# Grand Tribunal *Created:* 2026-10-26, *Modified:* 2026-10-26 ![[Grand Tribunal (cover).jpg|600]] **Grand Tribunal** is a board game about the least glamorous part of being a wizard: getting the work approved. You spend vis to assemble a magic item, you watch the room vote on which kinds of magic count this year, and then you find out whether the archmages agree that what you built was the point of the season. It is **[[Ars Magica]]**'s prestige economy with the roleplaying taken out — the Tribunals, the voting, the hunger for the rank of archmage — and what's left is a lean resource-management game that fits in ninety minutes. ## Setting The premise comes straight out of the parent game's politics. Since time immemorial the Order has met in Tribunals, and the greatest of them is the **Grand Tribunal**, held every thirty-three years: magi come from across the world to lay their magical creations before the archmages, who judge them and award the title of archmage to the very best. **Grand Tribunal** hands you a seat in that hall as one of the magi competing for the honour, and the fiction is thin on purpose — the drama is entirely in whether the room's taste and your workshop output happen to line up. That thinness is a feature: Atlas is explicit that players don't need to know **Ars Magica** to play. The board references the setting, and the cards are built from its vocabulary of spell categories and item types, but nothing on the table requires you to have read a six-hundred-page rulebook first. Project: Redcap makes the sharper observation that the title is a slight misnomer: what you're actually doing — winning prizes for magic items produced over a run of turns — maps onto House Verditius's contest of magical craftsmanship rather than onto anything the Order's Tribunals get up to in play. Fair, and the distinction probably only matters to someone who already owns the roleplaying game. ## Mechanics ### The box A board (8" × 20"), two 55-card decks, and 99 pieces — 24 voting tokens, 60 vis tokens, one Praeco pawn, two tracker tokens, and twelve award tokens (four each of blue 1st, red 2nd, and yellow 3rd) — plus a six-sided die, and paper and pencil for scoring. Three to five players, ages 12 and up, 60–90 minutes. ### The loop Cards represent **magic item types, spell categories, and resources**. Every card carries an **advancement cost** — variable for items, always two for spells — paid in Vis tokens; when it's met the card becomes **active**, its tokens go back to the communal Vis pile called the **Regio**, and it moves to a marked-off part of your **Sanctum** so the table can see what's live. An active spell can then be installed on an active item for free, provided the item has room for that category. Cards in your hand and in your Sanctum carry between rounds, along with any unspent Vis. ### Contested sources Vis doesn't just arrive. Sources sit on tracks with tracker tokens, and a **Contested Source** is resolved by a die roll — rerolling ones and sixes — with the number coming up as the Vis you pull from the Regio. Which is the sting: once you've rolled, every other player in turn may roll for the same source, paying you one Vis for the privilege. Taking the rich Vis means letting your neighbours buy in behind you, and a tracker that reaches the last space in a Tribunal area runs into the next one, capping how often a source can be tapped before the Tribunals convene. ### The Tribunals Three times during the game the Tribunals convene. Each round the table **votes** on the item types and spell categories they're most likely to be able to play, so you're building toward a plan and lobbying the room toward it at the same time. At each Tribunal, 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-place awards go to the players whose items match the most-voted types and categories, and the trackers advance into the next Tribunal's area. The owner of the winning item takes the Praeco pawn and opens the next Tribunal as first Praeco. The last one is the Grand Tribunal itself: whoever has the most points when it closes is invited to become an archmage and wins. Atlas calls it a resource-management game, and that's the right frame — votes, Vis, and cards, with a limited number of actions each turn. It is a Eurogame wearing a wizard's robe, down to the contested source where the good Vis costs you only the neighbour you just invited into it. ## Editions - **Grand Tribunal** (2006) — Atlas Games, released March 2006. Designed by **Phillip R. Chase**, with graphic design by **Michelle Nephew** (based on work by Scott Reeves), art by **Alexander Bradley**, and published by John Nephew. Stock number AG1280, $24.95, and the only Ars Magica board game Atlas has produced. *In the library.* A single edition, with the rules sheet also circulating in Italian and Spanish. There is no revised printing — but there is an **official errata** on Atlas's site that changes the Vis token awards, so a copy of the rules alone is not the whole rules. ## References - [Grand Tribunal - Atlas Games](https://atlas-games.com/grandtribunal) - [Grand Tribunal official errata (Vis token awards) - Atlas Games](https://atlas-games.com/grandtribunal/GTerrata) - [Grand Tribunal (Ars Magica) - Atlas Games shop](https://shop.atlas-games.com/products/grand-tribunal) - [Grand Tribunal Board Game - Project: Redcap](http://redcap.org/page/GTBG) - [Grand Tribunal - BoardGameGeek](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/21276/grand-tribunal) - [Thoughts on Grand Tribunal - BoardGameGeek forum thread](https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/123888/thoughts-on-grand-tribunal)