The Goal
Roll dice to earn character, magic, and attack points. Spend them
to put gods, warriors, relics, and spells into play, then use those cards to destroy
your rivals' characters.
Destroying characters earns Worship Points (WP). The first player to reach
the match's worship-point goal wins immediately. That goal is 10 WP by
default, and the New Game screen can set it to 5, 10, 15 or 20 — when you
join an online room by code, you play to the host's number.
There is one other way to lose: run out of cards. If it's your upkeep and
your deck is empty when you go to draw, you are out of the game and your opponent
wins, however few WP they have.
Setup
Building a deck
- A deck needs a minimum of 40 cards.
- No more than 3 copies of any one card.
- Exception: Class 3 characters and Class 3 relics are limited to 1 copy each.
These are the game's most powerful cards, and each carries an extra cost to play
(see C3 Cost below).
Opening hand
- Each player draws 5 cards.
- If you don't like your hand you may reroll it once: your hand is shuffled
back into your deck and you draw a new hand of the same size. You only get one
reroll, so declining is final.
Who goes first
Every player rolls a d20. The highest roll becomes the priority player, and
play proceeds counterclockwise from them. Ties are rerolled between the tied players
only. Priority passes to the next player at the start of each new turn.
The Board
Your side of the table has a few distinct zones:
- Active spots (3): the front line. Only active characters may attack or be
attacked, unless a card says otherwise.
- Bench (5 spots): characters waiting to come forward, plus any
non-equipment relics you've played.
- Field: field cards in play, which affect the whole table.
- Graveyard: destroyed and discarded cards. Plenty of cards care about
what's in here.
- Sealed Away: cards removed from the game entirely. Unlike the graveyard,
sealed-away cards can't normally be brought back.
Some cards grant extra active or bench spots. A granted spot disappears the moment
the card granting it leaves play, and whoever was standing on it goes with it, so be
careful about relying on borrowed space.
Moving characters
- Bench → active is free.
- Active → bench costs that character's withdraw cost in character points.
- Either move can only be made during one of your Play phases.
Resources
There are three resources, and each die face maps to one of them:
- Character Points (CP): die faces 1–2. Pay for characters,
relics, field cards, and withdraw costs.
- Magic Points (MP): die faces 3–4. Pay for magic cards and for
abilities with a magic cost.
- Attack Points (AP): die faces 5–6. Pay for attacks.
Points vs. tokens
Points come from your dice roll and from card effects. They are temporary: any
point you don't spend disappears at the end of the turn.
Tokens come only from card effects, and they stay with you until you spend
them. A token works like a tiny relic you can cash in for its matching point at
any time, and it sits off to the side rather than taking up an active or bench spot.
When you pay a cost, regular points are spent first and tokens are drawn on only if
the points run short.
The Turn
All players move through a turn together. A turn has six phases:
Upkeep → Roll → Play → Combat → Play 2 → End.
Upkeep, Roll, and End happen for every player before the turn moves on. Play,
Combat, and Play 2 are different: one player takes all three in a row before the next
player begins. That block of three phases is a player's “go”, and a
turn is made of one go per player.
1. Upkeep
Start-of-turn bookkeeping, resolved in this order:
- Poison damages every poisoned character (1 HP each).
- Characters with Stoic heal 1 damage. A character already reduced to
0 HP is not saved by this. It dies.
- Triggered and upkeep abilities fire.
- Dead characters are cleared from the board.
- Each player draws a card. A player whose deck is empty here loses the
game, there is nothing to draw.
2. Roll
Each player rolls 6 dice, up to 3 times, Yahtzee-style. After a roll
you may keep any dice you like and reroll the rest, and dice you kept earlier can
be thrown back in on a later roll. When you're satisfied, or after the third roll,
your dice lock in and convert to points using the mapping above.
3. Play
Starting with the priority player, spend your resources: play characters, relics,
field cards, and magic; activate abilities; withdraw active characters; move
benched characters to active. Then move to your Combat phase.
4. Combat
Attack with your active characters, paying attack points. Each character may
attack once per combat phase unless a card says otherwise. You may choose
not to attack at all. The phase still happens, it just does nothing.
There is no combat on turn 1.
