How to Play

Hordes is a digital deck-building / engine-building card game. Every turn you draw a hand of cards and spend them — along with your class's abilities — to fight a single shared enemy and score points. As the game goes on you improve two things at once: your deck (by buying new cards from a shop) and your engine (by equipping Items and playing Companions that keep paying off turn after turn).

The enemy never trades blows with you card-for-card. It is one creature made of four tiers that attacks you on a schedule by rolling dice. Your job is to defeat its units — each one you beat becomes a trophy worth points.

In Daily Challenge mode, you race a round clock: everyone playing on a given day faces the exact same enemy and the exact same shop, and the goal is the best balance of a high score against finishing in as few rounds as possible.

Draw 5 → survive the enemy's hit → buy, build, and attack in any order → discard and redraw.

If you know the genre: Hordes borrows the buy-and-build loop from Dominion, the always-available random shop and common-enemy scoring from Ascension, run-based combat with special enemy abilities from Slay the Spire, and dual-school class combos from Titan Quest.

You don't need to read anything else to start. Here's a full first turn.

1. Start a Daily Challenge. From the Home screen, find the Daily Challenge panel — it shows today's boss. Press Begin.
2. Pick your Champion. Choose one or two Schools from the grid; the preview panel fills in your class, its starting stats, and its starting cards. New player? Start with a single-school class — Warrior (straightforward, attack-focused) or Wizard (spell-focused) are clean first picks.
3. Peek at the matchup first. Open the Match Setup panel to see today's shop and boss before you commit — you can pick a class that suits them. When ready, press Start Match.
4. Take your turn. You start with a hand of 5 cards. Play them in any order you like:
   • Play Money cards to build up Florins, then buy a card or two from the shop.
   • Play Mastery cards to fill your Mastery gauge.
   • Equip an Item, play a Companion, cast a Spell, or play an Attack — then click an enemy tier to attack it.
5. From Round 2 on, the enemy hits first. At the start of the turn you'll see one or two enemy attack prompts. Click OK to acknowledge each one (you can't act until you do), then take your turn as above.
6. End your turn. Press End Turn. Your hand, your played cards, and anything you bought are discarded, and you draw a fresh 5. Keep going until the game ends.

Where everything is on the board: the Shop is a drawer on the left; your hand and piles are in the center with the End Turn button; the enemy stands on the right; and your stats sit alongside.

That's it — you're playing. Everything below explains why it works.

A turn has a simple rhythm.

• Draw 5. Every turn begins by drawing a hand of five cards.
• Round 1 is free. The enemy does not attack on the first round — take a turn to get set up. (In single-player, one round = one turn.)
• From Round 2 on, the enemy attacks first. At the start of your turn the enemy rolls its dice and the results appear as sticky prompts you must acknowledge with OK: first the Boss result (rolled on the spot — there's no preview), then the Horde, Vanguard, and Commander tiers together. Until you clear these prompts, Play and Buy are locked — so you always see what hit you. The prompts spell out any injuries taken, mitigation spent, the dice faces rolled, and any afflictions or stripped Items.
• Then you act — in any order. There are no sub-phases. Buy, build, and attack however you like, limited only by your Attacks, Spells, and Buys banks (and any recurring ↻ effects that fired at the start of the turn).
• Cleanup & redraw. When you press End Turn, everything in your hand, your play area, and your purchase queue is discarded; your per-turn resources reset; and you draw a fresh 5.

These are the canonical meanings you'll see on cards and around the board.

Symbols

The enemy

Actions & combat

Shop, economy & card movement

Per-turn banks

Two more terms you'll meet

• Duration — a card that stays in play across turns for as long as it holds tokens, resolving a ↻ effect each turn until its tokens run out. (Example: a spell that pools up "acid" tokens and spends one each turn to defeat a Horde unit.)
• Equipped Items — Items you've put into play; they stay until something removes them and count against your Items-Equipped limit.

Every action in Hordes flows through a card. There are six types — four you play to affect the game, plus two utility types.

A few examples

• Bash (Attack) — attack 1 enemy with ⚔️ + 1 force.
• Boon of Valor (Spell) — +2 Attacks and a burst of ⚔️ scaled by your ✦.
• Belt Pouch (Item) — ↻ +1 Buy and +1 Florin at the start of every turn.
• Arcane Phantom (Companion) — attacks one enemy with ✦ + 1 force, for free.

