Xenocide Uprising

A board built for one

There is a third option under Layout in the menu, beside Standard and Two columns. It is called Solo, and it is the first layout designed around how many people are sitting down.

The table was describing itself

The board carries one lane per seat, and rounds accumulate sideways inside each lane. With four seats that is the most useful thing on the screen. With one seat it is a single lane, holding cards you played, directly above your hand, which holds the cards you did not.

It was a row that existed to say there was one of you.

In the solo layout the table goes away and something more useful stands in its place: a readout called Counter of Fates. What is left in the Gathering, what is banked against the Ancient, what each Force will do if you spend it now, and whether it is live, bound, or accumulating while immune. The numbers you were working out in your head between turns.

The actions and the hand then sit centred beneath it, because with the table gone there is no column for them to be pushed to one side of.

A second seat brings the table straight back. The layout is a preference, but the table’s absence is not: it is keyed off the game actually being solo, so joining a friend restores the lanes without you having to remember why they went away.

Two panels got names

While the board was being rearranged, two things that had never been called anything got called something.

The enemy panel is The Woken. The three pile counts are The Waker’s Folly. Neither name changes what they do. Both stop them being the unnamed grey boxes at either end of a board where everything else has a name, and the second one quietly says whose fault all of this is.

What is deliberately not here

There is no undo, and no way to rewind a turn. That has been asked for and it is parked rather than refused, but it belongs to solo and training only. Rewinding a table other people are sitting at is a different and much worse problem, and pretending otherwise is how you end up with a feature that cannot be finished.