Description

Unique Gameplay Element

In Splintered Lands, your resources are everything. You spend your Authority (which represents your health) in order to gain power, assert your influence, and attract skilled allies. 

The wasteland is fickle. You never know what opportunities await you in the Dunes, and you must commit resources before setting out to find them. Be wary, though: if you spend your Authority too quickly, your enclave will bleed itself dry. 

Authority 

Authority is a tenuous thing in a land struggling to survive. Authority represents the supplies and staffing necessary for you to run a subsistent enclave and the influence you have over your hostile environment. 

Players spend Authority to acquire cards from the Dunes row. Players also lose Authority equal to the damage dealt to their Headquarters (HQ). This loss of Authority represents damage to fortifications, loss of supplies due to hostile incursions, the cost of treating wounded defenders, and the reduction of an enclave’s ability to impact its environment due to these things.

Players begin the game with 100 Authority each. The game ends when one player loses all of their Authority.

The Dunes

During setup, players jointly choose three of the faction decks to play with. They shuffle them together, then draw and place five cards face-down in a row between both players to form the Dunes row.

During play, you'll seek out new characters and wall defenses by trekking out into the Dunes. Be careful, though: you will have to decide just how deep into the Dunes you want to go, as you must commit resources to the excursion before you set off.

Players search the Dunes and recruit the characters they find with promises of shelter, survival, and – for the bold – glory.

Player Enclave

During play, each player will begin to build up their own side of the play area, or their Enclave. This consists of their barracks (draw deck), treatment (discard) pile, walls, reserves, attachments, and HQ.

The Walls represent fortified positions around your enclave. Each wall may be occupied by up to two face-up character cards. There are three walls in an enclave - left, center, and right.

Cards in the Reserves are played face-down to add an element of surprise. You may choose to reveal them to supplement your defense when your opponent attacks you, or you may choose to deploy them to attack the other player's enclave.

Attachments help defend your walls. See more information below.

 Attachments 

Attachment cards, easily identified by their horizontal layout, follow different rules than other cards. When you acquire an attachment during your Dunes phase, you may immediately attach it to one of your walls.  

Attachment Card Stages

 Attachments in play are always in one of four defensive stages, and each stage provides the attached wall with a certain amount of defense. An attachment will rotate counter-clockwise to let players know how much defense it is currently providing its wall.

Card Layout

Abilities can have triggers or effects that happen in ways that break the core rules of the game and can happen at any time during play. Some cards produce extra effects when played with other cards.

Synergies are effects that are activated when cards with the same synergies attack or defend together. 

Field Promotion helps you remove unwanted cards from your deck. When you acquire a card with the Field Promotion icon from the Dunes row, you may permanently get rid of a card of equal or lesser value.

Deploy: During this phase, the attacking player seeks to damage their opponent’s HQ by deploying cards from their walls. The attacking player declares which one of the defending player’s walls is the target.  

The attacking player totals the damage being generated by their attacking cards, and damage is dealt first to the defending player’s cards, and then to the defending player's HQ (lowering their Authority).

Fortify: During this phase, players plan their defense and secure the walls of their enclave; positioning is key to thwarting an opponent’s attacks. Lay traps with the strategic placement of reserves and build tactical advantages with synergies to provide bonuses to your characters.
 

Dunes Draw

Dunes: During this phase, the active player may spend Authority to scour the Dunes and recruit survivors to increase the strength of their enclave. Know this: the stronger survivors in the Dunes will not join a weak enclave. The sooner you prove yourself to be the strongest the Dunes have to offer, the sooner the capable will flock to your banner.
 

Discard

Discard: During this phase, the active player gives their exhausted survivors a rest and prepares for the next turn.

Dunes Shift

Dunes Shift: The Dunes are in constant flux and nothing valuable stays around for long. At the end of each player’s turn, the card in the Dunes row farthest from the Dunes deck is discarded. Any remaining cards in the Dunes row are shifted away from the deck, and all empty spaces are replenished. This unique mechanic ensures that the Dunes row never stagnates and that play continues moving at a fast pace.

Once a player has completed their discard phase, play then passes to the next player.  

 The Splintering redefined the word "natural," and the wasteland features natural selection in its prime. If there were any scholars left to argue about such things, they might ask themselves if humans were even still worthy of being called the apex predator. Whatever those long-gone thinkers might have decided, one thing is certain – you can't survive the Dunes alone. 

Meet the four survivor factions that are featured in the base game. Each one has a unique history and a singular attitude, but they all have one thing in common – they will do whatever it takes to survive.

The Delvers are a unique group of survivors whose ancestors helped run a large mining operation (and those that found their way to the dig site in the first few years following the Splintering). They have survived by hunkering down in the mines and using or repurposing the mining equipment to suit their needs. These hard-bitten survivors only venture outside their endless warren of caves and mine shafts in order to find resources, and on the rare occasion they allow themselves to be discovered on an excursion, they tend to come back with whoever or whatever discovered them so they can be put to work for the good of the group. 

The Mercenaries are a well-organized band of...well, mercenaries. They are descended from a collection of military members and law enforcement officers that banded together shortly after the Splintering. The Mercenaries have been polishing the skills their ancestors taught them, cutting their teeth on near-constant conflict. Their gear is in the best shape, and they know how to use it. The demand for skilled mercenaries has never been higher than it is now, in the Splintered Lands – and they’re willing to sell their services to the highest bidder.  

The Ravagers are a group of barbaric survivors that all share a common circumstance – they were exiled from their former groups. In most cases, this was because they were too violent and dangerous to live side-by-side with your average person – and in a world where almost everyone has had to kill to survive, that’s a feat. These wild survivors thrive on the gleeful and haphazard cannibalization of old-world technology to suit their needs – needs which almost always consist of hurting people and protecting their own (so they can continue hurting people). These madmen and madwomen are generally covered from head to toe in varying proportions of scrap armor, scrap weapons, and blood...and they are loving every bit of it.

 The Splinters are not a specific faction; rather, “Splinters” is a term for any typical group of survivors that can be found banding together two hundred years following a nearly successful extinction-level biological event. They are an enclave of post-apocalyptic survivors that have had to scrounge a living off the fading technology of the old world. They are grungy, callous, hardworking, harsh people whose survival instincts never take a day off.