1. Choose a Hero. Choose freely among the five hero cards. Some require you to begin on one side of the card or the other, but if the one you choose does not, you may freely select a starting side as well. Place it on the table as shown in the Table Diagram. Return the rest of the hero cards to the box.

2. Stats & Gold. Set your Health Strategy , and Recovery , dice to the values on your hero card and place them next to it. Turn your chip — called a gold tracker in Tanglewoods: Gold — to its numerical side. Then, set it to 20 minus the sum of your three starting stats.

3. Prepare the Play Area. Lay out the various cards and decks as shown in the Table Diagram.

• Stock the Shop. Shuffle the item cards into an Item Deck with their ordinary (brown) and upgraded (yellow) sides facing the same direction. Place them on the table as shown with the ordinary sides face-up. Put the Merchant Card on top of them.

• Cultivate the Forest. Shuffle the fable and minion cards together into a single deck, making sure that all of the daytime ( icon) and nighttime ( icon) sides face the same way. This is the Forest Deck. Place it on the table as shown with its daytime side face-up.

• Ready Your Map. Shuffle the map cards with their daytime (green) and nighttime (purple) sides facing the same way. Place this Map Deck as shown with its daytime side face-up.

• Bears Abound. Set the three bear cards in a stack as shown with their enemy sides, rather than their modifier sides, face-up. The order doesn’t matter.

4. Unit Dice. Gather all 17 unit dice and place these in in your dice pool.

5. Difficulty Scaling. Referring to the table in “Difficulty Scaling”, choose a difficulty level and make that level’s adjustments to setup, if any.