Unit States and Turn Phases

Units within the Quantum Rift Adventure Card Game can either be ready, exhausted or damaged at any one time. We show exhausted with a blue counter, damaged with a red counter and ready (the default state) without either counter, as in the photo below.

  • Units enter play in the ready state. When a ready unit attacks or an effect exhausts a ready unit, it changes to the exhausted state. When an effect damages a ready unit (or exhausted unit), it changes to the damaged state.
  • Units that are exhausted remain in this state until they are either readied (back to the ready state), which happens at the start of every turn, or an effect damages them to put them in the damaged state. Note: An exhausted unit can’t attack or exhaust again.
  • Units that are damaged remain in this state until they are either revived (back to the exhausted state) or an effect attempts to damage them again, which causes them to be destroyed (or lose 1 vitality if the unit has vitality). Note: A damaged unit can’t attack, can’t be readied and can’t exhaust.

Hopefully, it’s clear that becoming exhausted is not usually a problem because that only lasts until the start of the next turn, while becoming damaged is something to avoid unless you have some revival tricks up your sleeve (or in your hand). But, either way, if you are not ready when you get your chance to attack then you won’t be able to. Speaking of which, let’s look at the phases of the turn and see where this chance to attack might come.

Each of your turns playing the Quantum Rift Adventure Card Game proceeds through five phases after the start of turn, when exhausted units become ready again:

  • DEPLOYMENT
  • COMBAT (when ready units can attack, in order decided by player)
  • EXPLORE
  • THREAT (when THREAT effects are triggered)
  • REGROUP (when REGROUP effects are triggered)

Thinking back to the predicament we left Sabrien Reed in at the end of our previous post, face-to-face with two Hyvryx Scouts thanks to the Seek and Destroy Encounter, let’s assume it’s the start of the turn and see how this plays out.

Deployment Phase – Although we might have some gear in hand to deploy, let’s assume we don’t deploy it now because of the first effect on each Hyvryx Scout, which would cause 2 Charge to be added to the Encounter! (“Whenever an opposing unit or gear is deployed, add 1 Charge to any active Scouting encounter”).

Combat Phase – At the start of this phase, all three units are ready and able to attack. Fortunately, for you, the attack order is decided by the player! Assuming Sabrien attacks first, the following outcomes are possible:

  • Sabrien is exhausted (from attacking), one Scout is damaged (from Sabrien achieving more Hits than its Defence), one Scout is still ready.
  • Sabrien is exhausted (from attacking), one Scout is exhausted (from Sabrien only managing Hits equal to its Defence), one Scout is still ready.
  • Sabrien is exhausted (from attacking), one Scout is ready (from Sabrien getting fewer Hits than its Defence), one Scout is still ready.

Given that Sabrien gets to roll 3 Attack dice with a +1 roll bonus and 1 guaranteed Hit, the last outcome seems very unlikely, especially with the chance to Rift. In fact, the chance to Rift on each roll and 4+ being considered an Attack success means you can virtually guarantee you will damage one of the Scouts, so let’s assume the first outcome is what happened. Great! For reasons that will become clear in a future post that covers the Combat Phase in more detail, let’s assume the remaining Scout does not attack Sabrien.

Explore Phase – Ordinarily, you might be able to do something interesting here (which you will see in the next post), but we must skip this phase if there is an active Encounter, so onto the next phase …

Threat Phase – We must trigger the THREAT effect of the Encounter, which puts 2 additional Charge on it.

Regroup Phase – We now trigger the REGROUP effect on the damaged Scout to discard it, leaving just the one ready Scout.

We’ve now reached the next turn, which we might expect would play out similarly to this one, with all units starting out ready again and Sabrien attacking, but something special happens after Sabrien damages the remaining Scout: there are no longer any ready Hyvryx units in play to satisfy the Encounter’s DURATION, so the Encounter ends immediately!

Hurrah! Sabrien has survived his first encounter on Andares. Not only that, he is about to get his first chance to explore this mysterious world, far away from his home, in both space and time! Be sure to join us next time when we will get to explore what happens next together.

Anatomy of a Card (Part 1)

Hot on the heels of the card reveals, we can now start breaking down each card into its component parts. Let’s start with Sabrien Reed, one of the four Heroes that will appear in the first adventure created with the Quantum Rift Adventure System (QRAS).

Since this is a developer blog, as opposed to a rulebook, we’ll skip over some parts and focus on what should hopefully be the most interesting to hear about!

Let’s start with Quanta! Every playable card in the QRAS has one or more Quanta symbols shown under its Type. In Sabrien’s case, you can see he has 1 Red, 1 Green and 2 Yellow. What each colour means is actually beyond the scope of this post, but we can confirm that the group of Quanta symbols shown under the Type almost always represent the cost that must be paid to play the card. (If you’re wondering how you might pay this cost, I’m afraid that’s also the subject of a future post!)

Next up, we have Attack and Defence, which are used during the Combat Phase to determine which of the characters involved should become damaged or destroyed. Unlike some other games you might be familiar with, this goes beyond simple comparison of values and involves rolling some dice! Specifically, you will roll a number of six-sided dice equal to the Attack value, aiming to have more successes than the defender’s Defence value. (At the default difficulty setting, rolling 1-3 is considered a failure and 4-6 means a success.)

The final part of Sabrien’s card we wish to talk about today is the Game Text. As you can see, he has an ongoing effect that references a Quanta symbol for reducing the cost of some Action cards when you play them and another effect that can boost Sabrien’s Defence value if you can get at least one success when performing a Quanta Test. Again, it’s a bit early to go into full details of what this means, but you can rest assured there will be dice involved!

Hopefully our reluctance to go into lots of details has not been too frustrating for today, and your curiosity to find out more will bring you back in the near future. Whether you are a fan of dice in your card games or not, you will definitely want to read our next post, which will cover the innovative ways we have integrated dice into our card game to maximise excitement without compromising strategy and skill.

Cards!

Although we are still in the early stages of development of our new adventure card game, we have arrived at the point we can share a couple of cards.

Over the coming weeks, we will reveal the meaning of specific parts of each card, so stay tuned if we have (as planned) piqued your curiosity! Until next time …