FIELD MANUAL // 02

Your Turn

Deploy, attack, occupy, and reinforce — the four phases of a turn

This chapter walks one full turn: what you see before you start, the four phases (deploy, attack, occupy, reinforce), and how commits work so you never fire one by accident.

Start of your turn

Before you commit to anything, the Start of Your Turn panel tells you what you’re about to walk into, and lets you clear anything that needs clearing first.

The panel opens with a ROUND N header — your “where in the game am I?” anchor. Under it, two forecast lines read live off your position:

TROOPS [+N] — the deploy you’ll receive the moment you tap START YOUR TURN. The number already includes your base deploy, every bonus you hold (including partial payouts), objective income, and any active boosts or penalties. No mental math needed.
CARDS — whether a card is coming this turn. When you’re one tick short, it says so. When nothing is coming, it says that plainly too.

If the lobby set a turn timer, the countdown sits below the forecast.

Above the forecast, up to two orange alert banners stack in a fixed order:

Unread events. Things that happened to you between turns — messages, combat on your borders, proposals. Tap it to read them all in one place.
Pending proposal. Someone’s offer is waiting on you. Tap it to jump to your hand, where Accept and Decline sit ready.

A third reminder appears whenever timed effects are still counting down — unrest about to land, a penalty with turns remaining, fresh intel results. It stacks with the others and updates as effects resolve. See Cards.

Once you tap START YOUR TURN, a thin orange strip lights up under the header for the rest of your turn. No strip means “not started yet”; strip means “you’re mid-turn”. And START YOUR TURN is the only button here that fires on a plain tap — every other commit in the turn uses hold-to-fire, so a stray finger can’t end your turn or spend troops you didn’t mean to spend.

Start of Your Turn panel with both alert banners stacked — The pre-start panel: ROUND header, troop and card forecast, and the two alert banners stacked on top.

The timed-effects reminder above an active deploy panel — The timed-effects reminder mid-turn — everything still counting down, in one stack.

Active deploy panel with the orange strip under the header — The orange strip under the header means your turn is in progress. Before you start, there's no strip.

Turn structure

Each turn runs a fixed sequence: deploy, attack, occupy, reinforce. Before any of it, the game resolves your turn start on its own — cards earned, penalties applied, agreements taking effect. By the time the panel appears, all of that is done; the banners are how you catch up on it.

After reinforce, your turn ends and the next player’s begins. Between turns you can still play cards, up to the play limits.

Waiting for your turn

While another player acts, you don’t get a dead screen. The orders panel on desktop (and the phone bottom bar, which opens by itself between turns) carries the same brief you see at your turn start: the round number, your projected troops and cards, and the same two alert banners, tappable straight into the event log or your hand.

No countdown runs while you wait. The clock belongs to the active player; yours starts when your turn does.

Off-turn orders panel showing the brief with both alert banners — Waiting on desktop: round number, projected troops and cards, and your alerts — one glance tells you what you're walking into.

Phone bottom bar opened between turns with the brief — On phone, the bottom bar opens by itself between turns with the same brief.

Deploy

You receive troops at the start of your turn and place them on territories you own — split them across as many territories as you like.

The floor. You always get at least 3 troops per turn, even with fewer than 3 territories. Hosts can set the floor anywhere from 1 to 10 in custom games.
Bonus zones stack extra troops on top. Some pay only when you hold the whole zone, some once you hold enough of it, and some pay per territory from the first one — see Winning.
Negative zones charge instead of paying. They show in bold red everywhere so you can read the risk before you commit — see Tactical Cards.

Picking a destination opens the action slider:

[−] n  (──bar──)  m  [+]

The minus and plus keys nudge by 1. The left number is what you’re committing; the right number is your whole pool. The commit button under it names the action and the target — a 13-troop deploy onto Texas reads DEPLOY 13 → TEXAS.

