Hidden hands · seven guilds · one round
Multiway-Tug
Two hidden hands of cards pulling at seven contested lanes. You cut the offer; your opponent chooses which side they take.
Art · spwashi, exchange
Open a table
Two players · no matchmaking here · you invite them yourself
A table is minted with two seat links. Keep one, send the other; whoever opens a link takes that seat, and nobody else can. There is no shared lobby to race for and no public table to wander into.
Each seat has 10 minutes to make its move. A seat that lets that run out forfeits the table, so an abandoned match ends instead of waiting forever.
Here on your own? Open a table anyway and play both sides: the next page shows you how, and it is the real game under the real rules, not a demo. Or play The Descent, which is a game for one.
How one turn goes
- 7 lanes, weighted
2 2 2 3 3 4 5. Lead a lane when the round ends and you take its whole weight. - You hold six favor cards, hidden. Every favor belongs to one lane: that is the lane it pulls. Your opponent sees how many you hold, never which.
- On your turn, spend ONE of four actions · Secret (1 card), Discard (2), Gift (3), Competition (4). Each is once per round, so the order is yours to choose.
- A Gift or a Competition only PRESENTS favors. You cut; your opponent chooses which side they take, and you cannot answer your own cut. That is the whole game.
- ⚑ Spending an action does not move the lanes. This is the part that looks broken and is not. A Secret goes face down and reaches no lane until the reveal. A Discard burns two favors out of the round and they reach no lane ever. A Gift or Competition puts its favors in escrow, and they land on the two sides only when your opponent ANSWERS. So the seven lane rows will often sit perfectly still right after your own move: that is the rules working. The running account of where all 21 favors are (held, face down, burnt, placed) is what moves, and the table prints it.
All of it: the deck, the fog, scoring, and what this build does not do
- 7 guilds are the 7 lanes · one thing, two names, and this page uses both: guild 3 is lane 3. There are 21 favor cards in all: a favor is a card. That 21 is a conservation tooth the executor enforces: no favor is conjured or destroyed for the length of a round.
- How the hand is hidden. Beside the count, your opponent sees the committed root of your hand; the cards themselves are rendered to you and to nobody else. What a lane pays is what it pays whoever ends up leading it.
- Nothing ends the round early. All twelve committed turns are always played, and the winner is named once, at the reveal. The bars pick which rule names them: 11 influence takes it outright, else leading 4 lanes. Short of either bar the round is still decided, on the higher total influence, else the more lanes held; and only an exact dead heat on both is a draw. Every one of those clauses is a tooth: the executor refuses a claimed win the rules do not make.
- Then reveal and score. Each seat's Secret is turned face up onto its owner's side of its lane, and only then is control counted.
- The shape of the round is yours. Which of your four actions to spend, in which order, and which cards to put in the cut, are all yours.
Every play is checked against the rules and against your own dealt hand, so a hidden hand is still not a hand you can invent cards from. Every press is re-run against the rules before anything is written down. The move and the proof that the card came from your own dealt hand land together or not at all, a press out of turn is refused with nothing recorded, and the whole round can be replayed afterwards from its accepted moves and come out the same way.
Honest about the play: a round is one round. There is no match, no alternating opener, and the seat that answers the last cut has a real measured edge. And the winner is not this page's opinion: the rules decide it, and if they cannot, the round refuses to end rather than name somebody.
Mechanics derived from Hanamikoji (Kota Nakayama); this is an original re-theming.