How Does It Work

You are the sovereign of your hold. Your goal is to outlast your enemies and lead your people to peace. You do that by raising structures, deploying your denizens, and relying on your core resources to keep it all going. At your disposal are treasures, strategies, fortifications, and arcane arts that draw upon your hold's foundations to bring your enemies to heel.

In Holdfast, there is no life total. As long as your hold still exists, you remain in the game. Victory comes from outlasting others as their holds collapse under pressure, upkeep, and conflict. The simple win condition is to be the last player standing - to end your turn with at least one denizen and one structure.

The Cards You Control

• Denizens are people. They move, assault, and use abilities. Denizens are the backbone of your hold and without them you structures would fall to aggressive foes while your enemies' walls remain upright.
• Structures protect your hold and can define its borders. They serve a myriad of purposes but are not half as useful without denizens to operate them and keep them standing.
• Belongings can be any number of tangibles - from treasures to consumables to gear you arm your people with.
• Fortifications improve structures by bolstering their strengths, providing ways in which they can fight back, and instilling them with old magics that help them survive.
• Traps are devices, spells, and strategies you can trigger during assaults. They can end an overzealous enemy before their turn is finished.
• Mysticisms are a variety of magical arts. Some help, some harm, and all give you distinct advantages over the other enemy holds.
• Resources are the backbone of your civilization, producing bounty you can use to deploy everything else.

Bountiful Harvests

Bounty is the basic unit of the game. As a sovereign, you collect bounty in your stores until you're ready to spend it. There are five different kinds (for now), each representing something distinct you can use to maintain your hold. While all civilizations use all bounty in some sense or another, the more spread out your production is the hardier it will be to maintain a necessary balance.

• Current — water, weather, blood, pressure, and flow.
• Material — stone, timber, ore, and other unrefined sources.
• Production — skilled labor, production, and refinement.
• Stock — crops, bodies, sustenance, and death itself.
• Wealth — currency, valuables, persuasion, and trade.

Your capacity for bounty in a standard game is 20. Some cards can change this for better or worse. When you harvest bounty, it does not leave your store until you spend it. The only other way to get rid of it is to flush your store entirely at the start of your turn.

Starting the Game

Each player shuffles their deck and offers it to an enemy to cut the deck before playing. A player is randomly selected to go first. Then, all players set aside sixteen cards from the top of their deck to make their starting hand and put all resource cards from that hand into play. Setup is now complete.

To help keep track of resources and the actions of cards, counters and dice are useful to have available. Also helpful might be a pencil and paper to track the bounty you raise and the amount you spend each turn. If you're unsure how certain card interactions work or what some keywords mean, you can use the resource here to better understand Holdfast's nuance. When something remains unclear, you can always send us a message on our contact form to ask for clarification.

How To Play

Starting with the first player, each turn follows the same set of phases.

1. Harvest Phase — Add bounty to your stores from each source on the field that grants some to you. Most often, bounty will come from your resource cards but sometimes other cards provide it under certain conditions. Remember your capacity for bounty is 20 by default. You cannot add more than that even if you could harvest more.
2. Mainenance Phase — Once your stores are full from your harvest, you must pay your maintenance costs in the following order: (1) War tax, (2) effect maintenance, and then (3) field maintenance. War tax starts when you have no cards left in your deck. It costs two of any kind of bounty for each turn that passes with no deck. Effect maintenance comes from other sources besides the maintenance cost of your cards. For example, an enemy mysticism. Your field maintenance is the total amount from all cards on your field. If you cannot afford this, you may offer up cards to your rubble until you can afford it or until you have no cards left in play.
3. Command Phase — Play whatever cards you want in whichever order you like as long as you meet their deploy cost. Each of your cards can act only once unless otherwise specified. Turning face down and/or moving around the field, assaulting enemy cards, and using abilities all count as actions. You may only assault with cards during the assault phase.
4. Assault Phase — Target denizens, belongings, or structures in range one at a time with groups of one or more denizens. Assault until you decide to stop or your cards have no more actions left.
5. End Phase — Check if you have at least one denizen and one structure still in play. If you do not, you lose the game. If you still do, draw eight cards and put down all resource cards from your hand. The next player then takes their turn.