Watch out for Goop. Some bosses shove a Goop card into your deck. It's a dead card — you can't play it, only discard or trash it. It exists purely to clog your draws.

Card faces show their live computed values in your hand and in the shop, updating as the board changes — so an "attack x enemies" card always shows the current x.

Hordes has two kinds of resources: per-turn banks that reset every turn, and a couple that carry across the whole game.

Per-turn (reset at cleanup)

• Attacks / Spells / Buys — your class sets how many of each you get per turn. Playing an Attack, Spell, or making a buy spends one; effects can add more.
• Florins — the currency, produced by Money cards and spent on buys.
• Attack Power (⚔️) and Spell Power (✦) — power stats that pump up the force of your attacks and spells. Both reset to 0 each turn.

Cumulative (persist all game)

• Skill Points — earned by playing Mastery cards; they fill your Mastery gauge and never reset. This is the only resource that accumulates for the whole game.
• Mitigation tokens — absorb incoming injuries one-for-one.

Two rules the whole game obeys

• Always round down on any division (an effect worth "✦ ÷ 2" at ✦ = 5 gives 2).
• Resources floor at 0 — you can never have negative Attacks, Buys, ⚔️, Florins, and so on. Effects that reduce your Florins don't push the balance below zero; the reduction is deferred against your next income instead.

Tokens. Some cards hold tokens representing stored-up power or a cooldown. Careful: discarding a card that holds tokens loses all of them.

The shop is how you grow your deck. In a Daily Challenge it's fixed for the day — the same for every player:

• The four Money gradations and the four Mastery gradations, always available.
• Plus about 15 variable cards drawn for the day: roughly 6 Items, 3 Attacks, 3 Spells, and 3 Companions.

To buy a card you need two things: an available Buy, and enough Florins to cover its cost. Buying pays the Florin cost, spends 1 Buy, and moves a copy of the card into your purchase queue.

The timing that trips up new players: a bought card does not go into your hand. It sits in the purchase queue and is discarded at cleanup, which means it shuffles into your deck and you'll draw it on a future turn. You're investing in later turns, not this one.

Some effects bend these rules — a 'for free' buy skips both the Florin cost and the Buy, and a few cards let you put a bought card on top of your deck so you draw it next turn.

The board won't let you make an illegal buy. Buy buttons disable when you're out of Buys or can't afford the card, so you can't accidentally overspend. The shop lives in the drawer on the far left of the board.

Attacking is how you actually score. The core rule:

To defeat an enemy unit, your attack's force must meet or exceed its hp.

Force is a card's base number plus a factor of your ⚔️ and/or ✦ — so building Attack Power and Spell Power earlier in the turn makes your attacks hit harder.

You attack one tier at a time. When you play a card that lets you attack, the eligible tiers glow and become clickable — pick the tier you want to hit. Defeating a unit takes a trophy from that tier: its count drops and your score climbs by that tier's value.

A couple of nuances

• "Defeat x enemies" is an automatic defeat — no force check. "Attack with force" does the hp comparison. Read the card to know which you're getting.
• Some Commanders can make a lower tier immune for a round — an immune tier can't be targeted and won't glow. If an attack ends up defeating nothing, a toast tells you it whiffed.
• A few cards offer alternate routes to the Boss — for instance, pooling tokens until they meet or exceed the Boss's hp to defeat it outright.

You're always fighting one shared enemy built from four tiers that grow stronger and fewer: Horde → Vanguard → Commanders → Boss.

• Horde and Vanguard are the same every game — the reliable, numerous front line.
• Commanders and the Boss are variable — a different enemy type is drawn for each day's challenge, each with its own personality.

How the enemy hits back. Each tier attacks by rolling dice — shown on the board as a stack of coins or polygon dice, one roll per stack. Every die face maps through that enemy's roll table into zero or more effects: a miss, an injury, a discarded Item, or a signature affliction.

Bosses have a signature curse. Beyond plain injuries, each boss brings its own nasty trick — some inflict special affliction tokens (Goop, Fizzle, Exhaustion, or Disruption) that gum up your deck; others lay a curse that punishes a specific kind of play (attacking, casting, buying, and so on). Commanders come in two flavors: some punish you (forcing discards, trashing cards, dealing injuries), while others buff a lower tier (rolling with advantage, or granting it an immune round).