5. Play 2
A second Play phase, identical to the first. Use up leftover resources, or
anything you gained during combat. When you finish, your go ends and the next
player begins theirs.
6. End
After every player has had their go:
- End-of-turn abilities trigger and temporary effects wear off.
- Unused points are lost (tokens are kept).
- Any player holding more than 7 cards discards down to 7.
- Priority passes to the next player and a new turn begins.
You may hold more than 7 cards during the turn. The limit is only checked here,
in the End phase.
Combat & Worship Points
To attack, pick one of your active characters, choose one of its attacks, and pay that
attack's cost. Damage is dealt to the target's HP, and a character reduced to 0 HP is
destroyed and goes to its owner's graveyard.
Earning WP
- Destroying a character earns WP equal to its Class: 1 WP for a Class 1,
2 WP for a Class 2, 3 WP for a Class 3.
- If a poisoned character dies to poison, the WP goes to whoever applied the
poison.
- Various cards also steal, redirect, or drain WP outright.
Attacking a player directly
You must destroy a player's active characters first. Once a player has no active
characters, your attacks can hit them directly: the damage removes that many WP
from them, and any damage beyond the WP they had left is gained by you. That
overflow is the intended finisher, so an unanswered board can end the game in a hurry.
Damage order
All bonuses to an attack are added first, then defensive reductions are applied. If an
attack splits its damage between targets, the split happens before reductions, so each
target reduces only the portion aimed at it.
Card Types
Characters: paid with character points
A character has a name, HP, a class (1–3), subtypes, a resource cost, a
pantheon, at least one attack, and a withdraw cost. It may also have any
combination of a static ability, a triggered ability, an activated ability, and a
second attack.
C3 Cost: Class 3 characters and relics carry an extra requirement on top of
their resource cost, something you must do or have in order to play them at all
(sacrifice a card, have had a character die this turn, discard, mill, control a
particular kind of character, and so on). It is checked and paid as you play the
card.
Anubis, Heart Weigher · 15 HP · Class 3 Character: Dog God
· Cost 3 · Egyptian
C3 Cost: a character must have died this turn.
Whenever a character you control dies, you may put it on top of your deck. The
attacking player still gains WP.
3 Atk, Judgment Force: 6 damage, plus 1 extra for each character in
your graveyard.
Withdraw: 3
Relics: paid with character points
A relic has a name, class, subtype, cost, pantheon, and an ability. The only
subtype right now is Equipment.
- Equipment relics attach to a character you choose the moment they are
played. They can grant that character an extra attack, an extra ability, or
both. If the character leaves play, its equipment is detached.
- Non-equipment relics are played to your bench and provide their ability
from there.
Sculpture of Demeter · Class 2 Relic · Cost 2 · Greek
At the start of each turn, roll a die. You gain a token of the result of the die roll.
Fields: paid with character points
A field card has a name, class, cost, and pantheon. Fields affect the table as a
whole rather than a single character, and they stay in play granting their effect
until they are removed.
Most fields decay: they last a limited number of turns and are then
discarded. A field with the Preservation keyword ignores decay and stays
until something removes it.
Spartan Phalanx · Field · Cost 2 · Greek · Preservation 2
Players have one extra active character spot.
Magic: paid with magic points
A magic card has a name, class, subtype, cost, and pantheon. There are four subtypes:
- Twist: playable at any time, including during another player's
go, as long as you can pay for it. This is how you interrupt and respond.
- Spell: playable only during your own Play phases.
- Blessing: attaches to a character and improves it. It stays attached
as a card on that character until removed, and goes to the graveyard if the
character leaves play.
- Curse: the same, but harmful. Some curses attach to an active
spot instead of a character, fouling that spot for whoever stands
there.
Keywords
A keyword always means the same thing on every card that has it.
Static keywords are printed on a card and are part of what it is;
applied keywords are handed out and taken away by effects during play.
Static
- Stoic: heals 1 damage at the start of the turn. This is regeneration, not
a death save: it won't rescue a character already at 0 HP.
- Immortal: HP can never drop below 0, so the character cannot be destroyed
or killed. It can still be sacrificed, sealed away, or removed by an
effect that strips the keyword.
