The map
Encounters
A run plays out over a branching encounter map. At each step the game presents three encounters as options; the player picks one and advances, losing the rest. There are 68 cards in the deck: 19 common ones — 15 in the shared pool, plus the three PvE difficulty steps and the PvP — and 49 biome cards.
The rhythm is fixed
The map is not a free draw. The rhythm repeats every six steps, and one full turn of the cycle is a day. The HUD shows DAY beside LIVES, counted from 1, and the number turns over as soon as the PvP is behind it — along with the key it decides. A winning run (10 keys) is a journey of about ten days.
+ Travel cards
easy / medium / hard
single card
A battle must not ambush the player between events. PvP moves lives and keys — being ambushed by it would punish a decision the player never made. And the three PvE difficulties are only a real choice if they appear together, competing with each other.
The day count is derived, not stored: progress / 6 + 1. There is no day state to desynchronise, and travelling mid-cycle resets nothing. A full run is 59 steps.
The exception is authored, not drawn: a battle flagged as an ambush in its asset may appear among the events. Today exactly one card uses that licence — the Shrouded Marsh ambush.
Two rules govern every step
- Choosing is irreversible. Picking a card spends the step; the others vanish. There is no going back to the same crossroads — which is why leaving a shop advances the run. The button reads DEPART, not “exit”.
- The drawn options are persisted. Reloading the game shows the same crossroads.
Without persisting the options, closing and reopening the game would redraw the cards, and the irreversible choice would be theatre — you could just reload until the card you wanted appeared.
The transversal principle: no choice should be clearly superior. Shop, free and special must genuinely compete — taking the free item now costs the weapon the shop would have offered; travelling costs whatever this biome still had to give. If the player never hesitates, the choice has failed.
Encounter types
Merchandise
Three items plus a reroll (10 gold, doubling each time), filtered by specialty and by the rarity window of the current tier. Every shop in the game stocks three slots.
No direct cost
A single gift or a choice of one from three. The only cost is having chosen it over something else — and declining still spends the step. Hero cards carry a contract of their own: veteran camps and rescued heroes come with guaranteed promotions that grow by phase (the card says “T2.1+”), the biome kin cards draw from the whole rarity window of the phase, and the Oath Altar promotes far more often.
Paid in gold
The offer looks free, but taking the item costs gold — a price drawn when the card is built and announced in its subtitle. If you cannot cover it, she takes everything you have.
PvE
Three cards of different categories — Mob, Elite, Boss. Losing costs nothing.
No exit until the end
A card that opens a map of its own, with several challenges in a row and no shop inside. The completion reward is permanent and goes to the whole team.
Passage
Changes biome. It is a beat of the rhythm, not a draw: it appears in the first event after the PvP and nowhere else. The destination is on the card.
Rerolls everything
Swallows everything the player owns — heroes, equipped weapons and the whole stash — and returns the same quantity in similar things. Choosing is the consent.
Rewrites the match
NPC dilemmas with an embedded cost, and the ability builder.
The price changes what the card is. Free is the deck's risk-free card, and the promise of “no cost” has to keep holding — if any free card could charge in secret, the player stops trusting the label.
Shops
| Shop | Offer |
|---|---|
| Weapon shop | Any weapon. |
| Sword shop | Melee weapons. |
| Staff shop | Staves — they heal a random wounded ally. |
| Bow shop | Bows. |
| Race shop | Heroes only: one of each of the biome's three home races in every tray. |
| General shop | Any-race hero (50%) + themed biome items (50%). |
Selling is throwing into the stash bin: dragging any item or hero onto the drawer's bin credits the sale price, on any screen where the stash opens. The only refusal is selling the last hero in the build. A failed acquisition — stash full, not enough gold — charges no gold and consumes no item.
| Gesture | What happens |
|---|---|
| Drag onto the team | Equips it on a hero, fills an empty slot, or merges. |
| Click the item | Opens the confirmation (BUY? / TAKE?); on accept it goes to an empty stash slot. |
| Drag onto the stash | Nothing. The drawer opens on top of the merchandise strip, so the gesture was ambiguous; the game blocks it and says what to do instead. |
Shared cards
Added to the local cards in every biome that does not exclude them. They are the common floor of a run — what can always appear. Weight is the relative draw chance inside the pool.
