Learn to Play

Your side is below; the Ministry is above

Orientation: each column is one Front. The upper Zone is the Ministry’s home; the lower Zone is yours. Every Zone header identifies its current owner and whether it is contested.

Your cards, your choice: when an effect makes you recover, surrender, sacrifice, target, heal, Ward, promote, or otherwise select a card, you choose among all eligible highlighted cards unless the effect explicitly says random, automatic, strongest, weakest, or chosen by the opponent. Optional paid recovery appears only while affordable; a queued recovery that becomes unaffordable may be declined. Awakened Threats are uncontrolled and follow their printed automatic selection rule.

Silas’s Dead Drop: at each recurring trigger, Silas bombs the empty Front containing the most Structures for 3 Integrity damage each. Forward Siege weapons are Structures and are hit too. Ties are random; if every Front contains a Citizen, nothing is bombed.

Spend, act, then end the turn

1. Review the Threat and Ministry summary. See what changed before committing cards.
2. Play cards. The red number is printed cost; buttons show legal targets.
3. Activate ready Citizens. Click your blue-outlined Citizen first.
4. Use resources if needed. Request Card Requisition draws for 3 total Devotion. Emergency Procurement spends Treasury. Once per turn, Emergency Conviction may sacrifice 3 Faith for 4 temporary Devotion, but can never reduce you below 4 Faith.
5. End turn. Current Devotion does not carry over; Reserve does.

New Citizens: most can initially Repel, Suppress, or Fortify. Mobilize permits a full normal action immediately.

Always select your Citizen first

Strength

Damage dealt to Citizens.

Health

Damage a Citizen survives; damage persists.

Discipline

Resistance to Pressure, not ordinary Strength damage.

Pressure

A non-damage attack used only when a card explicitly applies it.

Siege

Damage dealt to Structures after Armor.

Faith value

Whether a Citizen can Strike Faith and for how much.

Occupation pays—and opens the route to Faith

• A Zone occupied by only one coalition is controlled by it.
• When both sides occupy it, it is contested. The last uncontested controller remains the owner, but contested benefits and income are suspended.
• Your three home Zones produce base Treasury income even when empty.
• Uncontested occupation of an enemy Zone produces more Treasury.
• Zone traits may award Mandate, Reserve, surveillance, repairs, or other conditional benefits.
• An occupying Citizen can Strike Faith only after surviving in enemy territory until a later turn.

Structures: build over one, two, or three owner turns. They can be attacked unfinished. Engineers build and repair them; Saboteurs delay or disable them.

Each type enters play differently

Programs and Institutions can work together

Some Institutions check the affiliations of your active Programs. Government Church Apparatus restores Faith and creates Reserve while an Institution is active; Chamber of Commerce Conspiracy turns an active Faith Program into Treasury and Mandate. Program debuffs change the affected Citizen's displayed live statistics for the stated turn. If an effect says a Citizen cannot move, Advance and Reposition disappear from its legal actions.

Reactive recovery: Category A Specialist Exemption prepares face up. The next friendly Citizen that reaches Correction returns to hand if there is room, and the Exemption enters Correction instead.

Difficulty changes Ministry behavior, not your Champion

Nothing is hidden: the actual Ministry Faith, Devotion, Reserve, Champion benefit, active decree, and support are displayed during the match. Coalition calibration changes the Ministry’s setup, never your chosen Champion’s perk.

Daily Issue decks are weighted and bounded

Your first completed non-forfeit match each Chicago calendar day awards a Basic Daily Issue generated from cards eligible for its coalition and account. Your first verified win that day upgrades the current issue to a stronger Victory Daily Issue. If you saved the Basic version first, that saved deck remains yours and the new Victory version may also be saved.

You may play an active issue directly or save the exact deck under a name. A saved Daily Issue remains a complete account-bound deck; it does not add those cards as loose collection copies. An account may retain up to twenty named decks total, including custom decks, cloned starters, and saved Daily Issues.

A Daily Issue is not a uniform random pile: lower-rarity cards receive greater selection weight, while every result must remain a legal forty-card deck with at least sixteen Citizens and no more than six Neutral cards.