- Enlightened X: grants an additional ability once you have X or more
worship points. Lose the WP and the ability switches back off.
- Counter: deals 1 damage back to any character that attacks it.
- Preservation: on a field card, exempts it from decay (see
Fields).
Applied
- Poisoned: loses 1 HP at the start of the turn. If the poison lands the
kill, whoever applied it gains the WP.
- Silenced: can't activate abilities. Other keywords are unaffected, and
the character can still attack normally.
Applied keywords clear at the start of their owner's next upkeep unless the card that
applied them says they last longer.
In development
- Cunning: excess damage spills over onto other active characters.
Playing with a Friend
The Play Online group on the New Game screen starts or joins a real two-player
match over the network, no account or sign-in involved.
- Starting a game: click New Game → Create Room. You'll get a short
invite code (and a link that carries it), send either one to your opponent any way
you like.
- Joining one: click New Game → Join Room and type the code, or just
open the invite link.
- Once both seats pick a deck and ready up, the game begins. Each of you only ever
sees your own hand, your opponent's cards render face-down until they're played.
Your seat is remembered by this browser only. Reopening the invite link on the same
device rejoins your seat automatically; there's nothing to log back into, but also
nothing to recover a seat from if you switch devices or clear your browser data.
If your opponent goes quiet, the sidebar will say so after about a minute of silence
and offer Claim Victory after about three. Concede is available any time
you'd rather end the match yourself. Either way, this ends the match, not a
proper in-game win, no Worship Points change hands over it.
A room's game lives only in server memory: it does not survive the server restarting
or being redeployed, and an inactive room eventually expires on its own.
Keyboard & Accessibility
The whole game can be played without a mouse, and everything the board
shows is also announced to a screen reader. Cards are grouped into rows;
Tab moves between rows and panels, and the arrow keys move
along a row.
Moving around
| Tab / Shift+Tab | Move between the board rows, your hand, and the controls. |
| ← → | Move along the current row or hand. |
| ↑ ↓ | Move between rows, keeping your place across the row. |
| Home / End | Jump to the first or last card in the row. |
| Enter / Space | Open the card's menu. Play, attack, move, use an ability. |
| Esc | Close a menu, or cancel targeting / placing a card. |
Shortcuts
| N | Next phase. |
| R | Roll the dice (Roll phase). |
| K | Keep all dice and resolve them. |
| 1–6 | Keep / release that die (Roll phase). |
| H | Jump to your hand. |
| B | Jump to your active row on the board. |
| G | Open your graveyard / sealed-away pile. |
| L | Show or hide the action history. |
| , | Open Settings. |
| ? | Open this rules window. |
Shortcuts are ignored while you are typing in a text box, and while a
choice window is open, that window's own buttons take the keys instead.
Controller
A USB or Bluetooth gamepad works anywhere the keyboard does, it drives
the same cursor. Plug one in and press any button; the buttons below
appear along the bottom of the screen once it is detected. (The very
first press only wakes the controller up, so on the title screen you
press once to be offered Press any button to begin, and again to
start.)
| D-pad / Left stick | Move the cursor. |
| A (Cross) | Select or activate whatever the cursor is on. |
| B (Circle) | Back: close a menu, cancel targeting, close a dismissible window. |
| X (Square) | Roll the dice — or, with the cursor in your hand, change how your hand is sorted (Order → Type → Pantheon). |
| Y (Triangle) | Next phase. |
| LB / RB | Jump between the board and the side panel; switch tabs inside a window that has them. |
| LT | Keep all dice and resolve them. |
| RT | Jump to your hand. |
| Select / View | Open this rules window. |
| L3 (click the left stick) | Open Settings. |
| Start / Menu | Reset the demo. Asks first, and works even while a window is open. |
Nintendo-layout pads put B where Xbox puts A. Settings → Gamepad
swaps which face button confirms. Text boxes still need a real keyboard:
a controller cannot type a room code or name a custom deck.
Display options
Settings offers four themes, Dark, Light, and a
High Contrast version of each that clears WCAG AAA contrast, plus
a Text size control (up to 150%) that scales the cards along with
the text, and an Animations switch. If your system asks for
reduced motion or more contrast, the matching option is picked for you the
first time you visit.