Introduction
In Stage Blood, you and your associates are theatrical agents, placing actors in Shakespearian plays. You will send your performers to the various popular plays of the season, hoping to win favor with the six major households, and earn renown for managing the finest actors in the land.
Stage Blood is a simple card game about managing a troupe of actors, for 2 to 6 players.
We’re not sure if it takes place in the Renaissance, or a fantasy world, or in modern-day renfairs, but it’s certainly not historically accurate by any standard.
Each round, players choose one actor from their hand and send it out into the world, assigning it to one of the unfinished plays at the center of the table. Smaller actors act first, while larger ones act later. And there are no such things as small parts, except there very clearly are.
The game lasts for four seasons, after which players will compare their collections of favor tokens from each of six households, earning points for placing high in each one. There are some other ways to earn bonus points as well, and you can keep score on paper or use Actor cards as explained in the rules.
Stage Blood is still early in development, and we hope you’ll take a look and send us your thoughts. Here are the files you need to make your own playtest copy:
Actor Deck (54 cards, Version 1.4, 9/15/24)
Play Deck (32 cards, Version 1.4, 9/15/24)
Token Sheets (2 pages, 72 tokens, Version 1.4, 9/15/24)
Stage Blood Rules (Version 1.5, 12/4/24)
This game requires two decks of cards: one has 54 Actors, and the other has 32 Plays. There are also 72 tokens, on two double-sided sheets, and a rulebook. You will also need about 24 tokens to represent Gold Coins.
A note about the token sheet: These tokens are double-sided, so pages 1 and 2 are the first set, page 3 and 4 are the second set. The tokens marked “Stage Blood” are spacers only, and not part of the game.
Because of the tokens, we probably won’t ever be able to offer a version of this game at DriveThruCards. However, we do hope to create a full production version of this game at some point in the future. Meanwhile, if you have any suggestions, please let us know!
Making Your Copy: Here are links to some of our videos on how to make your own cards and tokens:
Note: Stage Blood is a revision of another game of ours called Coat of Arms. That game had some additional mechanics about building a coat of arms, but was otherwise very similar to this one. If you see any old blog references to Coat of Arms, this is what it became.
Also, since James Ernest keeps talking about stealing this game title back, for use in a completely different game about Shakespearean actors, we are likely to rename this one before we offer it for sale, probably to either “Company of Players” or “Season of the Bard.” But it’s still “Stage Blood” for now, because under the right publisher, it might actually revert to “Coat of Arms.”
Got thoughts? Let us know!
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