Mallory’s Rule's
The first time Mallory ever invited anyone up into those hills, he didn’t offer a map or a warning. He offered a die.
He shook it once in his palm, let it clack against the wood of an upturned crate, and when it stopped rolling he laid a finger on the pips like he was counting heartbeats.
“That number,” he said, “is your whole day.”
And that is still how Prospectors Bluff begins—every single turn. You roll one die, and whatever it shows is the exact number of actions you have to spend before your day runs out.
On quiet mornings, the count feels generous. On hard mornings, it feels like the sun barely rose before it started setting.
Mallory liked to talk while he watched you decide.
“You can walk,” he’d say, nodding toward the trail. “One action gets you one space.”
Then, after a pause, he’d add—only when it was just the two of you out there, circling each other like coyotes with manners—
“and if it’s only the two of you, every roll gets you 2 extra actions. But there’s a catch: you can’t start with more than 6. So each of you begins the day with 3 to 6 actions, depending on the roll.”
Paying the Current
The river, though—nobody “walked” the river.
If you wanted the river, you paid for it. Two actions. Not one.
You stepped onto a river tile, spent two of your day’s precious choices, and let the current move you to an adjacent river tile—close by, connected, but never free. Folks called it “paying the current,” because the river always collected.
Most days, you weren’t out there to admire water anyway.
You were out there to flip the earth’s secret face-up.
Prospecting cost one action. You’d step onto a site, take a breath, and turn the token like you were opening a letter that might change your life.
Sometimes it was gold—clean, shining, and honest enough to make your throat go tight. If it was gold, the ground was telling you, yes. This place mattered. Come back. Work it.
But if it was a bust… the land didn’t just shrug.
If you revealed a bust, then Fate came for you and resolved itself immediately, right then, in the same breath. No waiting until later. No tucking it away for a “better time.” Mallory’s rule was blunt: bad luck doesn’t stand in line.
That’s how the Bluff kept its teeth.
Even Luck
Mining was different from prospecting. Prospecting was discovery; mining was labor. Mining also cost one action, but you didn’t mine just anywhere—you mined on the gold spaces: the numbered ones, or the star-marked ones.
When you mined, you rolled one die, and the hills judged you by something as cruelly simple as parity.
Even numbers meant success.
An even roll meant you struck—really struck—and that’s when Boomtown began to take notice.
If you successfully mined a numbered gold space, the proof of it went straight into the News Stand, because news spreads faster than any pair of boots. The token itself found its way to that board in town, the place where whispers became headlines.
But the star spaces were strange. Star ground had a reputation for being real rich. When you successfully mined a star space, the token stayed right where it was—star sites could be mined again later, as if the earth there had a long memory and a deeper pocket. Yet Boomtown still demanded its rumor. So even on star ground, when you struck successfully, you placed a blank token into the News Stand instead, just to show the town something happened.
Mallory used to say star ground never stopped talking.
Stashes, Gravity, and the Thirteen
The first time Finch understood stashes, she understood them the way a smart person learns most things: by nearly losing everything.
She’d been carrying too much, and she knew it. Everyone knew it. The Bluff has a hard limit, the kind it enforces like gravity: you can never carry more than thirteen gold. Not fourteen. Not fifteen. Thirteen is the ceiling.
If you ever wind up with more than thirteen, the excess must be dropped, the excess must be dropped where you are.
No arguments. No “just for a minute.” The hills don’t care.
That limit is why stashes exist. They’re the town’s oldest kind of wisdom—quiet, buried, and effective.
You can bury your stash token in two situations: when you prospect a bust site, or when you successfully mine a regular numbered gold site. Either way, a stash comes into the world the moment the land reminds you what risk feels like.
And once a stash exists, it can hold unlimited gold, and that gold is safe from the fates, and safe from bandits. You cant loose what you don't have on your person.
That’s what makes it temptation. But, watch for shifty eyes snooping around for hidden places, someone might just be looking to dig for your buried treasures.
Because whenever you’re on a stash space, you can spend one action to retrieve gold from it… or to steal gold that someone else has tucked away there. take an action and roll a lucky 7 or doubles, because the chances of you getting that are about 1 in 3, Old-timers claim a hidden right hand boosts your luck.
Boomtown teaches you early: a stash is protection until someone notices it.
Of course, people notice everything.