Rarely, every territory you own refuses troops — all of them fortified, besieged, or full. The game doesn’t strand you: the slider is replaced by one button reading SKIP — ROLL N FORCES. Skip, and those troops arrive next round on top of your normal deploy.

The SKIP — ROLL N FORCES button when no territory can take troops — When nothing can accept troops this round, skip — they roll over and arrive next round.

The deploy phase with the action slider — Deploy: pick a destination from your territory list, dial the slider, hold to commit — here all six reinforcements head for Irondeep.

Attack

Pick an enemy territory next to one of yours. Combat is dice — both sides roll, losses land per roll. You can attack as often as you like in one turn: different territories, the same target again, anywhere along your border.

Once you’ve picked a source and target, the header shows the RISK% chip — your chance of losing this fight, coloured green through red. The RISK % attack mode below works on the same number. The chip and its colour steps are covered in Tactical Cards.

Three attack modes

A three-way toggle (ATTACK / BLITZ / RISK %) sits below the source and target:

ATTACK (the default) rolls one exchange of dice per press. You lose at most one troop per press, and nothing keeps rolling. Precise and low-risk: good for probing a defence or chipping at a border. The commit reads STRIKE → TARGET.
BLITZ keeps rolling until the defender is gone or your committed troops are spent. A slider sets how many troops you’re throwing in, from 1 up to one less than the source garrison; it starts two below the garrison, so you stay off the last-troop edge unless you drag there yourself. The commit reads BLITZ N → TARGET. Fast, but a bad streak can cost you the source.
RISK % is blitz with a stop-loss: you set the risk you’ll accept, and the attack halts on its own if the live odds get worse than that. The commit reads RISK X% → TARGET. The slider, the cap, and the halt are covered in Tactical Cards.

Your mode choice sticks for the whole game — across targets, turns, even a page refresh. A new game starts back on ATTACK.

The attack phase in ATTACK mode with the RISK% chip — ATTACK mode — one exchange of dice per press. Greywater is open to attack; the badge on Thornwall means a ceasefire blocks that target.

The attack phase in BLITZ mode — BLITZ mode — dial how many troops to throw (here 10 against Greywater), then hold to commit. The dice keep rolling until one side is done.

The attack phase in RISK % mode — RISK % mode — blitz with a stop-loss. Set the risk you'll accept; the attack halts itself if the odds get worse.

The RISK% chip at each of its four colour tiers — The RISK% chip's four colours — green is an overwhelming attack, red is a long shot.

Hold-to-fire commits

Every commit that spends troops or ends your turn uses hold-to-fire: press and hold for about half a second. A ring fills around the button as you hold; the action fires when the ring completes. Let go early and the ring rewinds — nothing happens, no penalty for the false start.

This covers every commit in the turn, from a single strike to END TURN. Only START YOUR TURN fires on a plain tap — starting your turn is safe.

Occupy

After conquering a territory, you move troops into it. Choose how many to transfer — both the source and the new territory must keep at least 1 troop each. The commit reads OCCUPY n → TARGET.

Occupying counts immediately: the captured territory adds to your territory count right away, so it feeds this turn’s card ticks.

When you’ve conquered everything in reach (no source has both spare troops and an enemy neighbour), the panel says so plainly: “No remaining valid attacks.” Move on to reinforce.

The occupy phase with the action slider — After a conquest, dial how many troops move in and hold to commit — here Irondeep's column rolls into newly taken Greywater.

Reinforce

The last phase moves troops between territories you already own. Pick a source, then a destination — troops find their own way through connected friendly territory.

The phase walks in two steps:

Pick a source. The header reads REINFORCE // PICK A SOURCE, and a full-width PASS button sits below if you’d rather skip.
Pick a destination. The panel lists everywhere your troops can reach. Pick one, and the action slider appears with MOVE n → DEST and PASS side by side.

The source must keep at least 1 troop. Use reinforce to shore up a border, stack a defence, or stage next turn’s push. When you’re done, hold END TURN and the table moves on.