The Reach

Clarity shipped this morning and turned a perfect banishment into one card of your partner’s hand, revealed. Three at most, look but do not touch.

Both halves of that have changed.

A slot is sight or reach

Look at the card and keep the slot. Or take the card into your own Redoubt, and spend it.

Any open slot, not only the oldest. If three are turned over you may reach for whichever of the three you need, because a window you can only take the front of is a window with one card in it, and that is not what three exact banishments were earned for.

Only another perfect banishment gives a slot back. So reaching across eats the sight that permitted the reach, and that is the entire price. There is no second cost bolted on top and there does not need to be: a table that leans on it stops being able to see, and a table that never reaches accumulates a window it is not using.

The asymmetry is the interesting part. Sight is permanent until you spend it; a card is gone the moment you take it. So sight is the long game and the reach is the emergency, which means you spend it in the position every recorded table has died in: one seat alone under a Strike of fifteen, holding an eight.

It can starve your partner

Take their last small card and a Manifestation they cannot cover ends the descent for both of you.

There is no guard against that. It was offered and turned down, and the reasoning is better than mine was: the risk is the mechanic. A reach you can make freely is a shared hand with extra steps. A reach that might kill the person you took from is a decision. The board says what it will cost before you take it, and after that it is yours to get wrong.

The cap is gone

Clarity capped at three slots this morning, on the argument that it may never reach the whole hand or the rule the co-op game rests on is dead.

That argument was for sight alone, where the veil was free information. It does not survive the reach. Every card you can now see is a card you might spend a slot to take, so sight and reach compete for the same currency and the cap is no longer what holds the line. It ships open. Bringing it back down is still the lever if it turns out too generous.

One correction to yesterday

I reported the fourth table as the first to reach an Ancient, with the clean rate going from forty-one per cent to seventy-five, and floated Clarity as a possible cause.

It cannot have been. Every table so far has been played by one person holding both seats, so both hands were already known and revealing a card gave nothing that was not already there. Clarity’s measured effect in all four descents is exactly zero.

The reach is different: a card leaving one hand and entering a play is a material change that shows in the numbers no matter who is holding the tabs. So this is the half of the mechanic that the next few descents can actually measure.

Renamed the same day. This is called Channelling now, and what it opens is a channel: look through it and it stays open, reach through it and it closes. Clarity was borrowed from the Dream Law’s own Power, which is also about information and a banishment made perfect, so the word was colliding before it had been in the game a day. And a channel is two-way, which is the whole property this mechanic has and the one thing the old name could not say. The entry above is left as it was written.