Dominion, Strike and Ruin

“Health”, “attack” and “damage” are gone from everything you read.

I had left them alone for a while on the grounds that they were clear and everybody understands them. That is true and it was still wrong: they were the last three words holding the interface at arm’s length from the world, and every time you read one you were reminded you were looking at a card game rather than at a thing waking up.

The code still calls them “health” and “attack”. The rules run on one vocabulary and you read another, which is the same split that keeps J, Q and K on the cards.

Two marks, not one

When an entity denies a Force, the card in your hand now says which kind of denial it is, and there are two kinds.

• Chains mean the Force is bound. The power is held and you will not get it. Playing the card still lands its Ruin.
• An egg means it is incubating. Your wards are accumulating against that entity even though nothing appears to be happening, and a Heretic makes every one of them live at once.

Collapsing those into a single “this does nothing” mark would tell you to stop playing Void into the Ancient of Void, which is exactly backwards. It is the biggest single swing in the game.

Numbers that move should show it

The Gathering and the Grave change almost every turn, and the only evidence was a number that had already finished changing. A new player never learned that Dream refills the deck or that paying a Manifestation feeds the Grave, because they never saw it happen.

Deltas now float off the pile. Ruin floats off the Dominion numeral, but only when the enemy is the same card as the frame before: a newly revealed Ancient is a jump in Dominion, not Ruin, and flashing it would be a lie.

And defeat takes the whole screen, in red. Victory stays inline, because the board behind it is the evidence and is worth reading. Defeat ends the run and the board is not.