 100% this video, click the badge to subscribe, then click the bell to get notifications when i’ve got new stuff.