Solo could not be won

I want to be plain about this one, because it is the worst thing I have found in this game and it was mine.

A solo descent could not be won. Not rarely. Not with bad luck. I ran five hundred of them and the number that reached the twelfth entity was zero.

Seventy-two percent of them ended at the Heralds. If you have played alone and felt you were doing something wrong, you were not.

Why

It is arithmetic, not difficulty, and that is the part that matters. A turn spends at least one card. Cards only come back when Dream fires. So below one card drawn per turn the hand drains in one direction and never recovers, and no amount of good play changes the slope. You are not being beaten by the Ancients. You are running out of people.

That is also why the hand limit never helped, which I had wondered about for a long time. The limit is a ceiling. The hand was on the floor.

The Muster

At the start of your turn, if the Redoubt holds fewer than four, more of the Unbound come forward from the Gathering. At most two at a time.

That is the whole rule. Solo only. A table plays exactly the game it always did, and there is a test that fails if that ever stops being true.

Four is not a number I picked because it worked. A turn has to do two things: play, and cover what strikes back. A play is one to four cards, and settling a Manifestation costs two more often than any other number. Four is one full turn’s worth, and below it you can no longer both act and survive.

The cards in your hand are Unbound, and so are the ones in the Gathering. The hand is who has mustered; the Gathering is who has not yet. So this is reinforcement rather than a refill, and it is why it fires only when you are losing. Nobody steps forward while the line is holding.

What it does not do

It is a check made at one moment, the start of your turn. You still drop below four constantly, because you spend cards playing and spend more paying, and you are only lifted back when the next turn begins.

So a Manifestation you cannot cover still ends the descent, and mostly that is how it ends. Of five hundred descents under the new rule, forty-two percent clear the twelve and fifty-one percent are consumed by a Toll they could not pay. A quarter end to a single Ancient’s twenty Ruin.

There is a chip beside your hand now showing how many will come forward at the start of your next turn. It counts up as you spend and empties when they arrive, so the reinforcement is something you watch approaching rather than discover afterwards. If a card you are about to play would refill you past the line, it shows struck through: your own Dream cancels it.

Two things I got wrong on the way

The first version fired only at the ordinary end of a turn, and banishing an entity does not end a turn ordinarily. It hands you a fresh one. So the rule was silent on exactly the turn a hand is emptiest, and a player reported the chip promising two while nobody arrived. It fires everywhere a turn begins now, and the test for it reads the engine and fails if any new path forgets.

The second is worse and more interesting. The first version refilled you all the way to four, which is worth more the emptier you are: ending a turn with nothing paid four cards and ending with three paid one. So the best strategy became spending everything, and it beat playing well by fourteen points. A cap of two fixes it, because you can no longer cash out. From nothing you reach two, and crawl back.

I am sorry it took this long. The game has been asking you to do something that could not be done.