The waking

The game has had a story for a while. It is on the Lore page and in the Tale, and most people were never going to read either, because nobody arrives at a card game and goes looking for the background first.

So it opens the Cycle now.

What it says

You are one of the Unbound. You were not always. Something above you had your hands for a while, and what you did in that time is not yours to remember. You come back to yourself partway through, somewhere you did not choose, holding cards you do not remember being dealt.

That last part is the piece I wanted and could never get from a page nobody opens. The Redoubt is not a room you walked into. It is where you found yourself when the influence lifted, and the thing in front of you is what you were being used against.

Once each Cycle, and then never if you say so

This is easy to get wrong in either direction. Shown once ever, it is missed by anyone not paying attention the first time and lost entirely to a player who clears their browser. Shown every game, it is a door you kick through on the way to the thing you actually came for.

So it returns at the start of each Cycle, and it carries a button that puts it down for good. Reading it is one press. Never seeing it again is one press. Neither costs a settings page.

Scroll, then the tour, then the first Spawn

Getting three introductions to agree took two attempts.

The scroll is the frame, so it goes first. The Heretic’s tour points at parts of the board, so it needs a board to point at. And the arrival of the first Spawn is a title card about the descent beginning, which is a lie if the descent began three screens ago.

The first version had the Spawn announcing itself over the top of the scroll, which read exactly as badly as that sounds.

The hand is a place

One smaller thing came out of the same work. The panel holding your cards had no name, so it has one: the Redoubt. Your Unbound and the count of what you hold sit above it, centred, where the other panel names on the board sit.

It is a small change and it does the same job the scroll does. A hand of cards is a game object. A Redoubt is somewhere you are.