How to Play Orléans: Bag Building, Followers & Actions
Orléans is a bag-building strategy game. Instead of placing a fixed worker pool, you draw followers from your own bag, assign them to action spaces on a personal board, and activate completed actions during the round.
Draw followers into your market
At the start of a round, draw a number of followers based on your current knight/development capacity. Only drawn followers are available for assignment that round.
Assign followers to matching action spaces
Each action requires specific follower types. Place drawn followers onto the required spaces of your player board. An action becomes ready once all required positions are filled.
Activate completed actions
Actions recruit new followers, advance technology/development, move your merchant, build trading stations, collect goods, gain coins or interact with other tracks and buildings.
Used followers usually return to the bag
After resolving an action, its followers return to your bag unless an effect permanently removes or relocates them. Recruiting therefore changes future draw probabilities.
Technology can replace follower requirements
Development can grant technology tiles that permanently occupy certain action spaces, reducing how many followers future activations require and making the bag more reliable.
Events resolve every round
The round track introduces events that can provide income, require payment, affect the population track or create another shared condition. Prepare before the event phase rather than treating it as a surprise.
End-game scoring rewards development plus board presence
Final scoring includes coins, goods and the game’s citizen/trading-station multiplier system, with additional values from collected components and effects.
Publisher reference: dlp games. Checked September 21, 2026.