Learning to play

Someone landing on Xenocide could not learn to play it. There were rules, in the sense that the rules were written down, but written down is not the same as taught.

Four things shipped together, because they are really one thing.

• The Tomes of Power were rewritten to teach instead of to list. Worked examples render the real deck, so they physically cannot show you a card the game would deal differently.
• A full Lexicon. Every term, with the rule behind it rather than the flavour. Anywhere a term appears underlined, tap it and the definition opens where you are standing, so you never lose your place halfway through a sentence.
• The Heretic’s tour. It is the only thing in the fiction that is on your side and understands how the Pantheon works, so it is the one that shows you around. Offered once, and always available from the menu afterwards.
• Inoculation, the first coach. Three lines after each move, each one the best move by a single measure.

On that last point: the three lines are arithmetic, not opinion. Each is the argmax of one exactly computable quantity, worked out on a real copy of the game engine. There is deliberately no fourth line naming an overall best move, because that would require weighting the three against each other, and the moment it does that it is guessing and cannot tell you it is guessing.