Gameplay Rules

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Full canonical rules engine: rules/01-engine-spec.md, rules/02-card-anatomy.md, rules/03-singularity-events.md, rules/04-faction-matchups.md, rules/05-withdraw.md

The One-Sentence Version

Each turn you attach one Signal card to an Agent, charging its moves; you play Agents, Protocols, and Schemas freely; you fight with charged Agents — and every move you use brings the Singularity one step closer.

What You're Building With

Four card types, no exceptions:

There's no shared mana pool, and nothing costs a generic resource to play — Signal is the only cost in the game, and it only powers Agent moves.

Signal & Attachment

Signal is the game's resource, and it lives where you put it. Attach a Signal card to an Agent during your Deploy phase and it stays there — through combat, across turns — until that Agent leaves the Grid, at which point every Signal attached to it goes to the Void with it.

Seven factions, seven Signal types, plus Generic Signal that satisfies any cost:

A move's cost is printed in symbols: ● means one attached Signal of that Agent's own faction type; ○ means one attached Signal of any type. Nothing is spent when a move is used — the Signal stays attached.

Designation: Human, AI, Hybrid

Every Agent is also Human, AI, or Hybrid. It's not a deckbuilding restriction — mix freely — but it matters: several Singularity Events hit Human and AI Agents differently, some card effects reference designation directly, and it tells you at a glance what kind of board you're looking at.

The Turn — Six Phases

Clash, step by step

1. Advance — you declare your attacking Agents; each Commits.
2. Counter — your opponent declares blockers (one per attacker, by default).
3. Reactive window — either player may play Reactive Protocols.
4. Impact — damage resolves simultaneously: attackers hit blockers (or Integrity, if unblocked); blockers hit back.
5. Surge — every move used this Clash adds its Surge value to the Singularity Clock.

An Agent that just entered the Grid this turn can't attack or Commit — unless it has the Surge keyword — so racing onto an empty board still takes a full turn to spin up.

The Grid — Five Agents, No Bench

Your Grid holds up to 5 Agents. All of them can attack or block; there's no separate "active" slot. Play more than 5 and you have to send one to the Void first.

Damage, Resilience, and the Void

Damage accumulates on an Agent and doesn't reset between turns — tracked with counters, not "until end of turn." Once an Agent's accumulated damage meets or exceeds its Resilience, it's defeated: it and everything attached to it go to the Void.

Winning — Integrity

Both players start at 25 Integrity. Reach 0 and you lose. Unblocked attacks hit Integrity directly. You also lose if you're forced to draw from an empty Archive (deck).

The Singularity Clock

This is the game's second clock, and it only moves one direction.

Every move an Agent uses has a Surge value — 1, 2, or 3 — printed next to its damage. After Impact resolves each Clash, every Surge value from every move used that Clash (both players') is added to a shared running total. Passive actions — attaching Signal, deploying Agents or Schemas — don't move it. Only moves do.

When the total reaches the format's threshold, the Singularity fires — once, and the clock does not reset. The active player rolls a die; the result maps to one of six events (below); the event resolves fully and its effects last the rest of the game. Nobody wins or loses on the roll itself — every event changes the shape of the game going forward, not the win condition.

The Six Singularity Events (d6)

No event is a coin-flip win. Each one rewards a different board state, which is why deck-building around your faction's favored roll is part of the game.

Faction Matchups — The Cycle

Every faction is strong against exactly one other and weak against exactly one other, in a single seven-beat directed circle:

Resisters → Collective → Architects → Navigators → Emergent → Augmented → Aligned → (back to Resisters)

Read left-to-right: Resisters are strong against Collective, weak against Aligned. Collective is strong against Architects, weak against Resisters. And so on around the circle. Full per-faction breakdown: The Seven Factions.

The bonus: when an Agent fights an Agent of the faction it's strong against, its moves deal +3 bonus damage. When it fights the faction it's weak against, it takes +3 bonus damage from that Agent's moves. This only applies to Agent-vs-Agent combat — never to direct Integrity damage. It's printed on the card as two small faction-color sigils, no text: an upward triangle for Strong, downward for Weak.

Withdraw — Pulling Back

Every Agent has a Withdraw cost, printed as a row of ○ symbols in its stat block. During your Deploy phase, you may Withdraw one Agent: pay its Withdraw cost by sending that many attached Signal to the Void (plus all the rest of its attached Signal, also to the Void), and the Agent returns to your hand with all damage removed.

Withdraw isn't a move — it doesn't trigger Surge, and an opponent can't play a Reactive Protocol in response to it. You can only Withdraw an Agent that's Ready (hasn't already moved this turn) and hasn't been Committed. One Withdraw per turn, full stop.

Withdraw and PERSIST look similar and are not the same mechanic:

Keyword Glossary

Deckbuilding

Nothing stops you running five factions. Signal economics will talk you out of it — five Signal types in one deck spreads your resource base thin. Most competitive decks settle on two or three.

Continue: The Seven Factions → · Card Codex · ↑ Codex home