A rule we had wrong

A player wrote to ask why the game warned them they were about to be consumed. Their last card was a Dream card. Dream draws. Surely, they said, the draw happens before I have to pay, and whether I can cover the Strike is a gamble I am entitled to take.

They were right. And checking why they were right turned up something worse.

The order of a turn

A turn has four steps: play a card, activate its Force, deal the Ruin, then suffer what the entity strikes back with. Dream draws in step two. You pay in step four. So a card you draw can settle the very Manifestation that turn provokes, and playing your last Dream card on a gamble is a real line rather than a mistake.

The engine had this right. The player could see it was right. The warning said otherwise, because the warning is calculated from the hand you are guaranteed to still hold, with nothing added. That is deliberate: the server must never tell you what is on top of the Gathering, and a plan made from the guaranteed remainder is always still legal after a draw. But it means the sentence “this will end the descent” was a claim the game could not support.

The part that was actually broken

Reading the rulebook to answer the first question turned up the second one.

The solo rules allow the Heretic token to be spent in two places. Before you play a card, which the game had. And at the start of step four, “before you have to take damage”, which the game also had, in the sense that the code accepted it there.

It was simply unreachable. The moment your hand could not cover the Strike, the game ended. You never arrived at the step where the Echo was waiting.

So the two ways to lose disagreed with each other. Run out of cards on your own turn and the game spares you if an Echo remains, in as many words. Take a Strike you cannot pay and it did not. Same token, same rulebook, opposite handling.

Both halves of that player’s line had been taken away: gamble on the draw, and fall back on the Echo when the draw is not enough.

What changed

An unpayable Strike now holds you at step four instead of ending the descent, so the Echo is there to spend. If you would rather not, committing your whole hand when the whole hand is not enough is how you decline, which is the rulebook in its own words: a player who “cannot discard enough cards” dies, and everyone is consumed with them.

The warning says may now. It names the draw when your play carries one, and it tells you the Echo is still available when the Manifestation lands.

And a fourth way to pay

The same player asked for something else in the same message: sometimes none of the three suggested payments is the one they want.

There is now a fourth option beside them, Choose cards, which pays nothing up front. The Manifestation stands, and you settle it at the step that has always existed for exactly that, with your whole hand in front of you.

The three suggestions were never the payment screen. They are a shortcut, added because most settlements have one sensible answer and clicking through them was ceremony. When yours is not one of the three, you should be able to say so.

My thanks to the player who asked. The rules were on the table the whole time and I had shipped something that contradicted them.