| Card | Type | ~Weight | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weapon Shop | Shop | 22 | Any weapon in the catalogue, 3 slots. The heaviest card in the game. |
| Sword Shop | Shop | 12 | Melee only. |
| Bow Shop | Shop | 12 | Bows only. |
| Staff Shop | Shop | 12 | Staves only — they heal a random wounded ally instead of dealing damage. |
| Abandoned Chest | Free | 12 | Single gift: any weapon. |
| Quartermaster's Table | Free | 10 | Choose 1 of 3 weapons. |
| Mercenary Camp | Free | 10 | Choose 1 of 3 heroes from the home species of the biome you are in (any species in the Sacred Battlegrounds). |
| Hunters' Post | Free | 10 | Choose 1 of 3 heroes from the home species of the biome you are in (any species in the Sacred Battlegrounds). |
| Oath Altar | Free | 10 | Choose 1 of 3 heroes from the home species of the biome you are in (any species in the Sacred Battlegrounds). |
| Abandoned Cage | Free | 10 | Single gift: a hero of one of the biome’s home species (it speaks with a rescued voice). |
| Wrecked Cart | Free | 10 | Single gift: a hero of one of the biome’s home species. |
| Abandoned Camp | Free | 10 | Single gift: a hero of one of the biome’s home species, a dropped weapon, or pantry leftovers. |
| Offering on the Trail | Free | 8 | Food — the mode is drawn. There is a 6% chance the Staff of the Forsaken Dung turns up among the meals. |
| Black Hole | Special | 6 | Rerolls the entire build. Excluded from the Sacred and the Plains. |
| The Old Road | Travel | 10 | The default passage. Pulled by the rhythm at step 0, not by the draw. |
| Patrol / Elite Hunt / Guardian | Battle | 10 | The three cards of the PvE step: easy, medium, hard. |
| Ghost Battle | Battle | 10 | The PvP of step 5. With no recorded ghost it becomes a victory by absence. |
PvE battles
| Category | Difficulty | Reward | Drop rarity |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mob | Low | Basic | Current tier |
| Elite | High | Greater | Tier +1 |
| Boss | The hardest available | The best loot | Tier +2 |
Enemy count and strength scale with run progress, capped at five bodies per side. Summons keep their authored stats and stay outside the budget — otherwise the budget would be split among bodies the player never chose.
Reward tiers
| Tier | Rarity window | Enters at |
|---|---|---|
| Bronze | Tier: 1 / Tier: 2 | Start |
| Silver | Tier: 2 / Tier: 3 | Day 4 — progress 18 |
| Gold | Tier: 3 / Tier: 4 | Day 8 — progress 42 |
| Diamond | Tier: 4 / Tier: 5 | Day 12 — progress 66 |
Without a ceiling, the base distribution drops 1% legendary in the very first encounter and the tier becomes decoration. Combat reads a table of its own (encounter tier × phase), not a bonus on top.
Diamond begins after the 10th key: a clean run tops out at Gold, and Diamond belongs to the run that lost a PvP and stretched.
The tier decides the rarity, not the asset. Whether it comes from a native asset or a promoted hero is decided by the promotion table — which is how Diamond delivers Tier 5 heroes despite very few Tier 5 assets in the whole catalogue.
When a card can appear
Every encounter carries a window written in days, and a special battle also has to be in band: it is only drawn on the days its own tier is reachable at all. The band is the shop's rarity window — what your gold can already buy that day is what a fight is allowed to pay.
| Card tier | Appears on | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Tier: 1 | Days 1–3 | After Bronze, nothing else pays Tier 1. |
| Tier: 2 | Days 1–7 | Leaves the shop window when Gold opens. |
| Tier: 3 | Days 1–11 | Leaves the window when Diamond opens. |
| Tier: 4 | Day 4 onwards | Enters with Silver — before that it pays what the run cannot give yet. |
| Tier: 5 | Day 8 onwards | Enters with Gold. |
Dungeons and the Black Hole only appear from day 6. And a special card's reward follows the tier it announces: gold, drop and recruit all come from that one number, with no separate loot tier that could disagree with the fight you just won.
The seven dungeons
One card that becomes several in sequence, with no exit and no shop inside. Each cleared node is worth +1 atk / +1 hp / +5% attack speed, permanently, for the whole team. Ordinary fights inside cost more than a normal one (ratio 2.90 against 2.29) and the field is fuller: an average of 3.55 bodies.
