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We cannot help but post some teasers from the summer of 2026’s game creations!!! We are now more or less ready with the map design of “Summiting the Sentinel”, another Chartagon game with a map focus! We can make as many maps as we want. When you see these images, don’t you want to play!?! (Sorry, it is not for sale just yet!)

The Sentinel, Chartagon’s most symmetric island, is about to be climbed by you daring explorers. On your way up, until you reach the ancient observatory at the summit, you will collect floral specimens only found on this desolate island. The more time you spend on your way up, the more specimens you find. However, if you don’t reach the summit and safety before night, it means you have suffered a lethal climbing accident on the steep, rocky, unforgiving mountain cliffs. The player who is last to reach the summit before the nightfall is the winner!

In Chartagon, all islands came to be by “Our Creator”, and we are only exploring them. We know that The Sentinel had a very special purpose for Our Creator once upon a time, which is signified by the symmetry and location of the island. Further, there are no records showing the discovery or naming of the island, and it seems to have had the same name since the dawn of time. While we have our own hypotheses, you may come up with your own, and maybe we will know the answer in the future, when we have discovered more of the Chartagonian archipelago.

The islad has four different height zones: 1) coastal meadows (white, with sparse birch trees, rowan- and maple-like trees); 2) mountain foot (green, with dense leaf trees and willow); 3) above the tree line (orange, without any trees, and mostly jagged rocks an steep cliffs); and 4) the peak (red, with snowy rocks, and the old and desesrted observatory at the top). As most games, Summiting the Sentinel is in an autumn setting.

We are super happy to announce the very first, real beyond prototype version, of Chartagon Discoveries!!! This is THE game, which most people only call “Chartagon”, and that we have game tested and redesigned for around 10 years by now. The wait is over. We’ve only got 30 copies, and only 25 are for sale (with collectors certificates), since five of the copies will be sent to reviewers. The good thing is, if we need more, we can get as many as we want, on pretty short notice.

This game has come a long way, but we still keep to the original idea: you should be able to learn the game (~10 minutes) and play the game (~40 minutes) during a lunch break. After a few games, you can fit two games without cards, i.e., the competition version, within a lunch break. The playing time is similar for all number of players, and if you want to play on a larger map or use two maps at the same time you can use two decks of cards to double the playing time.

In case you want to know more about the game; here is the rule book! You can download maps here! Enjoy!!!

We are very happy to announce that we have the first copies of LULO in our hands!!!

The LULO games (abbrevation of LUckily LOst) are fast to play, because you draw tiles in parallell from a common pool until the pool runs out. That means zero downtime! You use the tiles to build paths that gives you scores in different ways in the different versions of LULO: you either play in the forest, in caves, or at small islands at the coast.

The games can be played individually or combined in any way you want, to give you different experiences and adjust the playing time. If you play all three games at the same time, we call it TRILULO. With only one biome, expect each round to take 2-5 minutes, and with more players it is only faster. We think LULO is an excellent way start of every game night, and hope you will like it as much as we do. LULO quickly became one of our favorite games, and we felt an urge to prioritize this release!

Chartagon: The Dig is a short game of esthetics and composition. The mechanics forces new settlement layouts to appreciate for every game, including X small houses, X large houses, 1 small well, 1 large boat (on the boatyard), and 1 large lighthouse, and although each player scores points, the game explicitly says that winning or losing is of minor importance.

The game setting is at an archeological site, where players use old village map fragments (cards) to reconstruct the original Chartagonian light house settlement. Each player draws a pearl from a bag and places it to expand his/her/their digging grid. Red pearls represent potential building remains and white pearls mean that nothing was found at that location. The patterns of red and white pearls together with the buildings at different levels of the topography gives complex and truly enjoyable compositions, and it is easy to imagine the everyday life in the miniature versions of the wind-exposed settlements, where buildings are packed tight together to shield from wind, rain and snow.

The game is ready for playing, and hand made boards and pieces can be manufactured on request. Contact us at info@chartagon.com if you are interested in a quote, but expect it to be quite pricy, since we don’t intend to make a lot of these games. If you want to know more about this game, here are the rules:

Finding the previous walking dance reminded me of some notes I made years ago (as you can see on my hand writing), about a walking game. I remember that I also found the melody, but I can’t seem to find it right now, so let’s hope I can make an update of this post later on with the melody. The game is from the outer islands, where the inhabitants built small labyrinths to walk in by placing rocks on the ground. The labyrinth had concentric cirles, and you could only move your walking direction (clock-wise / counter-clock-wise) when you moved from an inner to an outer cirlce or vice verse. Everyone walked in the same direction, except one person who should catch the other ones and that walked in the other direction. Everyone had to sing and walk in rhythm, and you find the lyrics a bit poorly translated from Chartagonian to English here:

The ocean isn’t blue at night
when only lit by beacon light
Black, black waves flash into white
but only is your course… is right

As long as lights of beacons burn
the red and green says you must turn
Black, black waves behind your stern
but rocks ahead, as you… will learn

[The last verse was found on another island, and I don’t think it was part of the standard singing, but it is worth adding for full transparency. The graphite text was added at a later time point, and is taken from a later note in the same note book.]

