Survival

01 · The first principle

Cards are the resource, not Ruin

New players spend their turns maximising Ruin and lose on the fourth entity with a full board and an empty hand. Ruin is easy: every card does it. Cards are what run out.

A Spawn holds 20 Dominion. Between you, you have far more than 20 Ruin available. What you may not have is enough left to survive the Heralds. Diamonds are therefore not a supporting suit; they are the engine, and Hearts are the only reason the engine keeps turning after the deck thins.

02 · Immunity

Read the enemy before you read your hand

Look at the suit of the entity first, every single turn. Sending Dream into the Spawn of Dream (J♦) is not a small inefficiency; it is throwing a card away for its Ruin value alone, which is the worst rate in the game.

The exception is Spades. Against a spade-immune enemy your shields are incubating, not lost, and a Heretic later makes all of them live at once. Sending Void into the Ancient of Void (K♠) is a gamble on drawing a Heretic: a real strategy, not a mistake, but know which one you are making.

03 · The best play in the game

Count for the exact kill

An exact kill puts the entity on top of the Gathering. You draw it back as a 10, 15 or 20: the largest cards in the game, and exactly what you need to pay an Ancient's 20 Ruin later. Overkill by one and it goes to the Grave instead.

So before committing, do the subtraction. Remember Clubs double after the total, so a 5 of Clubs is 10 Ruin, and against an Ancient, the Ancient of Swarm (K♣) is exactly 40.

04 · Sequencing

Spend the cheap cards first

Your big cards do two jobs: they kill Pantheon and they pay Ruin. Small cards only really do the first. So chip with Aces and low cards early, and keep at least one card worth 10+ in hand at all times. The moment you cannot cover the counterattack, the game is over regardless of how healthy the enemy looks.

Symbionts are the most efficient cards in the deck for this. An Ace adds 1 to the total but triggers both suits' powers at the combined value. A♦ + 8♣ draws nine and deals eighteen for the cost of a card you were never going to kill anything with.

05 · Discipline

Clubs are a finisher, not an opener

Doubling is the only multiplier in the game. Spent on a healthy Spawn it buys you tempo you did not need; held for an Ancient it is 40 Ruin from one card. The exception is when the double lands an exact kill, and then it is always right.

Spades early, against the right enemy

A ward persists for the whole fight and protects everyone. Nine points of ward on a fresh Ancient is worth far more than nine Ruin, because the Ancient will manifest several more times before it dies. On a nearly-dead Spawn it is worth almost nothing. Shield early in a fight, Ruin late.

06 · The Heretic

Two in the deck, and they decide games

A Heretic deals no Ruin, breaks the entity's domain for the rest of the fight, skips the Manifestation, and hands the turn to whoever you choose. Spending one on a nearly-dead Spawn because it was a convenient turn is one of the most expensive mistakes available.

• Best case: the Ancient of Void (K♠) with wards banked. Every one comes live at once.
• Strong: any Ancient, early. You unlock a suit for the longest, hardest fight.
• Waste: a Spawn, or an entity whose suit you were not going to play anyway.

It is also the only way to hand the turn to a specific player, worth remembering when someone has been quietly accumulating a hand while everyone else drew nothing.

07 · Enduring

Doing nothing is a move

Enduring takes the Ruin without spending a card. When the enemy's Strike is fully shielded, enduring is free: you lose nothing at all. Even unshielded, if your cheapest commitment is a 2 and your alternative is spending a 9, enduring is the better trade.

You cannot endure if everyone else just endured, so it is a shared resource: in a four player game three of you can endure in a row, and the fourth is forced to act.

08 · Together

Coordinating without cheating

You may not describe your hand. You can still coordinate well, because the most useful information is public: how many cards each player holds, how big the Grave is (Hearts get better as it grows), and what the enemy is immune to.

• Watch hand counts. A Diamonds play distributes clockwise from the player who made it, so who plays it changes who benefits.
• Hearts are wasted on an empty Grave. Early on, that pile is small.
• If someone is down to one card, the next Diamonds play matters more than any Ruin.

09 · Expectations

You are going to lose

Xenocide is hard on purpose. Our own measurements: random play maroons fewer than two of the Pantheon on average. A competent heuristic maroons about six of twelve and wins roughly one game in a hundred. Reaching the Ancients at all is a good run.

Judge a game by how deep you got and which decision cost you, not by whether you won. That is also why the game records how many Heretic tokens a solo run spent, Gold, Silver or Bronze, because how you survived is the interesting part.

Alone, the exact kill IS the game

Everything above holds. Descending alone under the Dream Rite edition, one thing hardens: a subdued entity is not gone. It waits, and when the Pantheon is spent it breaches on its own, at full Dominion, against whatever you have left. Overkilling is no longer a wasted card. It is a debt.

So when you cannot Expunge this turn, choose the remainder you are most likely to hit next turn. A play that leaves eleven and a play that leaves one deal almost the same Ruin and are not remotely the same move.

Spend a Beckon before you strike, not after

Calling a subdued entity back before you have touched the one in front of you belays that fight: it is set aside intact and costs nothing. Strike first and you break off instead, and everything you dealt is returned to it. If you are going to spend a Beckon this round, spend it first.

Warding everything can starve you

The Muster fires when the Redoubt falls below four. It is reinforcement, not a refill, so it only comes when you are losing. A descent spent warding every Manifestation takes almost no Ruin, musters almost nothing, and runs the Gathering dry with an Ancient still standing. Taking a blow you can afford is sometimes how you get paid.

The last one must be Expunged

Once nothing is left to reveal, subduing is the end of the descent. Hold something small for it. An Ace kept through three fights is worth more than the four Ruin it would have added on the way.

Inoculation

Descending alone, you can switch on Inoculation before you begin. After every move it shows what three different priorities would each have invoked from the position you were just in:

Each line is worked out by playing every legal invocation against a copy of the real position and reading off what happened, so none of it is estimated. There is no fourth line naming a best move, and that omission is the design.

It also checks your payments. Committing to the Grave has an exactly cheapest answer, and the greedy one is often wrong: paying 10 Ruin out of a hand holding 10, 6 and 5 burns 11 if you reach for the small cards first.