One player becomes the Oracle, who can cheat knowing all the answers to the 8 questions (peeking the end of the booklet), but can only speak through Rebus— abstract images built from overlapping tiles. The others are Investigators, who must interpret those images, propose meanings, and slowly construct a shared symbolic language between human and machine.
This booklet is not merely a prop — it is the game’s true grammar. In fact the game involves the innovative mechanism of the Referents: a system that players will use to anchor the symbols they see to this book texts and illustrations. Without it, communication between Oracle and Investigators would collapse into pure abstraction.

Your notes, drawings, and guesses become the game’s evolving dictionary that you will use through your 8 adventures.

By the end, you will not just have solved the mysteries —you will have invented a language, one glyph at a time.

In most detective games, events are mysterious but language is clear. In The League, it’s the opposite: the story is obvious, but the language is the mystery.
Other detective games hide the facts — The League hides the language.
Here, the crime is visible, but the words to describe it must be invented.

• Rulebook and the first case (EN v.1, May 2024) (link, BGG link)
  • Rules
  • Printable Components
  • The first case: The Curator (solutions not included)
• Rulebot (link) second only to myself, this Gemini agent called “The ExtraordiBot” is trained to explain all the rules
• Print-and-Play Components from our Riddle Library (required if you don’t own a copy of The Strange Forgeries)
• Blog
  • A Detective Game About Inventing Languages, Gamefound, Nov. 2024