CALLING ALL PARDONERS to join us on The Road To Canterbury!

Gryphon Games is pleased to present its second Kickstarter project, The Road to Canterbury, by the very talented designer, Alf Seegert. The Road to Canterbury was inspired by a villain: the deliciously wicked figure of the Pardoner in Chaucer’s 14th century literary masterpiece The Canterbury Tales. In The Canterbury Tales, a company of medieval pilgrims travels together from London to Canterbury, telling each other stories along the way. The Pardoner tells a tale about the deadly consequences of greed. In doing so, he hopes that the pilgrims will seek him afterwards and offer coins in exchange for the forgiveness he falsely promises through his relics and indulgences.

In the game The Road to Canterbury, players each play a pardoner just like Chaucer’s. As you travel the road on pilgrimage to Canterbury, you sell indulgences delivering pilgrims from the eternal penalties brought on by the Seven Deadly Sins. But to succeed as a pardoner, you will need to do more than just sell forged pardons for quick cash. To keep your services in demand, you will actually need to lead these pilgrims into temptation yourself! Perhaps some phony relics might help? There is one big catch. The Seven Deadly Sins live up to their name: each sin that a pilgrim commits brings Death one step nearer, and a dead pilgrim pays no pardoners!

Here is an example of one of the 5” by 7” Relic Cards included as a Level Two reward. The art for these special cards is by Brian Kohrman, and each one will be hand-certified as authentic by the Chief Pardoner himself, Alf Seegert.

The complete rules to the game will soon be posted on Board Game Geek (subject to last minute tweaks of course as production draws nearer because of this Kickstarter campaign!). We think that you will be very pleased at the atmospheric artwork and high-quality components that Gryphon Games has planned and put together for The Road to Canterbury—a worthy follow-up to Gryphon’s recent hit Pastiche—in terms of production values, art and attention to details. The artwork all dates from the sixteenth century or earlier, and the game board is itself taken from Hieronymus Bosch’s painted tabletop The Seven Deadly Sins. 

Components include cards with details of each individual Deadly Sin painted by Bosch and seven thick pilgrim cards with art from the earliest illustrated manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Individual cloth coin bags are provided so each player can hide away his ill-gotten gains.

The Pardoner's Guild awaits your support, so feast your eyes on these tempting (dare we say luxurious?) offers to the right. If you join us, you will be the pride of your parish and the envy of your neighbors!

To learn more about The Road to Canterbury visit bit.ly/getpardoned.

The designer, Alf Seegert, is an American game designer and professor of literature at the University of Utah. He is a five-time finalist at the Hippodice game design competition in Bochum, Germany and is the designer of the games Bridge Troll, Trollhalla, andnow The Road to Canterbury.

Gryphon Games has produced such popular titles as Roll Through the Ages, Incan Gold and For Sale. But occasionally a game like The Road to Canterbury comes along—which is just too good for us to ignore, and yet we have no idea how to assess the demand for what we know is an excellent game.  That’s where all of you Kickstarter Pardoners -- ahem, PARTNERS -- come in. A good Kickstarter response will encourage us to publish this terrific game and it will give us an idea of just how many to publish as well.