2. House Rules (Isekai Ver.)
"Kylegalli, Kylegalli, Kylegalli..."
"Does something come to mind, my lord?"
"...Yes. Maybe this could be my way out after all. Get your hands on a Kylegalli set and send it off for me."
"Where shall I send it?"
"To the House of Everts. A duke I know would find it quite entertaining. And if luck is on our side... perhaps even the young duchess."
"The duchess, my lord? I've heard the rumors, of course—that the Duke dotes on her so fiercely she has never once set foot outside the ducal castle."
"That's about the size of it."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Never you mind. Thinking too far ahead would be premature anyway. Speaking of which, Charles—we're playing Yacht, and the gap between our scores is over a hundred points. Is that my imagination? Every roll you take comes up a beauty."
"It is your imagination."
"............"
I'm free now! The world has entered the great age of board games!
Well, maybe not quite that far, but I certainly felt like I'd been crowned some kind of Board Game King.
'Though my life was collateral in the bargain.'
My little wordplay, of course, hadn't slipped past anyone. My father had raised our house from barony to viscounty in his youth—the man who'd managed that couldn't possibly have missed what I was really doing.
Which meant that letting it slide was his way of telling me to give it a try.
And naturally, I had no intention of letting such a golden opportunity go to waste.
"So, what next? What kind of board game would be best?"
Even off the top of my head, dozens upon dozens of games came to mind.
Time-tested classics, mystery games with branching storylines, cutthroat management games where reading your opponents was everything, psychological games built on mutual suspicion and deceit.
Truthfully, I wanted nothing more than to spread strategy games—the very flower of the board game world.
'But obviously that's a pipe dream.'
How many servants had already given up on Yacht, claiming the rules were too complicated? And that's a game that needs nothing but dice and a pencil.
Strategy board games were a whole world away. Multiple kinds of tokens, multiple kinds of cards, rules that needed a full rulebook to explain, and enough decisions to make your head spin.
Even if I poured my passion into building one now, barely anyone would be able to play it—and that would run counter to my goal of introducing people to the joys of board games in the first place.
So: Kylegalli.
"Its fun is already market-tested."
Grandpa Charles and Sally had both said it was entertaining, and besides, Sally had once pulled an all-night Kylegalli marathon with the maids and slept in until noon because of it.
Simple rules, primal fun, excellent game design. It was the perfect gateway board game.
Its only real flaw, if I had to name one... was the name?
'If I'd known it would come to this, I should have given it a proper name.'
Kylegalli. Really? Kylegalli? It was practically an advertisement declaring to the whole world that I'd made it.
I should have just kept the original name. The belated regret washed over me, but there was no taking it back now.
Everyone already knew it as Kylegalli, and I hardly wanted to track each person down one by one to correct the record. All I had to do was swallow a little embarrassment.
Though... a small pang of guilt did gnaw at me. The original game had been created by a genius in another world, and all I'd done was redraw the art before slapping my own name on it.
Just as my mood was starting to sink, I caught the sound of someone nearby and turned my head.
"M-Milord..."
"Sally."
"I-I, um. That is to say..."
So this was where she'd gone off to—she'd been cleaning.
Well, she was my personal maid and bodyguard, and she'd woken up later than her own master. A light punishment, really.
Not that I truly saw why a shut-in like me, who never left the mansion, needed a bodyguard at all.
"I-I'm so sorry!!"
"Hm? What's this all of a sudden?"
"W-Well, I overslept and couldn't attend to you, milord, and then you got scolded by the Lord of the house, so..."
"Ah."
"Is K-Kylegalli... forbidden now too...?"
"Don't worry, Sally. If anything, it's an opportunity."
"Sniff... Yes?"
"It's true I got summoned before Father because of you, but I negotiated my way to an official blessing for board games. Which means Kylegalli is still fair game."
"Ah...!"
"So no crying. Are you finished with the cleaning?"
"Oh, yes! They'll do the rest by themselves!"
At a single wave of Sally's hand—her mood flipping from gloomy to radiant in an instant—the broom and mop lifted into the air on their own and began sweeping and mopping the floor around us.
