The Two-Hundredth Night

The Eve

Two hundred times the houses had sat to the board, and for the two-hundredth sitting nothing ordinary would serve. The chronicles will show that House Skurven came to the table ahead — a hundred and one victories against ninety-four, and the three most recent contests taken in a row — while House Kumachan came with a single fresh win and a long memory. As at the hundredth, the sitting would run to three rounds, decided on the night's whole harvest of points; but this time the houses had prepared something older and stranger: sealed letters.

Each man wrote two — a Letter of Nemesis naming five cards the other would least wish to face, and a Secret Scout Report wagering prime-numbered stakes on the other's habits — and closed each with a wax seal that genuinely is one: the seal bears the arithmetic fingerprint of the very text folded inside, published for all to see while the letters stayed shut. Any hand that tampered would break the number. None did. All four seals stand cracked and proven on the Chronicle, where any visitor's own browser re-derives the proof.

Deep Cuts, or the Revenge of the Never-Played

The first board was an act of archaeology: ten kingdom piles and four landscapes drawn entirely from cards that had never once appeared in the previous two hundred games — Embargo, Ambassador, Black Market, Sea Hag, Coppersmith, Tournament and their long-neglected kin, with the Fountain promising fifteen points to whoever would stoop to hoard ten Coppers. Both men stooped. Both Fountains paid.

What followed was a war of attrition of a kind not seen since the Clash of Kings marathons. Skurven raised four Ambassadors and with them shovelled his refuse across the table — the victor would end the round carrying eight Curses and ten Estates of largely charitable origin. But Kumachan had found the Tournament, and the Tournament found him four Prizes — Princess, Followers, Trusty Steed and Diadem — and the Princess made his hoard cheap and his engine cruel. Buried under another man's garbage, he won by forty-one.

The Reveal, and the One Mutual Dread

Before the first round, the Nemesis seals were cracked and the letters read aloud. The houses had guessed they might name as many as four cards in common. They shared exactly one — but such a one: Possession, the card that lets a man play his rival's deck for him, named by both letters in mutual and well-earned dread. It stood once on the board, credited to both, a monument to how well twenty months of rivalry teaches two men each other's nightmares.

The chronicler's task was to fill the board to ten piles with neutral infrastructure — and here the record notes a rescue: the letters had summoned Harsh Winter, a prophecy that no board may carry without an Omen to wake it. So the fill became Mountain Shrine, whose omens count the prophecy down and whose shrine-fires burn the board's garbage; Village Green, the anti-Moat, which grants no immunity but turns every forced discard into next turn's villages; and Market Square, which watches the board's many trashings and quietly mints Gold from them — in both directions.

The Nemesis Draft

A board built of two men's spite played exactly as spitefully as promised. Torturer against Berserker, Swindler against Skulk, the Wolf Den fining every orphaned card three points, and the Harsh Winter gathering as Mountain Shrine's omens burned down the sun. The scores tell the story of the round better than any account: sixty-six points between the two houses combined — in a round of thirty-four turns. Kumachan weathered it nearly twice as well, and the night's ledger swelled to a sixty-one point lead.

The Odyssey, and the Ghost That Came Ashore

The closing board was the night's high poetry: the Odysseys themselves — Old Map to Voyage to Sunken Treasure to Distant Shore, Ithaca at the bottom of the pile — with Sirens, Necromancers, Giants and the Maelstrom, on the grand scale of Colony and Platinum. And fittingly for an Odyssey, the voyage home took days: begun on the night of the thirteenth, the ships did not reach harbour until the seventeenth. Ten years, mercifully condensed.

Here the record must confess a mystery it cannot resolve. The manifest, sealed and signed, called for Ghost Ship — a debut two hundred games in the waiting. But when the fleet mustered on the board, no ship rode at anchor; in its berth stood Ghost Town. No hand at the table admits to the change, and none can account for it. The chroniclers can only suppose that somewhere on the crossing the Ghost Ship ran aground, and her spectral crew, being practical folk, settled where they washed up and incorporated. The town they founded played its part brilliantly — and the ship's debut remains owed to some future board, should she ever be raised.

The round itself was everything the first two were not: swift, rich and breathlessly close. Skurven drained the Native Villages and sailed the Odysseys three times over; Kumachan walked the Pilgrimage six times and hoarded Buried Treasure; the Battlefield paid eight to four in the crown's favour. When the dust settled on the twenty-sixth turn, six points separated the houses on a board where Colonies go for eleven — the margin of one good hand, either way.

The Scout Reports Unsealed

After the last round, the two Scout Reports were cracked together — nothing had opened early — and adjudicated against the record. Both men proved uncommonly good prophets: six predictions in eight landed. Skurven called the four Prizes with his heaviest stake, the lone Ambassador, and the six Pilgrimages — twelve points of hits. Kumachan called the nine-card shopping spree, the Fountain, and the turn-eighteen Province — fourteen. Only the night's pace fooled anyone: neither man guessed the Odyssey would sail home in a mere twenty-six turns.

Contest CC, Decided

The Contest Roll records the rounds' harvest, 235–168; the scout stakes above complete the night's true account.

Andreas of House Kumachan takes the two-hundredth contest by sixty-nine points, sweeping all three rounds — an answer, across a hundred contests, to the hundredth night, when Skurven swept Big Time 311–250. Each house now owns one of the Chronicle's two triple-crowned sittings. The standing after two hundred: Skurven 101 — Kumachan 95, with four contests level. The gap, seven on the eve, is six by morning.