| Dungeon | Biome | ~Weight | Drawn nodes | Bottom | Pays |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Siegeworks | Sacred Battlegrounds | 10 | Easy → Medium | Gatekeeper — Cerberus + Abyss Hound | 2 banner weapons |
| The Wolf Den | Sunlit Plains | 10 | Easy → Medium → Chest | The Black Pack — Den Alpha + Dark Wolf + Cub | 2 camp items |
| Collapsed Ruins | Ancient Forest | 10 | Easy → Medium → Chest | Holy Moose | 2 weapons, any |
| The Warren | Shrouded Marsh | 10 | Ambush → Easy → Chest | Brainster | elite gold ×2 |
| The Deep Hold | Luminous Tomb | 12 | Medium → Easy → Medium → Crypt | The Keepers — Vampire + Renegade Ghoul | 2 grave goods |
| Sunken Vault | Enchanted Shallows | 10 | Easy → Medium → Divers → Tide Pool → Crabs | Drowned Digger — Ice Golem + Old Miner | elite gold ×2 |
| Ember Caves | Arid Wasteland | 10 | Easy → Medium → Chest | Magma Golem, alone | 2 hoard items |
The topology is a graph authored in a map prefab, separate from the content: the same
diamond map serves a werewolf dungeon and an undead one, and a new map ships without touching code.
avoidRepeats is on in all seven, and it only avoids repeating the neighbouring node —
it does not exhaust the pool, which is why two entries suffice for a four-node dungeon.
The boss at the bottom of each dungeon — and the cast of some special battles — is a monster deliberately kept out of the biome table: it appears only on that card. That is what makes descending into a dungeon show a creature the surface never does. Filter the bestiary by the Dungeon role to see all of them.
Travel — leaving a biome
Biome changes happen exclusively by choice, through the Travel card. It always appears in the first event after the PvP and nowhere else. How many passages the step shows depends on how long the run has been parked in the same biome.
| PvP fought in this biome | Travel cards at the changeover step |
|---|---|
| 0 — just arrived | None. The step is events only. |
| 1 | 1 passage + 2 events |
| 2 | 2 passages + 1 event |
| 3 or more | 3 passages — staying is no longer an option |
Changing biome is the run's visible advance. While it depended on the card coming up in the draw, that advance looked like luck: a run could cross the whole game in the starting forest without the player having done anything wrong. Fixing the step teaches them where the decision arrives; raising the pressure gives the run a direction even when they would rather stay.
The destination is on the card, drawn rather than chosen afterwards. “The passage to the Luminous Tomb, or the sword shop?” is a question with an answer; “travel somewhere, or the shop?” is not.
The PvP step — ghost battle
PvP is a fixed step of the rhythm. The player fights another player, but not in real time: the combat uses a previously recorded build — a ghost. The player's own build is recorded too, and serves as a ghost for others. No matchmaking wait, no connection problems during the fight, constant availability of opponents.
| Rule | Detail |
|---|---|
| The opponent has a name | The player picks a nickname (up to 12 characters) when starting a new game. It travels with the recorded build and is shown on the crossroads card and on the enemy nameplate. |
| Matched by day | Ghosts are selected by the day of the run, and the match is exact. Recording happens at the PvP step — the last of the day — so whoever faces it is at exactly matched maturity. |
| Victory by absence | A day with no recording yields a walkover, worth +1 key like any win. |
| One recording per run | A day holds one recording per run, not one per player — otherwise a solo player would always meet their own last build. Cap of five runs per player per day. |
| Your own past build | When the drawn ghost is your own build from a previous run, the game says so: “a build from one of your past runs” on the card, YOUR PAST BUILD in battle. |
| No bots | The pool is never seeded with generated builds. |
The network layer is the largest missing piece. Ghosts are currently local, recorded and read from the device itself. The backend will be Supabase (Postgres + PostgREST) over plain REST; the snapshot contract is already in its final shape, which makes the switch a change of layer rather than a rewrite.
| If the network fails at… | What happens |
|---|---|
| Title screen | Cannot enter; message on screen. |
| Run start / entering the hub | Returns to the title screen (the save is already written). |
| PvP step with no cached ghost | Returns to the title screen. |
| Ghost upload | Does not interrupt — it goes to a local queue and retries. |
| Inside a battle | Never interrupts. Combat never touches the network. |
Separating “where power is earned” (encounters and PvE) from “where the run is decided” (PvP) keeps both layers legible. The returned life is not a material reward: it does not make the team stronger and cannot exceed the cap. What it changes is the cost of a mistake.
Economy
- Gold starts at 250 and is part of the run's persistent state.
- Every new day pays a fixed wage of 150 gold — win, lose or walkover.
- A PvE victory pays by the encounter's loot tier: 60 / 80 / 100 / 120 / 160 (Common to Legendary), +25% of that each day.
- Sources: PvE victories, events, and selling items. Sinks: shop purchases and rerolls (fixed cost 5).
- PvP is not a source of gold — all economic gain comes from the map, which creates natural scarcity.
- Tension comes from prices that rise with the tier.