Magic really was a marvel, no matter how many times I saw it. No wonder people went crazy for magic shows.
With a sheepish, hehe-ing Sally in tow, I set off down the corridor.
There was something I'd been meaning to ask her, after all.
"By the way, how was Kylegalli? With the maids, I mean. What was the reaction?"
"Oh, it was incredible! At first it was just me and my friend, but she kept beating me and I got so mad I got rough about it, and then... three people, then four, and by the end more than ten of us were playing!"
"And that's what kept you up all night?"
"H-Honestly? We were playing and playing and none of us noticed how much time had passed... By the time we came to our senses, we'd slept straight through until late..."
Ah-ha. I'd been there myself a few times.
Go to a board game café with friends and sink your teeth into a single strategy game or RPG, and hours would melt away in what felt like minutes. I'd even had sessions where we started at one in the afternoon and looked up to find it was five, forcing us to awkwardly rush the ending.
'But that was with strategy games that took hours per session. Kylegalli rarely runs past thirty minutes even at its longest.'
Which left two possible explanations.
Either playing with ten people at once had stretched the game time out enormously...
...or they'd truly been absorbed in the most fun they'd ever had with a board game, and lost all track of time.
Personally, I was rooting for the latter.
"Anyway—Father's given his blessing, so I'm going to spread Kylegalli properly."
"Sp-spread it...?"
"Yeah. Starting with the household staff, and from there out into the territory."
"...Th-That's... already happening, I think?"
"What?"
"B-Because Head Butler Charles said it seemed like it would be really popular, and he had a few more sets made to hand out to the knights and the servants..."
"...When?"
"R-Right after he left your room yesterday, milord."
Seriously, that old man?
How does he keep pulling off this brilliant stuff!
'Well then, all the better...!'
It had only been a day, so meaningful results were probably still a ways off. But Grandpa Charles had commanded the house knights before becoming head butler. If the man himself had recommended it—and it was a game made by the young lord, third son or no—then surely a few of the knights had given it a try.
I'd go and hear it straight from the source.
'And play with them, obviously!'
Frankly, I'd only ever played with Grandpa Charles and Sally, so fresh blood at the table was the thing I craved most. New reactions! New playstyles! New faces!
Fresh, juicy newbies—I needed to see newbies!
"Right, then. To the training grounds!"
"Y-Yes, milord!"
The House of Byron had been a barony only a few years ago, but neither its territory nor its mansion could be called small by any stretch.
Word had it my great-grandfather had been a knight who earned great distinction in war, and thanks to a personal friendship with the Emperor of his day, he'd received not a mere baronetcy but a full barony—and prime land at that.
There were no mines or dungeons to speak of in our territory, but it sat at a strategic crossroads connecting the imperial heartland to both the western and southern regions.
Merchants, grain, and goods flowed through constantly whether we lifted a finger or not, so even without much native talent for commerce, the land pulled in a tidy fortune. It was part of why my eldest brother, despite showing a gift for magic, had chosen the Academy's economics faculty over the Mage Tower.
So, what's the point of all this?
That the training grounds inside our mansion alone were absolutely enormous.
"Sword stances—ready!"
""""Agh!!!!"""
"Too quiet! LOUDER!!!"
""""AAAAGH!!!!!"
"Still brutal, as ever."
"It, it looks absolutely exhausting, doesn't it...?"
Naturally. In a world where superhumans existed, knights capable of wielding aura were a military force beyond imagination.
Beings who could, quite literally, run across the surface of a lake and leap clear over hills. In wars between nations that might matter less, but territorial disputes so often came down to little more than duels between knights.
Since the number and quality of a house's knights translated directly into its prestige, every single day was a relentless grind of hard training.
'No wonder gambling got a pass around here.'
When you trained at full intensity day in and day out, you needed somewhere to blow off steam.
That used to be gambling—until Father's ban, at which point, by all accounts, no replacement existed.
Which meant I was swooping into a brand-new market gap!
'It does feel a bit like selling the sickness and then the cure, though.'
But the one at fault was the knight who'd used Yacht as a gambling vehicle—not me, and certainly not board games.
