Description

In Hollow Trail, you become pilgrims on the long-for-gotten road to salvation. Your goal is to place cards controlled by you (servants)on selected locations and gain points. But the trail vanishes in your steps, so it´s up to you, if you´re willing to sacrifice your servants by placing them on those doomed places.

There are 4 actions in player´s turn:

1. Send - You’ll start every turn with 5 Minions in your hand. When you take a Send action, choose one of them and place it below the leftmost card of the trail. Mark it with a token in your color.
2. Travel - With a Travel action, you advance one Minion along the trail to the right. Your Minion can take a number of steps indicated by its speed
3. Fight - With a Fight action, you can attempt to slay or turn an opponent’s Minion. Choose one of your Minions at that same location. Your Minion is the attacker and your opponent’s Minion is the defender. Specify whether you will fight with strength or willpower.
4. Conjure - Each location along the Hollow Trail holds magical power that can be unleashed by those who know its secrets. To take a Conjure action, your Minion and its location must have a matching type. This type determines the type of spell you can Conjure.

Contests
Hollow trail is a positional game. To score, you need to send your Minions to a particular location. The locations that allow players to compete for points are called Contests. The Contests are not resolved until the scoring phase (every 4 rounds) so it’s not enough to gain the dominant position – you must hold it.

Scoring phase
After each set of 4 rounds, there is a scoring phase, as indicated by the timing track along the top of the scoreboard. The following things happen in this order:
1. Guardians attack. Resolve Guardians from left to right.
In the example below, the Guardian attacks the location to its left, turning the red Minion into a Lost Minion.
2. Score locations from left to right.
In the example below, the red and blue players are tied at the first location, so each gets 2 points. No one gets points at the second location. The red player could have scored 5 points at the third location, but red’s Minion was turned, so no one scores. Both players at the Campsite score 1 point.
3. Old trail vanishes! Remove the first three locations and all Minions there. Cards go to their respective discard piles. Slide all remaining cards left.
4. If any of the remaining locations is still face down, turn it face up. Guardians revealed this way do not attack, but give Guardians and Obstacles their resistance tokens and replacement-option cards, as usual.
5. New trail appears. Shuffle the deck corresponding to the next part of the game and deal out 3 new locations face down.

At the ends of part I and part II, the first three locations in the trail are removed. The Minions at those locations have a chance to glean magical essence for their players, but they don’t survive to the next part of the game. In general, it’s a good idea to get at least one Minion to the second half of the trail so you aren’t starting the next part of the game with nothing.
6. The leftmost card of the trail must not be an Obstacle or a Guardian. If it is, replace it with a random Contest from the same deck.
7. All players may now discard any number of Minions from their hands and draw back to a full hand of 5. In this case, all cards must be drawn randomly from the deck.
8. Advance the round counter and determine a new starting player. The player in the worst position gets to go last. This means the starting player is the player to the left of the one with the fewest points. If players are tied for fewest points, the one with fewer Minions is worse off. If there is still a tie, break it randomly.