Power limits: Basic issues allow at most eight Rare+, two Exalted+, and one Rank 6+ card. Victory issues allow at most twelve Rare+, four Exalted+, and two Rank 6+ cards. Normal copy limits also apply. The recorded seed reproduces the exact result.

Daily Order / Provision Victory Grid

Each difficulty has separate Order and Provision rows. The first three verified wins in each row earn that difficulty’s normal Rapture Credit prize: 1,000 RC on Faith Criminal, 3,000 RC on Citizen in Good Standing, 10,000 RC on Angel of Devotion, and 30,000 RC on Eternal Leader.

Balanced Command: completing both three-win rows at one difficulty grants a larger one-time daily bonus: 3,000, 10,000, 30,000, or 100,000 RC respectively. The grid resets at the Chicago calendar-day boundary.

Report a production problem without reconstructing it from memory

During an active match, Report Match Problem saves the current game state, recent action timeline, game build, and general browser/viewport details with your description. This lets authorized staff reproduce bugs that occur only on the live site. The confirmation dialog states exactly what is sent before you submit.

Hidden game information is included: a submitted diagnostic snapshot contains both hands and draw decks. It excludes chat, private messages, passwords, and authentication tokens. Reports are restricted to authorized staff.

Match analytics record the generated starting state, actions, cards played, outcomes, failures, and version information so balance and ignored mechanics can be measured from human play. You may turn routine analytics off on the setup screen. Filing a report still sends its disclosed snapshot. Routine event history is retained for 90 days; resolved diagnostic reports may be retained for up to one year.

Locations vary; ownership must be earned

Every match randomly deals six different named map locations from the current pool. Each appears only once: three are assigned to the Ministry row and three to the citizen row.

Program now means a broadcast, show, campaign, or scheduled public program. Durable organizations, state apparatuses, algorithms, ration-control systems, and offices are Institutions. Unique story settings are Zones; repeatable facilities built inside a location are Structures.

Emergency Conviction: once per turn, sacrifice 3 Faith to gain 4 temporary Devotion. You must have at least 7 Faith, because the action cannot reduce you below 4. Temporary Devotion fills current capacity, then Reserve up to 3; excess is lost.

Collection: fixed Order and Provision starters are always playable, but their individual cards are not automatically owned. Your collection contains only earned or acquired cards. In the Workshop, clone a recipe, use + beside an owned card to add it, use − in the deck list to remove it, select a coalition and Champion, name the result, and save it when all forty-card rules pass.

Mobile layout: Resources, the current action prompt, and your hand can each be pinned or unpinned independently. Those choices persist in this browser.

Citizens remember what they have done

Every Citizen on the board displays lifetime damage dealt and damage taken for its current deployment. Specialists also display healing performed. These totals survive turns and temporary buffs, but reset when a new copy is deployed.

Wade: Judgment deals 7 damage, but it may target only a Citizen whose displayed DEALT total is zero. Ordinary combat, special attacks, and an Omega-forced attack all update the same visible history.

Equipment does not defect

When recruitment or defection transfers a Citizen, its attached Equipment returns to the original coalition's Correction. The Citizen changes sides exhausted; the Equipment does not change ownership.

Persistent cards are part of ordinary play

Both fixed starter coalitions include an affordable Program, Virtue, and Network Special. Play them to establish persistent advantages: Programs represent continuing broadcasts or campaigns, one active Virtue guides your Citizens, and a Network Special supports a recurring card-family strategy.

Initiative, economy, and Champions

Both coalitions receive a five-card opening package. Order acts first with 1 Reserve. Provision receives the first normal draw and begins with 2 Reserve. Citizen in Good Standing uses equal Ministry durability; Easy and Angel visibly calibrate Ministry Faith or opening allocation for the selected coalition.

Margaret Holloway: pay 2 Faith at the start of your turn to choose a card in Correction and return it to hand; it receives no automatic discount. The Adjudicator: damaged enemies have -1 Discipline. The Shepherd: the first Citizen deployed each turn restores 1 Faith and creates 1 Reserve; matching another friendly affiliation restores 1 additional Faith.