We will catch the smartest whale
and we will set the fastest sail
but Black, black waves of northern gale
can hide the prey and we… will fail

UPDATE: I still have not found the melody (though I now remember and can play the first and last parts), but I will place it here if I find it later on!

Best regards / Pär

Sometimes you stumble onto something unexpected in the material of the Clerk, and the other day an almost complete description of a Chartagonian walking dance was found. This dance was apparently an almost mandatory ending of festivities, before the parties returned home or continued under more informal forms (i.e., the youth kept dancing and socializing). What is particular about this dance is that it both strengthened the Chartagonian identity as well as island specific identity. The music had two parts containing two phrases, repeated as AABBAABB…e.t.c., and always ended with a single A, when everybody had danced one phrase with each person at the gathering. The A-phrase was the Chartagonian-wide melody, and the B-phrase was specific for each island. It it not clear who composed the A-phrase or the B-phrases, but it is likely that the B-phrases were changed over time, to fit the current settlements. The A-phrase has been unchanged since the first lighthouses, but we don’t know how the melody came into the descendants’ possession.

The dance is more walking than dancing, and gave everyone the opportunity to walk together in silence for a short time (or silently singing the lyrics, which is also unknown to us at this point). The dance started with everyone standing in pairs in a large circle, holding one hand of the other person, and during the dance everyone walked slowly forward in the ring to the tempo of the music, 3/4 at about 120bpm. After every phrase, the person standing on the outer side from the center moved forward to dance with the inner person in the pair in front. During every second phrase, one pair switched places, so that the outer person became the inner person, making everyone eventually dance with everyone. The last A-phrase was danced with the person you started to dance with. In practice, this meant that if there was 20 persons at the gathering, the music would play 21 phrases (with each phrase being about 16 seconds, the total duration would be 5-6 minutes).

We assume that quite a few feelings could be expressed through the light touch when leading each other in the ring, giving the opportunity to bringing people closer together or taking the edge of personal conflicts. Most of the time, this dance/walk would reduce the tempo of the party and be a real party-pooper, but most people seemed to be settling down in a good way before leaving for home.

In the example below, the melody is played as documented by the Clerk, on the form AABBAABBA (and therefore suitable for 8 people), but the first BB comes from one island and the second BB comes from another island, so you can hear the vast difference between the B-phrases of different islands. The Clerk left note transcriptions for five different islands, but leave references to other documents which we have not yet found in the archives.

The lyrics lack sophistication, and is written in an old Chartagonian style, at least in the A-phrase. There is no mentioning about lyrics for the B-phrase, but because the rhythm and length of the A-phrase does not match, we assume that there should be island specific lyrics for each B-phrase. While the known lyrics are difficult to translate to good English, the meaning should be something along these lines:

Thank you everyone for all this time
There is nothing that we should regret
This day will flee
but we will see a-
nother dawn when (the) sun has set

In the autumn of 2024, there was a cold November. I know, because I wrote down the rules for a solitaire game that I created in my note book where I also write a lot of other things. I had almost forgot about this solitaire, even though I find it a very nice way to waste my time (or actually, that should be procrastination). The rules are as follows (translated from my notes):

PAGE 1: Sunday, November 24th, morning

This morning is even colder, ~18. It is calm and freezing fog, but strangely enough, it is supposed to be +4 and rain tonight!

Now in the morning, I have played a new solitaire game that I came up with. You preferably play it with a special deck of cards, but it is also possible to play with a regular deck without spades and face cards. You shuffle the cards and place every other card face up in a pile. During the game, you place one card at a time on the table. You may only place a card next to another, not diagonally, still with either the front or back facing up. If one or more cards that are hidden lie between two open cards of the same suit, e.g., [1][x][1] or [3][x][3], the hidden cards are turned face up. If two or more cards with…

PAGE 2: …the same suit lie next to each other, you may remove the cards from the game. You get 1 point for each card you remove, and in the solitaire version, you win if you get 30 points*. If you play against each other, the pile is divided among the players (2 or 3 or 5; if playing with 4 players, discard 2 cards first), and then the players place 2 cards at a time. The game only uses the card’s suit/symbol, except for the following special cards:

• Ace of Hearts: you may move any card of your choice to a new location.
• 5 of Hearts: you may remove all cards that lie diagonally to the 5.
• 10 of Hearts: you may turn all hidden cards face up.
• Ace of Diamonds: all three of the above in any order.