Having settled the matter neatly in my conscience, I made my way toward the training grounds.
"Hard at work, everyone?"
"Eh? L-Lord Kyle?! Everyone, attention!"
"No, no. Don't..."
The moment the knight commander spotted me, he tried to snap the knights into formation, but at my wave of protest he called it off and approached instead.
His face clearly asked why I was here—someone who hadn't set foot on the training grounds since he was a small child.
"Lord Kyle, it's been a very long time since you visited the training grounds. What brings you here?"
"Nothing much. Board games."
"Board... games? Surely you don't mean Kylegalli?"
Huh.
You know about that too?
"You've played it, Sir Knight Commander?"
"O-Of course. Senior Charles insisted I try it at least once, so I did..."
Oh.
Contrary to my expectations, the knight commander's voice as he spoke about Kylegalli was extraordinarily delicate.
A distinctly ambiguous air, like a man debating whether or not to say what was on his mind.
Feeling a faint twinge of foreboding, I pressed him anyway.
"What is it? Speak freely."
"...Then, with your leave, I shall be candid. Frankly, milord... it was... not very fun."
"...Really?"
"N-No! The game itself being no fun—absolutely not! Kylegalli as a game is plenty entertaining!"
"Then what?"
"It's the... the rules. They're... quite inconvenient, actually."
The rules? Kylegalli's rules were inconvenient?
While I stood blinking in incomprehension, the knight commander pressed on with a sigh.
"I heard the rules from Senior Charles. The game's own rules were easy enough to grasp... but forbidding aura and magic—that part has proven, ah... problematic."
...Banning aura and magic?
You mean that thing I did after the first game, when Grandpa Charles's aura and Sally's magic got out of hand?
"Hmm. Perhaps you'd like to see for yourself?"
"...Please."
"Understood! Knights who have played Kylegalli! Assemble!"
"""Assembling!!"""
At the knight commander's bark, one short knight, one rather older knight, and one knight conspicuously bald at the crown came scrambling over and set up the game board.
A table from the corner of the training grounds, a bell and cards fetched from who-knew-where—done.
The knights settled around the table and turned toward their commander.
"Sir? Shall we do it as before?"
"Go ahead. The young lord is here to observe."
"Understood."
"Then—begin!"
───CRUNCH!!
"...Huh?"
It happened in the space of a single heartbeat.
The same instant it took me to blink once.
...The instant the game began, the bell had already been crushed flat into a lump of scrap metal.
The knights' utterly unbothered expressions said everything: this was not a first-time occurrence. Not even a second-time one.
"This is... how it goes, milord."
"............"
Only by witnessing it with my own eyes could I finally grasp the problem—one I had never even considered.
Every board game I knew was built on the assumption that ordinary people, with no supernatural powers whatsoever, would be playing. That was only natural; in the original world, there was no such thing as aura or magic.
But this world treated every manner of ability and spell as a daily fact of life.
In a world like that, how well could the original world's board games possibly hold up?
'The mansion staff like the maids, and the ordinary folk of the territory, are fine. They're all just like me.'
But knights, mages, and the many other kinds of ability-holders were a different story. This exact problem was all but inevitable with them.
...To be honest, the easy way out was simple. Just shrug and call it unavoidable.
Knights and mages were, after all, a small minority of the whole. Most of the people living in this world were ordinary humans, same as the original world.
Wave the minority off as an unsolvable edge case, keep making board games exactly as they were—easy enough.
Except...
'If that was all I ever intended to do, then I never should have dreamed of a world where everyone could enjoy board games together.'
"Don't worry, Sir Knight Commander."
"My lord?"
"I'm the one who makes the games. If the rules don't fit, I'll simply make new ones."
House rules.
Additional or modified rules, agreed upon by the players themselves, to accommodate their circumstances or introduce new variables in board games, TRPGs, and the like.
Right now, that was exactly what the moment demanded.
'But the house rules I know won't cut it here.'
Not the ordinary house rules of the original world—rules born of this world alone.
For the sake of board games everyone could play with a smile on their face.
It was time to build a set of rules entirely from scratch.