In this game, each player acts the part of an Egyptian tomb decorator. Every day of your life, your job is to record prayers on the walls of the Pharaoh’s tomb. But today is a holiday, and you have found yourself in an unused tomb with time on your hands. Why write the same old spells and good wishes for the Pharaoh? Now is your chance to write whatever you want!
The object of the game is to lay your cards down to form phrases, scoring points and moving your token along the scoring track until one player reaches the top of the track and wins. Include your pharaoh name in one of the phrases to earn 20 extra points.
Setup: Arrange the players around a table with plenty of room for laying out cards in front of each player. Shuffle the pharaoh card deck and the glyph card decks. Deal one pharaoh card to each player. Deal 10 glyph cards to each player. Place the glyph card deck in the center of the table in two or three stacks. Place the unused pharaoh cards in another stack nearby. Place the scoring track to one side of the table and place a marker for each player at the beginning of the scoring track.
Game Play: Randomly determine which player will go first. Each player then plays in turn, proceeding in a clockwise order around the table. A turn consists of two actions. A player can perform any two of the following actions, in any order, on their turn.
Actions:
Draw a card from the glyphs deck. If there are multiple stacks, the player can choose the top card from any of the stacks. You may not draw a card if you already have 15 or more cards in your hand.
Play a group of cards from your hand in front of you to form a phrase. Add up the number of points on the cards played, then move your scoring marker the corresponding number of spaces along the scoring track. If you are able to use your pharaoh name as part of the phrase, add 20 points to your score.
Play a special card. Each of the special cards will be explained later.
Trade a card from your hand with a card from any other player. This is done on a voluntary basis. The other players do not have to trade with you, but it might be to their advantage. Be careful when discussing which cards you wish to trade with other players, as someone might learn information which will be useful to them when playing a special card on a later turn.
Discard up to 5 cards from your hand and draw an equal number from the discard pile.
The game continues in a clockwise direction with each player taking two actions per turn. When a player’s marker reaches the end of the scoring track, that player wins. It is not necessary to reach the last space on the scoring track by exact count.
Playing a phrase: The only way to score points and progress in the game is to lay cards on the table to form phrases. The Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was a phonetic system, with each symbol representing a sound. In addition, individual symbols could stand for a whole word. Although there are many other subtleties in real hieroglyphic writing, for purposes of the game the cards can be used to represent either a sound or a whole word. In addition, vowels were optional in hieroglyphic writing, and the same applies to the game. Some of the cards can be either, such as the “M” or Owl card.
This card could be placed to represent the sound made by the letter “M,” or to represent the word “Owl.” Other cards have no associated sound and can only be used as a whole word, such as the “Star” card.
By placing cards down either in a horizontal row or a vertical column, you can make a phrase. The following set of cards would be read “A lion came in.”
The phrase formed does not have to be grammatically perfect, nor does it have to make perfect sense. This is graffiti, after all! Players are encouraged to be creative and to use their imagination. Each phrase does have to have at least three words, whether as individual cards or phonetically spelled out. Each phrase must also have at least one noun and one verb. If a player lays down a phrase that doesn’t make sense, the other players listen to his explanation of what the phrase is supposed to say and then decide if it counts or not. If they decide against it, the player must return the cards to his hand.
When laying down a phrase, it is permissible to add cards to a previous phrase, making it longer. Only the newly laid cards score points, however. Cards may also be laid crossing a previous phrase similar to a crossword puzzle, re-using a single card, which again is not scored. See the example below:
Here the player used the first phrase—“A lion came in,” and added a new phrase crossing it vertically in a later turn. The second phrase is “Seated woman sank in water basin.” In the first turn, the player scored 9 points based on the sum of the point values listed in the upper right corners of the cards. On his next turn, the player would score 11 more points because the single point on the “I” card cannot be used again. It is not a requirement that phrases be connected together in this manner. If you prefer, they can simply be laid down in parallel rows. This might garner more points, but does not give you the option of re-using a card.
If a player has all the right cards to lay down her pharaoh name, she simply does so as part of a phrase. The pharaoh name must exactly duplicate the symbols shown on the card—it is not permissible to substitute another card with the same sound. (A wild card may be substituted for a missing symbol, however.)
The first four cards in the above example spell out the name Khufu. The “F” card is placed underneath the “OO” card because that is how the symbols were typically arranged by the Egyptians, as shown on the pharaoh card. The phrase would read: “Khufu went home.” (Translating the symbol for house generously.) It would be worth 33 points, because it includes the player’s pharaoh name for an extra 20 points.Special Cards: Following is a list of the special cards and an explanation of how each one is used.
The Chisel Card—This card is used to take a card that has already been played off of the table. The player who plays this card places it in the discard pile and then picks up one card from any of the phrases that have been played on the table. He can even pick up a card from one of his own phrases! The player who loses a card from one of her phrases does not lose any points as a consequence—with one exception: If the card picked up is a part of a pharaoh name, the player who played the pharaoh name loses the 20 bonus points gained from playing that name.
The Cartouche Card—This card is used to protect a pharaoh name that has previously been played. As an action, a player can play a cartouche card onto the table on top of her pharaoh name. A pharaoh name protected by a cartouche card cannot be invalidated by using a chisel to steal one of the cards in the name.
The Tomb Robbers Card—This card allows the player who uses it to search through the deck and pick out any single card of their choice. They have 15 seconds to do so, and it is suggested that the other players all count slowly to 15 as a method of timing the search. (And possibly distracting the searcher.) Once the player has obtained his card, he re-shuffles the deck and returns it to the middle of the table.
The Pharaoh Card—This card allows the player to call out a card that they wish to obtain. Any of the other players who has at least one of the cards named must give one card of that type to the player who used the pharaoh card.
The New Dynasty Card—This rare card is for those who like to play rough. When a player uses this card, he picks one of the other players. That player must immediately discard her pharaoh card and pick another one. If the player forced to change pharaohs has already placed her pharaoh name on the table, she loses the 20 point bonus for the pharaoh name. A player may use this card on himself, if for example his pharaoh name is Hatshepsut, and he is really hoping for Khufu instead.
The Wild Card—This card can be used to take the place of any other card in the game, with the exception of other special cards. It comes in handy when a player needs only one difficult-to-find card to finish his pharaoh name. The zero in the upper right hand corner of the card indicates that no points are scored when this card is used in a phrase.
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