You don't have to memorize any of this. The pre-battle preview names the day's boss and shows its full roll table in plain language, so you can plan your class and purchases around exactly what you're facing.

The enemy's main way to hurt you is injuries.

• Where they come from. Enemy dice deal injuries, and a handful of aggressive cards let you take injuries on purpose in exchange for a benefit.
• Mitigation tokens are your shield. Each token absorbs one incoming injury before it lands. You bank them from Spells, Items, Companions, and some class specials — the Warden class, for example, gains one at the start of every turn.
• Healing. Some cards return injuries you've already taken. Healing is capped at your current injuries, so healing with nothing to heal is simply a harmless no-op — you can't "bank" negative injuries.
• Injuries stick around. They're tracked across the whole game, and any injury tokens still sitting on your in-play cards at the end are counted as injuries too. (A few cards deliberately gamble on parking injury tokens for a payoff — mind the clock.)
• A few effects deal injuries that mitigation can't stop — read the enemy's roll table.

At the end of the game, injuries cost you points — so it's always worth defending against them. (Exactly how much they cost is intentionally not shown; treat every injury as worth avoiding.)

Your Champion is defined by the Schools you pick at the start of a match. Choose one or two: one School gives you a single-school class; two Schools combine into a named dual-school class.

What a class gives you

• Base per-turn banks — how many Attacks, Spells, and Buys you start each turn with.
• Items-Equipped limit — how many Items you can keep equipped at once (grows with Mastery).
• A per-Item bonus — a small buff (like +2 ⚔️) applied at the start of each turn for every Item you have equipped, rewarding you for stacking Items.
• Starting cards — a couple of school-flavored cards seeded into your opening deck.
• A Mastery threshold and an unlockable Class Mastery skill — and, for some classes, an always-on Special.

Single-school classes

Dual-school classes

Coming later: four more Schools — Pain, Alchemy, Medicina, Footwork — appear on the selection grid but are grayed out for now. Their classes aren't built yet, so you can't pick them. Multiplayer is also on the roadmap but not yet playable.

Plan around the matchup. Your match — the shop and the enemy — is created before you choose your class, so you can open the Match Setup preview and pick a Champion that counters the day's boss.

Your opening deck is small and mostly economy, so your first couple of turns are about ramping up.

Single-school class — 10 cards

• 2× 1-Mastery
• 1× 2-Money
• 5× 1-Money
• 2× your school's starter card

Dual-school class — 15 cards

• 3× 1-Mastery
• 2× 2-Money
• 7× 1-Money
• 3× school starter cards, split 2 from one school and 1 from the other

School starter cards are the flavor of your class from turn one — for example, Weapon Mastery opens with Cleave, Arcana with Arcane Blast, Defense with a mitigation starter, Sophistry with Conscription, and Brigandry with Pounce.

Note: the designed option for dual-school players to choose which starter to drop isn't built yet — dual decks currently use the fixed 2-and-1 split above.

Playing Mastery cards earns Skill Points, which fill your Mastery gauge. Unlike everything else, this gauge is cumulative across the whole game and never resets — it's your long-term progress bar.

• Unlock your Class Mastery. When the gauge reaches your class's threshold — 15 for a single-school class, 25 for a dual-school class — you unlock your Class Mastery, the signature power listed for your class.
• "WITH MASTERY" cards get stronger. Many cards carry a bonus clause that only applies once you're mastered, so hitting the threshold quietly upgrades cards you already own.
• More item slots. Your Items-Equipped limit grows with Mastery: limit = base + ⌊Skill Points ÷ 10⌋ + (1 once Class Mastery is unlocked).
• Timing. Crossing the threshold mid-turn takes effect immediately — you get the skill and the extra item slot right away — while an Item's ↻ and other begin-of-turn effects wait until the start of your next turn.
• Swapping Items. At your item limit, you can discard an equipped Item to free a slot for a new one.

Buying cards grows your deck; the real depth is turning one-shot cards into a self-reinforcing engine.

