Rules

How to Win (or Lose)

• The Monarch rule: If you start your turn with 8 or more Victory Points, you win. You earn VP when:
  1. You finish Objectives.
  2. An Asset generates a VP when their rules say.
  3. At the start of your turn you earn 1 VP for each Location if you are the only player on it.
• King Slayer rule: If you have no Assets on the table when your turn ends, you’re out. The last player who still has any cards on the table (Assets) wins.

Deck Construction

In Strife each player has a Main deck, and a side-deck of Objective cards. How you build these decks and what cards you include is up to you, but they must follow these rules:

• Main Deck:
  • 30 - 50 cards
  • A limit of 3 copies of any given card
  • Includes at least 1 Landmark Location
• Objective Deck:
  • 5+ Objective Cards

Getting Ready

1. Pick one Landmark Location from your deck and put it on the playing field.
2. Choose 3 cards from your deck – these are the first cards in your hand.
3. Shuffle your Main deck and draw 3 more cards
4. Pick one Objective card to start with, then shuffle the rest of the Objective deck.

What Happens on Your Turn

1. Start of Turn
   1. Turn any exhausted cards upright (they’re no longer exhausted).
   2. Do any “Start” actions written on your cards.
2. Draw
   1. If you have fewer than 3 cards, draw until you have 3.
   2. If you have more than 7 cards, discard cards until you have 7.
   3. Refer to the Glossary ("Draw") if you run out of cards.
3. Fight – see the Fighting rules.
4. Deploy – see the Deploying rules.
5. End of Turn
   1. Do any “End” actions on your cards.
   2. Reset the defense numbers on all cards for all players.
   3. You can keep up to 3 Material (the round‑shaped resource) between turns.

Fighting (You can skip this and draw a card instead.)

General rules

• You can fight more than once in one turn.
• Machines can't attack or defend, they can fight Characters if attacked directly

Steps for a Fight

1. Attack
   1. Say which characters or machines are attacking
   2. The other players pick which characters will try to defend.
2. Choose Targets
   1. All players pick who their fighters will hit.
      1. The defenders pick first.
   2. Lots of characters can hit the same enemy.
   3. Defenders with high prowess can force attackers to fight with them instead of the target that attacker wants.
3. Deal Damage
   1. Start with the highest‑Prowess characters and work down.
   2. Characters with the same Prowess act at the same time.
   3. If a card takes damage equal to or more than its defense number, it’s destroyed (goes to the Boneyard).

Deploying (You can skip this and draw a card instead.)

General rules

• You can do any of these actions in any order, as many times as you like
• Machines cannot have equipment cards played on them

Things you do during Deployment

• Play a card from your hand
  • Pay the resource costs by Burning or Harvesting
  • You play Assets directly to a Location, or to your Reserve zone
    • You may deploy to any Location, even if another player is on it, this means you are contesting the ownership of the Location.
    • Assets in the Reserve zone do not attack, and their rules text does not apply until they are deployed to a location
• Move a character or machine to a new Location, or to your Reserve zone
  • Pay the Move cost shown in the card rules (if none is shown, the cost is [1]).
  • When you move a card to a Location owned by a teammate, they become the new owner.
• Replace your Objective card: pay [4] Material, discard the old Objective, then draw and show a new one.

Actions and Effects

• Actions are things you do like playing a card, moving a card, using abilities on cards, etc.
  • You cannot use abilities on cards that are Exhausted.
• Effects are what happens because of an action, like gaining a resource or destroying a card.

Every action creates an effect, but some effects happen automatically like “Start” or “End” effects, and some effects may be persistent.

When it’s your turn, after each step you get a chance to add one effect to the Chain (a list of things to resolve). Players go clockwise, each adding at most one effect per pass. The chain stops when nobody adds anything new.

⚠️ Rules for resolution of effects are still in development, at present all effects resolve immediately in the order they were added. In the future the vision is to have a tier printed alongside the effect on the card; higher‑tier effects happen before lower‑tier ones, no matter where in the chain they're added.

Glossary