There's a rulebook and a glossary. Very attractively designed, well laid-out, and easy to follow.
Ignore the Howard and Wessex families for now - they're part of the Upstairs, Downstairs expansion and Wessex expansion respectively. The purple boxes held meeples, a bag to put improvement tiles in, and some other stuff. They can be used post-unboxing for storage, which is GREAT!
Also, I love the family boxes. They're empty at first because you have to put the stuff together, but once you do, every family has their starter stuff all in the box, so you can just hand the box to the player who picks them. It's BRILLIANT.
These are what are called Improvement Tiles from the Sporting category and coins. Very easy to punch out. The side of the tiles with the roses are the better side, and it flips to the rose side after you first play a tile. (More on that later).
I'm going to skip ahead a bit and post the setup for my first game. I'm using one of the two solo variants - a 2-player game against an opponent of my choosing. There's 12 possible opponents - 4 each of Beginner, Intermediate, and Expert.
Since it's my first game, I opted for Beginner, naturally, and some disgraced branch of the Boelyns (they never recovered after Anne got her head chopped off way back when, apparently).
One of the mechanics involved in the game is the courtship of the Fairchild heirs, Charles and Elizabeth. I'll condense the long, rather interesting backstory included in the glossary by saying that the Fairchild children are parentless due to a boating accident involving their parents. This is a rich, well-connected family that unfortunately experienced a lot of death, disease, alcohol, running off with an actress - lots of bad shit.
At the start of the game, they've come to Derbyshire after a year of mourning their parents. Their aunt-in-law, the Dowager Countess Margaret, is the owner of Adderly Hall. She has no children. That means either Charles or Elizabeth will inherit Adderly Hall and that side of the family's wealth (Charles/Elizabeth's family also owns property up in Yorkshire, so this is a monied, landed family).
So trying to get a marriage match with Charles or Elizabeth will be critical to try and win the game.
I chose the York family. Why? Because A. The daughter of the family is cute and B. They start with an extra footman as their bonus.
Each family in the game has its own bonus. I'll focus on the original four families first since we're doing the base game.
York - One extra footman, because they're famous for the excellence of their domestic staff. Lot of training and development for the downstairs folks in this family.
Cavendish - The most esteemed of the four struggling gentry families trying to return to prominence. They start with an extra 3 reputation points and begin with 1.4 Reputation, rather than the 1.1 Reputation of everyone else.
Asquith - They've got their own Dowager Countess living with them, so they start with five family members rather than four. Dowager Countess is worth 1 Victory Point and her favors, which I'll cover some other time.
Ponsonby - Of the four families trying to rebuild, they're the wealthiest. They start with 300 pounds of cold, hard, cash, as opposed to everyone else's big fat zero.
I'd hit it with Marianne Waters. Maybe she can hook Charles Fairchild in.
The starting board position for the Yorks. Every family starts with the same five basic Improvement Tiles seen here - 1 each in of the five categories. Every family also starts with a Head Housekeeper (red), Butler (dark blue), lady's maid (purple), valet (green), and footman (white). Yorks get a second footman as noted, which I think will be quite useful.
There's other setup things to do, but that's the basics to get us started. I think for my first playthrough, I'll be explaining mechanics and going through gameplay at least the first few turns. Eventually, however, this being me, we're gonna get novelistic, baby!