How Assaults Work

The first thing you do when declaring an assault is you state your target. This can be an enemy structure, denizen, or belonging. Once you have your target, you then choose the members of your assault group. You must have at least one denizen, but can have up to as many as you'd like as long as all of them are still free to act and the target is in range for all of them.

What is in range for a denizen is decided by whether or not it's sheltered. A target that's inside a structure or behind a perimeter is not considered to be in range of a denizen. A target attached to another card, like a gear (belonging) attached to a denizen, cannot be a target. Everything else is fair game.

Once your group and your target is decided, the assault follows these steps. If it's a non-structure:

1. Reveal Step — If the target is face-down, you turn it face-up. It may have effects that can be activated at this time.
2. Damage Step — The group deals their total strength in damage to the target. At the same time, the target deals its strength, distributed as its controller wishes, across the assailants.
3. The game then checks which cards have 0 or less fortitude. The ones that do are felled and go to their owner's rubble. The rest remain on the field with their damage until the end of the turn.

If the target is a structure, there is slightly more to it.

1. Reveal Step — If any occupants are face-down, they are turned face-up They may have effects that can be activated at this time. The defending player chooses which are activated in which order.
2. Morale Calculation Step — The total strength of the assault group is checked against the total morale of the structure and its occupants. If it meets or exceeds, the assault progresses to the next step. Otherwise, the assault stops here.
3. Falter Step — Occupants are ousted from the structure and moved to the courtyard. Traps that are ousted go to the rubble instead.
4. Damage Step — The group deals their total strength in damage to the structure. At the same time, the structure deals its strength in damage, distributed as its controller wishes, across the assailants.
5. The game then checks which cards have 0 or less fortitude. The ones that do fall and go by default to their owner's rubble. The rest remain with their damage on the field.

The Field and Perimeters

At the start of the game, all cards exist in a single shared zone called the outland. But by connecting two or more structures you control, you can build a perimeter. This separates the outland from the inside of your hold - the courtyard. When you erect a perimeter, anything behind it becomes out of range from anything on the other side.

This division is not permanent however. If a structure on your perimeter gets removed in any way, then for the rest of that turn, your perimeter is considered "breached" and your courtyard and the shared outland become the same zone again. Only by playing a new structure in that gap can you rebuild your perimeter and separate the zones once more.

Each turn, you can extend your perimeter on either side by playing structures on either end. If you have no connected structures anymore (parts of your perimeter remain connected even after it's been breached), you can connect two or more together and declare a new perimeter.

Other Zones in Holdfast

Besides the outland, perimeter, and courtyard, there are five other places that cards can be. The first two are your hand and deck. Your hand is the collection of cards that are immediately available to play. Your deck is the remaining pile of cards that are not yet playable. Cards move from the deck to your hand each draw phase until the game ends or your deck reaches zero. You do not lose the game for having no cards in your deck.

The other three places are discard piles all - but the rules for accessing those piles differ for each. The first is the standard discard pile called the rubble. When something on the field falls, or when you have to pitch a card from your hand, it goes here automatically. Things commonly move out of the rubble in a game. The second place is the void. Things that go here you never gain access to again. Traps and Mysticisms go here by default after you play them.

The last place for cards to be discarded is the middling. This is a shared discard zone where you can access cards your enemies move to it. So why ever use it? Because it's the only other safe harbor for mysticisms if you want to play them more than once. You can fill a game with your arcane arts many times over, but the more you play the more your enemies possibly gain access to. Sorcery is a double-edged sword.

Other Special Rules

When cards reference "the courtyard" while you don't have one, they apply to the outland instead. But if they reference "your perimeter", they don't apply instead. This is called zone collapse.

Mysticisms go to the void by default when they're played. Traps go to the void when they're ousted face-up or when they're activated.

Your hand can never contain resource cards. When it does, they are played to your field immediately. No rules or effects may overturn this.

You can only ever draw cards at the end of your turn, and you must always draw exactly eight cards. No rules or effects may overturn this either.

Cards can never go back into your deck from anywhere on the field. If they would, they go to the void instead.

Quick Play Guide

Setup: Each player shuffles their deck, draws sixteen cards, and sets down all resource cards from their hand before the game begins.

1. Harvest your bounty
2. Pay your maintenance
3. Play cards and perform non-assault actions in any order
4. Declare any assaults one at a time
5. Check to see if you lost the game
6. Draw eight more cards
7. Put down all resource cards from your hand
8. Pass the turn