The Rulebook

Place the Location cards in a 5×5 grid in random order. Yes, you may have a rooftop on the bottom and a basement on the top. Doesn't matter.

Decide who plays the Patients; everyone else plays a Victim. Either the Patients player wins (by killing everyone else) or one or more Victims win (by surviving). If more than one person wants to be the Patients, the last person to watch a murder documentary gets it.

Each Victim player draws a random Victim from the Victims deck. One mulligan each, but if you take it, that's your character. Every Victim has a positive and a negative effect: discuss them openly and hold each other accountable.

The Patients player draws a random Patient (no mulligans), puts it on a stand and places it in its starting room. Victims note where it is, then each secretly chooses a starting location far away and writes it down. Each Victim draws one Camo/Sabo card, and the game begins.

Patients player: find all hidden Victims and kill them before they escape.

Victim players: stay hidden, sabotage the other Victims, and survive long enough to escape.

The Patients go first. Flip the coin: heads, move one room; tails, two. Movement is orthogonal: up, down, left or right, never diagonal.

If a Patient moves through or ends in a room a Victim is hiding in, that Victim must announce it once all Patients have finished moving. They're caught. Roll the die: if it lands inside the Patient's catching stat (top right of the card), the Victim dies, unless they have a Camo card to save them.

When a Victim dies, their room is destroyed and the rooms above fall down to fill the gap. If it was the last room in a column, the columns collapse inward and the Patient chooses the bottom room to the left or right. A Victim who survives being caught draws a free Movement card and flees.

If nobody was killed by the end of the Patients' turn, draw a Bloodlust card. They add chaos that speeds things up or leads to an unexpected catch. Patients players will grow to love these.

Draw one card: a Camo/Sabo card if you feel safe (Camouflage gets you out of a pinch, Sabotage screws over other Victims), or a Movement card if you need to run. Movement lets you move up to that many rooms orthogonally, including not at all. Write down your new location and discard the Movement card face up so everyone knows how far you could have gone.

If you're cornered and forced to move into or through a Patient's room, you're caught.

Camo/Sabo cards can only be played when their symbols allow it: on your turn, on another Victim's turn, in response to a Patient, or as a hold card (you may only have one held card at a time).

Play continues clockwise. On the Patients' third turn another Patient is released, and the room it starts in is blown up (after resolving any catch). If a starting room is already destroyed, choose one of the same colour, or any room if none remain. On the fifth turn, a stronger Special Patient is released. If you're caught by them… you're probably dead.

During the final three turns, any room with a Patient in it at the end of a turn is destroyed, so the board shrinks fast. Victims still alive in a leftover room when the Patients finish turn nine win.

Short version: survive through turn nine (the final three are turns 7–9). Long version: survive until no other Victims are alive, then the final three turns begin. In both versions, being the last Victim alive triggers the final three turns early: if everyone else is dead on turn four, you only have to survive until turn seven.

• Victims have a maximum hand size of seven.
• You may play as many Camo/Sabo cards in one turn as you're able to.
• "Stumble Into Nearest Patient" cards are in the Movement deck. Draw one and you walk into the nearest Patient's room and get caught.
• Effects resolve in the order cards are played; you can't sneak-play a card you're being forced to discard.
• If two or more Patients share a room when a Victim is caught, each Patient gets a kill attempt before the Victim can flee.
• All cards are discarded face up. Held cards (yellow symbol) sit on the table and don't count toward your hand.
• Victims don't have to draw on their turn; they may skip.