• Items are your engine core. Most carry ↻ effects that fire every turn, and because your class grants a per-Item bonus, stacking Items multiplies that bonus every turn. Item-heavy classes (Brigand, Corsair, Swashbuckler) lean into this hard.
• Companions are free tempo. They cost no resource to play, so a hand full of Companions can produce a huge burst turn — chain them all.
• Duration cards keep working. A Duration card stays in play across turns as long as it holds tokens, resolving its ↻ payoff each turn until it runs dry — great for spreading a big effect across several turns.
• Purchase-queue synergies. Some cards scale with how many cards are in your purchase queue, or let you top-deck a purchase so you use it immediately next turn.
• Thin your deck. Trashing weak starter cards (extra 1-Money, spent Mastery) permanently raises the quality of every future draw.

Good to know: most equipped-Item ↻ effects resolve automatically, but a few pause to ask you a question at the start of your turn — an Item that reads "↻ discard 1 card," for instance, stops and lets you choose. Your turn simply waits for your pick, then continues.

The game ends when any of these happens:

• you win by defeating the Boss, or
• you win by wiping out any 2 of the other 3 tiers (Horde, Vanguard, Commanders), or
• you run out of time — reaching the round cap (Round 30) without a win ends the match as a Defeat.

That round cap is the clock you're racing: hit Round 30 without a win and you lose, so an efficient, decisive run matters as much as a high score.

Your score comes from your trophies — and tougher tiers are worth more, so a single Commander or the Boss is worth many Horde units — minus a penalty for injuries you didn't heal.

Because Daily Challenge also rewards efficiency, the best runs balance a high score against finishing in as few rounds as possible. Grinding out every last trophy isn't always the winning play — sometimes closing the game quickly scores better.

When the game ends, the summary screen shows Victory or Defeat, your final score, your trophies per tier, run stats, and any runes you earned for your collection.

The exact scoring formula — including how much later turns are worth — is deliberately hidden. Play for more high-value trophies, fewer injuries, and fewer turns, and you'll score well.

Hordes' single-player has a few ways to play:

• Daily Challenge. The headline mode: one leaderboard-eligible attempt per day, with the same enemy and shop for everyone who plays that date. This is where you compete.
• Replay. After you've used your official Daily attempt, you can replay today's challenge as much as you like for practice — replays are not leaderboard-eligible.
• Random Game. A single-player run with a randomized enemy and shop, with its own separate all-time leaderboard.

Leaderboards are reachable from Home: a per-day Daily board (your first attempt each day) and a Random top-100, with your own row highlighted so you can find yourself.

Multiplayer — racing other players against a common enemy — is part of the design but not yet playable.

Beyond any single match there's an optional collection meta-game that rewards long-term play.

The loop: playing matches earns you runes (drawn from the 24 Elder Futhark runes). You take runes to the Forge and try to spell out Charms — permanent bonuses you can equip in a future match, firing alongside your class powers.

A few things make discovery a real puzzle rather than a checklist:

• Discovery is blind and ordered. A Charm is unlocked by submitting a specific sequence of 2–4 runes. You're guessing the word; the game only tells you when you get it right.
• Runes are consumed on every attempt — success or failure — so guessing has a real cost.
• No wasting runes on known duds. Failed attempts are remembered, and the Forge blocks you from re-submitting a combination you've already tried and failed.
• Hummers give hints. A near-miss attempt rewards you with a Hummer — a single true fact about the Charm you're closest to discovering — while always stopping one rune short of just handing it to you.

Once you've discovered a Charm, equip it on the class-selection screen before a match to bring its bonus into play.

Scope note: a representative set of Charms is live to discover and equip today; the full catalogue, an in-app tutorial, and social features are planned for later.

Symbols: ✦ Spell Power · ⚔️ Attack Power · ↻ recurring (each turn while in play) · x/y/z live variable.

The four enemy tiers

Card types

Attack (spends Attacks) · Spell (spends Spells) · Item (equip, ↻) · Companion (free) · Money (→ Florins) · Mastery (→ Skill Points).

Key numbers

Starting hand 5 · single-school deck 10 cards · dual-school deck 15 cards · Class Mastery threshold 15 (single) / 25 (dual) · item limit base + ⌊Skill Points ÷ 10⌋ + 1 (if mastered) · round cap 30.

Game ends when

You defeat the Boss or wipe any 2 of the other 3 tiers (win) — or you reach the round cap (Round 30) without a win (loss).

Golden rules

Round down; resources floor at 0; force must meet or exceed hp to defeat a unit.