The Algorithm: Predictive Governance remains intentionally stronger and requires its Angel victories to unlock, but The Algorithm cannot be selected in ranked play.

Hand, Reserve, and Devotion limits can change

Every resource display uses current / maximum. The base hand limit is 7, Reserve capacity is 3, and Devotion capacity rises normally during play. Cards can permanently raise an undamaged maximum for the match, damage the opponent’s usable maximum, or repair capacity damage.

• Hand: the current limit cannot fall below 3 or rise above 10. If damage leaves you holding too many cards, keep them, but you cannot draw or recover another until your hand is below the displayed limit.
• Reserve: capacity can fall to 0 or rise to 6. Reserve above a newly damaged limit is lost immediately.
• Devotion: capacity still cannot fall below its normal floor of 4 and cannot rise above 12. Current Devotion falls to a newly damaged cap if necessary.

Repair versus gain: Civic Capacity Restoration repairs one damage from all three limits. Repairing a limit does not itself draw a card or create Reserve or Devotion. Citizen Services Filing Expansion, Strategic Reserve Annex, and Devotional Capacity Grant raise their respective undamaged maxima; Information Quarantine Order, Reserve Impoundment Order, and Allocation Grid Sabotage damage the opposing limits.

Forty challenge modes grant exclusive cards

Ten families test Fortification, Intelligence, Loyalty, Siege, Faith, Economy, Correction, Combat, Awakened Threats, and Territory. Clear each family on Faith Criminal to unlock Citizen in Good Standing, then Angel of Devotion, then Eternal Leader.

A locked reward cannot appear in a starter, ordinary Daily Issue, or account collection. Beginning a challenge creates a seeded authoritative battlefield. The server resolves player actions and Ministry turns, records the relevant statistics, preserves the attempt for reconnection, and evaluates the finished match before granting its card; browser-submitted completion claims are never trusted. Eternal Leader rewards occupy an intentionally extreme non-ranked tier and are unavailable in standardized ranked decks.

Multiplayer uses an authoritative battlefield

A signed-in player may create a private lobby with a legal saved deck and turn timer, then share its invitation code. The invited player joins with the opposite coalition and both players mark ready. Players may instead enter the public queue as Order, Provision, or Either. Matchmaking keeps separate Order and Provision skill estimates, initially calibrated from recent AI games and refined by completed human matches.

Order chooses its Champion first and takes the first turn. Provision then chooses a different Champion. These visible draft and initiative rules are the coalition-balancing levers; the game does not secretly increase Order’s unit statistics. Champion perks, coalition card access, initiative, and objectives can be tuned from measured results.

The server—not either browser—resolves every card play, target, combat, movement, persistent effect, random result, victory, and rating update. Mandatory target, card, private-intelligence, Prototype, and free-movement choices must be completed before another action. Emergency Procurement, support changes, The Dead Internet cycling, and Omega commands are also server-validated actions. Each action names the battlefield version it was made against; the database locks that version while resolving the move, so stale or simultaneous submissions cannot both succeed. Reconnect loads the latest accepted state, with opposing hidden hands, draw order, and intelligence dossier redacted. This engine/storage separation also permits multiple application workers later without assigning permanent ownership of a match to one machine.

Turn timeout: while you wait, the battlefield shows the opponent’s remaining time. When it reaches zero, Claim timeout victory appears. Claiming asks for confirmation, then the server rechecks the deadline, participant, and exact battlefield version. A stale or premature claim is rejected and the browser reconnects. A valid claim ends the match, updates ratings, and enters the replay beside forfeits and ordinary actions.

Chat and ranked seasons remain future systems.

Choose Live or Correspondence

Live multiplayer uses short turn clocks and expects both players to remain present. Correspondence multiplayer uses 24-hour turns by default, stores the authoritative match on the server, and lets either player close the game and reopen it later. Public matchmaking pairs only players who requested the same pace. Private correspondence lobbies may use one-, three-, or seven-day turns.

Solo asynchronous play: use Save game for later during an AI match. Signed-in saves are stored with the account and can be resumed after closing the tab; this uses the same ordinary solo rules without a turn deadline.