Tap any of your units on the board to flip its starting state. Tap a front-row square to move your hidden Assassin there — only you can see where it is.

Your Assassin is marked with a dagger and a gold outline. To your opponent it is an ordinary front-line unit, and it moves and flips exactly like one until it strikes.

Facing & direction

• Facing defines "forward." Every unit's forward, left and right are read from its facing arrow, not from its home edge. Otherwise the Turn action would do nothing.
• Turn is a 180° about-face only. A unit reverses its facing; it can never come to face sideways. Every unit's forward axis therefore stays the board's vertical axis all game, which fixes what “left” and “right” mean for Cavalry, Chariots and deployed Siege.
• Turn is exclusive. Turning cannot be combined with a move or capture, only with a flip.

Movement

• Legionnaire lateral clause gates lateral movement only; forward and back are always available. Adjacency counts all 8 squares.
• "Move N squares" means a straight line that cannot change direction, and the path must be clear. Only Cavalry may jump.
• Siege in Packed (confirmed by the designer) moves 1 square in any direction, diagonals included.
• Chariot in Maneuver (confirmed by the designer) may turn one corner during its move: travel in one orthogonal direction, change to a perpendicular one once, up to 4 squares in total. Every square on the path, the corner included, must be empty. In practice it reaches any square within 4 steps of an L-shaped route — but never weaves around two corners.
• Archer Maneuver (confirmed by the designer) moves diagonally up to 3, and melee-captures the three squares directly in front — forward and both forward diagonals, range 1.
• Siege Deployed ignores blocking and immunity, but not physical obstruction — it still needs a clear line of fire.

Blocking

• A blocking state protects that unit from captures arriving along the sides it defends.
• The Roman Legionnaire in Defend (confirmed by the designer) blocks the three squares in front — forward and both forward diagonals — not its flanks. It remains vulnerable from the sides and the rear. Egyptian Infantry in Defend still blocks its front only.
• Knight-angle attacks (Cavalry Charge) arrive off-axis and bypass blocking entirely.

Commander Aura

• The bonus is change state, then act, in that order only (confirmed by the designer). A unit may flip and then move or capture; it may not act first and then change state. Moving or capturing ends the activation immediately.
• The budget is frozen when the unit is activated. Moving out of the aura mid-turn does not revoke the bonus, so turn order never changes the outcome.
• A turn is still one unit activation. Eight adjacent allies do not grant an eight-action turn.

Assassin

• It is concealed only in the Defend state (confirmed by the designer). Defend is its face-down side, so it deploys there and its state cannot be changed while hidden.
• While hidden it is mechanically identical to a front-line unit in Defend, so its legal moves leak nothing. Defend cannot capture, so its only attack is the assassination itself.
• It may strike 1 square in any direction, or turn its own card over to reveal deliberately. Either reveals it permanently.
• Consequence worth watching: if every other front-line unit sits in Attack, the lone unit in Defend is obviously the Assassin. Concealment now depends on deploying decoys in Defend.
• The opponent's view never contains the word "assassin" at all; concealment is enforced by redacting the data, not by hiding it in the interface.

Fortress & victory

• Active Fortress fires in all 8 directions to range 2 (confirmed by the designer) along a clear line, and firing is its action.
• A melee attacker disables the Fortress but is lost; the Fortress's owner scores the attacker's points. The disabler scores 8 either way.
• Any capture of the Commander wins, including a ranged shot.
• A disabled Fortress can be taken either by capturing it or simply moving into it (confirmed by the designer). Its square is a legal movement destination, so units with no capture rules at all — a Packed Siege, a Legionnaire in Defend — can storm it. A state that cannot move, such as Archer in Volley, still cannot. Nothing may pass through the square, and a ranged shot cannot win, because winning requires entering.

Armies & seats

• Seat and army are separate. Blue always holds rows 1–2 and moves first; either seat may field either army, so mirror matches are legal.
• In a mirror match both seats are labelled by colour, since the army name alone would no longer identify a player.

Edge cases

• A player with no legal action forfeits the turn rather than the game.
• In Timed Mode the game clock never pauses, exactly as written. A networked version would need a disconnect policy here.