Light
Seraphine, Dawncaller
Unbroken Vigil
Seraphine - The Angel of Light and Purity. She represents humankind. Holy warriors, Angels, Clerics, Paladins. Outlast your opponents and play defensively.
The core rhythm
Commit, spend, wait.
Every Realm you control is a switch you can throw once. Turn it sideways — commit it — and it pays you one Power of its Affinity. It stays sideways until your own Restoration Stage. Try it.
Energy Battery
0
Empty. Commit a Realm.
That gap is the whole game. Power spent holding a trick on somebody else’s turn is Power you do not have on your own.
Five Affinities, five Adepts
Pick one. Nobody else can have it.
Your Adept is you. A unique general taking the forces of your enemies on. Your Adept starts the game face-down on the board. Pay its casting cost to - Flip it - Once flipped your Adept will make an immediate effect on the battle area with a triggered flip ability, a passive ability, and an activated ability.
Dark
Morvath, Soulbinder
Harvest
Marvath - The leader of the dead and undead. Vampires, skeletons, zombies, ghasts. If its dead or undead, Morvath has something to do with it.
Solar
Kaelis, Sunforged
Forge-Heat
Kaelis. The Lightening's Hammer. Attack hard and fast with overwhelming damage before your opponents can react.
Frost
Medalin, Iceweaver
Deepening Cold
Medalin Iceweaver - Win at your own pace. Control your enemies. Lock them down until you are ready to attack.
Earthen
Bertha of Girthwall
Deep Foundations
Bertha - The mother of nature. General of the forest realms. Commander of the beasts. Smash your enemies with nature's wrath.
One turn, in order
Six stages, and a second bite.
A turn is one player’s pass through these. A round is everybody taking one. Every card in the game is written in turns — at a five-player table, that is a fivefold difference.
-
01
Restoration
Your committed cards stand back up. Every Minion on the table — not just yours — heals every wound. A cut lasts until the next Restoration, whoever’s turn that is.
-
02
Draw
One card, and you choose blind which deck it comes from: Spells or Realms. Seven to open the game. Whoever goes first skips this on turn one — that is the price of the seat.
-
03
Operations
Play Realms, summon Minions, cast Sorceries, equip Relics, flip your Adept face up.
-
04
Combat
Attack a player, or attack their Adept directly. Anyone at the table may intervene — on either side.
-
05
Second Operations
A second window after the dust settles, so you can act on what actually survived rather than on what you hoped would.
-
06
End
Discard what you did not want — and it is offered to whoever is on the lowest Life, to take or refuse. Then trim to seven, and any Power you did not spend is gone.
Two to five players
The duel is fine. The table is the point.
Three to five players is a free-for-all, and conversation, trading, bargaining and betrayal are part of the rules rather than something that happens around them. You may only open a negotiation if you hold the live decision — you are the active player, or somebody has just aimed something at you. Bystanders can answer an offer. They cannot start one.
Promises are not binding. An agreed trade is.
Starting Life by table size
| Players | Life | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | 20 | The duel |
| 3 | 17 | Politics begins |
| 4 | 15 | Crowded |
| 5 | 13 | Full table |
Life drops as the table grows so every size lands in roughly the same thirteen-round game. At a flat 20, a five-player game runs half as long again.
Where it is up to
Honest build status.
Adeptsworn is being built by one person in the evenings. Nothing below is a promise with a date on it.
- Working The game. Full rules engine, five Adepts, 113 cards, AI opponents that assess the whole table before choosing who to hit.
- Working Play over a local network. Host on one machine, join from another, up to five seats with humans and AI mixed.
- Working Card art. Every card in the shipping set is illustrated.
- In progress Play over the internet. A dedicated server is running in Sydney. Matches do not run on anybody’s home PC.
- Planned Accounts and profiles. Sign in, a match history, wins and losses, friends and private groups.
- Planned Custom modes. The two-player and big-table variants as a per-game choice rather than a build.
Get in touch
Tell me it’s broken. Or tell me it’s good.
One person builds this, and reads everything that arrives. Feedback on the rules and the balance is the most useful thing you can send — it is a card game, and card games are only ever fixed by people playing them.
Prefer email? These are the same addresses the game itself gives you:
- Bug reports devops@adeptsworn.com
- Feedback feedback@adeptsworn.com
- Anything else hello@adeptsworn.com
Messages sent through the forms above are relayed by Web3Forms, which passes them to my inbox. Your address is used to reply to you and nothing else — there is no mailing list, and nothing is stored on this site.