There are also a few special rules as follows.

PAGE 3:

Special 1: if playing solitaire, the Ace of Diamonds is always placed last in the deck. If playing against each other, the Ace of Diamonds has no special powers.

Special 2: if you place an open card next to another open card of the same suit, you must be able to remove 3 or more cards, otherwise both cards remain.

Special 3: once you have placed a card and potentially turned hidden cards face up, you can remove groups of cards and use special powers in any order.

The game is best with square cards and clear symbols and colors. I hope to be able to make such cards soon!

The narrative: an archeologist is trying to decipher a long past astronomer’s work of the celestial movements during the time of the very first lighthouses. Each point in the solitaire represents a reconstructed and solved equation, and getting 30 points means that all off the old equations are restored from oblivion. Of course, the full work is essential to understand the dynamics and meaning of the celestial trajectories when Our Creator was at early work.

Time for you and me is not the same as in Chartagon’s early days. The Constructor obviously must have spent enormous amounts of time when he single handed built all the lighthouses for the first islands, without getting worn out or older. From the few notes he left we know he was tired and exhausted after some days, and he did get sick like all of us, but there was always time to rest. The Clerk and the Constructor met a few times, and when they did we have quite good descriptions of how the Constructor worked, which combined clever use of mechanical-, balance/gravity-, and blood-sweat-tears-strategies. The patience and hard work of the early years is impressive and we conclude that time must have worked differently to allow all those light houses to be built by one person.

So what have we done recently, during the time that has passed since the last post? Let’s make a list:

• Regular lore research. We are continuing to create an inventory over the fragments already found, as well as finding new pieces to the Chartagon puzzle.
• The fourth game in the Chartagon main series has made significant progress, and we have started tweaking parameters and test playing again! We’ve started the graphical design of both the cards and the boards(s), and we soon need to print a first test game as a next progress step. The music score has a ready main theme, but we think that we’ve only come half way.
• We also started development of a solo-player mini game called Chartagon Foghorn. In this game you play a teenager who has been challanged by a friend to sound the Queen’s foghorn before midnight, and you could obviously not skip that challange! You’ll have 40 minutes to sneak past the Queen’s palace to find the way to win the challange. We ordered empty cards over a year ago, so the overall idea has matured for a long time. Unfortunately, time is not as forgiving as for the Constructor and there has not been time to plunge into this project until now. We’ve been working intensly on this during the last two weeks, and we are glad to say that the mechanics and conceptual layout is fully done! We need to make the graphical design, which will be a bit more complicated than previous games, so this might take quite some time. We also need to make independent play tests to see how we can make the instructions easy to follow, and to allow minor mistakes in interpretation. But overall: we’re confident that we’ve got a good game for some side-lore of the Queen’s palace!
• We’ve evaluated a new game component for Chartagon: Discoveries/Competition which allows placing two or more markers on the same post! This balances out some of the advantages you get from being player one, and especially so on a map with one especially favourable harbour post. We’ll possibly get back to this in a later post, and we need to insert it into the rulebook.
• We’ve just started developing a new mobile timer app for Chartagon: Discoveries/competition, which is intended for very large maps with unlimited players. Each player will have their own timer which says when they are allowed to make a move. The timer runs independently from the other players and also have a random delay (counterbalanced between players) that eliminates downtime. Or at least makes downtime fair.

So as you can tell, we’ve been very active! The greatest obstacles are time and money, so we will continue to make slow progress whenever we have the possibility!

Happy new year! We hope it will be a good year!

We’ve started the year with entering a very special board game contest, the single-card challange at TheGameCrafter (https://www.thegamecrafter.com/contests/single-card-challenge)! The essence of the rules is that the whole game, including rules, should fit on a single poker-sized card… very tricky, but fits well for a game like Asterism, where your imagination and creativity goes beyond what you actually see! The game we submitted can be found at: https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/asterism1

The one card game is very similar to a Chartagonian game which has been described both by the clerk and writers in later Chartagonian cultures. The widespread use of this game is perhaps because of it’s early origins, its simplicity, and it’s appeal to human creativity. The game has been described as both using the actual night sky, and by throwing pebbles or sea shells on the ground, to get the points to connect as star constellations or asterisms.

We think this was a good start for 2023, and hope you enjoy the game!