Obsession: Upstairs, Downstairs

Set up your family board and gentry deck as you would in the base game. When gathering your reputation tokens, you can now choose to play with the 7-8 tile, as you can play this new solo mode in either the standard or extended length. You will also take no objective cards to start out with. Set the casual and prestige gentry decks as usual. When setting the workers in the servants for hire box, take one under butler, four footmen, two valets, two ladies' maids, one cook, one hall boy, one head housemaid, and one useful man. If you are using the new Howard family, which starts with a cook, do not set out another cook. Choose one of these servants, other than the under butler, to take and place in your available service area with your starting servants, and place the remaining servants in the servants for hire area. Use the Tableau Round Track board instead of the traditional board, and shuffle and place the VP cards as normal. Remove all hybrid tiles. Rather than using the bag, you're going to set out one copy of each improvement tile and stack them with the rest of their improvement type in increasing order. Then place them in the market in this order: service, sporting, essentials, estate, and prestige. Set the solo estate challenge market counters in the spaces marked by the price on them. Find the D20, but you don't need a rival family or the rival AI card.

Decide if you're going to play a standard game or the extended length game. The goal in the standard game is to finish by round 12 with a score of at least 132 points. In the extended game, you'll have a goal of round 15 to score at least 188 points. If you take too long, you'll be docked VP, but if you manage to finish early, you'll gain bonus VP.

Each turn plays mostly the same as the base game. You'll follow the order of play listed on your family board, hosting events, inviting gentry, providing service, and gaining favors. However, when it comes time to buy a tile from the market, you can buy any tile in any stack for the price listed plus or minus that tile's modifier. You can always buy as many tiles from the market as you can afford. So the Builders' Holiday in this version of the game is going to mean that every tile in the market is discounted by 100 pounds. You are now limited on how many of each tile type you can take. In a standard game, you may not exceed three tiles of each of the five columns for a total of 15 tiles, or four tiles for a total of 20 in the extended game. This is including your starting tiles. If you do want to take another tile for whatever reason and you are full up on that category, you can discard one of the tiles you already have in your estate in order to slot that one in. When you pass, you have the choice between taking 200 pounds in rent as in the base game, or hiring servants. When hiring servants, you'll essentially use your Butler's Room as though that were your action. You'll hire two servants from the servants for hire box and place them, along with your butler, into your expended service box and flip the Butler's Room to the rose side. Remember, when you do pass, refreshing service is the very first thing you do, so your butler or under butler will always be available to do this. This means you can hire new servants and refill your hand at the same time. Roll the D20 for the AI. The AI will scrap a tile based on the number. First, find the stack with the range that the result fell within. Then, depending on where that number falls in the range, remove a tile from the game. So, if it's the first number of the range, you'll scrap the top or first tile of that stack. The middle number, you'll scrap the second tile down, and the last number, you'll scrap the third tile from the top. However, if there aren't enough tiles to do this, then nothing's going to happen. The AI will never scrap a tile if it would prevent you from completing your tableau. So if you still need to get two more tiles in your sporting category, the AI will never scrap the last two tiles from the market. On a 19 or 20, the AI makes no purchase.

Calculate your score the same way you do in base Obsession. In a standard game, you're trying to match or beat a score of 132 points by round 12. In the extended game, the score goal is 188 by turn 15. If you don't finish on round 12 or round 15, you'll apply a modifier to your score, and it's a brutal one. If you finish a standard game on round 13, you'll subtract 5 points from your score. On turn 14, you'll subtract 15 points (5 for the first turn, 10 for the second). Only the first two boxes are marked, but this will increase by 5 each subsequent turn that it takes you to finish. So if it takes you all the way to round 17 to finish a standard game, you're going to lose 75 points (5 + 10 + 15 + 20 + 25).

Play continues in this way until you've met two conditions: you've reached max reputation (7 in standard or 9 in extended) and your tableau is complete. A complete tableau is either a full three tiles in standard or four tiles in extended in each of the five improvement categories, and all tiles that can be flipped are flipped.