Crossing Paths
And the Bluff has another law, harsher than bad luck and louder than rumor:
If you enter a space occupied by another prospector, you must stop. Every time.
There’s no slipping past, no “excuse me,” no pretending you didn’t see them. Trails cross, and the hills demand resolution.
So you duel.
Both players roll one die. Highest roll wins and keeps the space.
But the real sting isn’t in who stays. It’s in what happens to the loser—because the Bluff doesn’t just settle disputes, it relocates bodies.
If the aggressor loses—the one who entered the occupied space—that aggressor goes to Jail.
If the victim loses—the one who was already standing there—that victim gets sent back to Boomtown.
And ties… ties are the land’s way of punishing pride equally. On a tie, both lose. Both players drop three gold onto that site—if they have it—like paying a fine to the dirt itself. Things lost in the tussle.
The first time it happens, you’ll feel how fast “game” turns into “story.”
When the News Stand Fills
And through all of it—through walking, river travel, prospecting, mining, and stashing—Boomtown watches its News Stand fill.
At the beginning, the News Stand feels harmless: a board, a gathering point, a way for the town to brag and chatter and point at proof.
But once that stand is filled, the world changes.
That’s when Bandit play unlocks.
That’s when the Bluff stops being a gamble between prospectors and becomes something hungry.
Because when the news gets loud enough, it calls in the wrong kind of people.
Pistols appear.
And pistols are power with a price.
If you gain a pistol, you get +1 to all numerically counted rolls—the kind of bonus that turns narrow losses into wins, and wins into humiliations.
But the Bluff charges interest.
While you have a pistol, you cannot mine. You cannot stash gold. You cannot dig up a stash. And you cannot win the game until you get rid of that pistol.
It’s the town’s way of saying: carrying iron is not the same as earning gold.
Still—when Bandit play is active, you can spend one action to retrieve or drop a pistol. Just one action, like picking up a curse… or setting it down.
And once Bandit play is active, crossing paths doesn’t always become a duel.
Sometimes it becomes a stickup.
You step into another prospector’s space, and instead of rolling for a duel, you declare it: a stickup. A bandit move. A threat wrapped in one action and a crooked smile.
The victim has two choices.
They can retreat to Boomtown and pay three gold.
Or they can stand their ground, roll one die against you, and let the hills decide who’s bluffing.
If the bandit wins, the bandit rolls one die and takes up to that many gold from the victim—then retreats to Boomtown or to the Cave, slipping away like smoke with pockets suddenly heavier.
If the bandit loses, the bandit drops their pistol (if they have one) right there on the soil beneath their feet—proof that arrogance can be disarmed—and then the bandit goes to Jail.
And if it ties? The Bluff punishes both again. Three gold dropped, if possible. The land taking its fee for the audacity of stalemate.
The Lonely Aggressor’s
Jail, by the way, isn’t a moral lesson. It’s an eviction notice.
When that cell door shuts, you don’t sit and rot. You just wait for your next turn. Then you walk out, plain and simple. But your place on the map might have you wondering if the deed was worth the risk.
Boomtown’s cells are small. If another player must join you, you’re ejected into the street. No harm, no foul… unless you get shoved into another player.
Then tempers flare, and it’s a duel.
After the fight, the winner holds their ground. The loser slinks back to Boomtown.
Unless it gets so rough there’s no winner. Then you’re dropping gold as you tussle in the dirt, and you’re both taking the long walk back to town.
Thirteen, Returned
And through all of it, the win condition stays quite brutally simple—the one line Mallory never bothered to decorate.
First to thirteen gold. Return to Boomtown. Spend one action to turn it in.
That last part matters more than people think, because the Bluff will let you feel rich out on the trail—but it only recognizes victory when you walk it back into town and pay the final action like a signature on a deed.
That is why the best prospectors don’t just chase gold.
They chase timing.
They roll the die at dawn, count their actions like matches, and decide—step by step—whether today is for walking, for river travel, for flipping the land’s secret face-up, for mining on even luck, for burying wealth where nobody can see it…
or for surviving the moment the News Stand fills and Boomtown’s whispers become a beacon for bandits.
Because a pistol can help you take gold.
But it can’t help you win.
Not until you’re back in Boomtown, with exactly thirteen nuggets, iron laid down and one last action left to spend.