General Play
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the timing of Victory / Defeat?
Check Victory/Defeat after each action tree is entirely complete – i.e., when you're not in the middle of an action, and there are no pending triggered actions. Example: if a Ravage action destroys a Spirit's last Presence, you still finish the Ravage action (which might involve a Dahan counterattack), plus any actions it triggers (eg: Blood Draws Predators), but you do not resolve any further Ravages from the same Ravage Card.
This is a slight rules change; the intent is that it be formally published in a future expansion, but FAQs will treat it as true starting immediately. (The core game rules say to check after each and every action, which could be in the middle of a tree of actions - eg, between the Ravage action and Blood Draws Predators.)
For loss conditions which key off of "you try to do something but can't" (e.g: The Kingdom of France's loss condition, when you are unable to add a Town), the loss is noted as soon as that happens, but you may play out the rest of the action tree to see if you achieve a Sacrifice Victory. Other loss conditions, like The Kingdom of England, are only checked when the tree is complete.
Tags: Victory and Defeat, Sacrifice victory, Changed rulings, Ravage, 2 more...
Normally, the Stage is shown by the top card of the Invader Deck, but on the last turn of the game (before the game ends when you attempt to draw an Invader Card and fail), the Invader Deck is empty. It is Stage III for the purpose of Event Cards and similar.
(Discussion elsewhere) Tags: Invader deck
Text format:
Video playthroughs:
During the Spirit phase, you play and pay for Power Cards and gain their elements, but you don't actually need to pick the targets at that point. You will find your first games go more smoothly if you trust that there will be a useful place to use your powers.
On p. 28, the Jagged Earth rules say, "The bad effects of Blight happen each time Blight is added to a land, regardless of the quantity of Blight." Does that mean once per *action* that adds Blight, or literally every time you put Blight down?
Literally every time you put 1 or more Blight into a land, including when you cascade. Presence destruction and cascading happen
immediately, as a part of placing 1 or more Blight, they're not triggered actions. What this is saying is that the general rule works just like The Kingdom of Sweden Lvl 1: if you add 2 Blight
at once, you only destroy Presence once and cascade if there was already Blight there. If you add 1 Blight, then
anytime later add another Blight - eg, if you were to cascade out of a land, then back in - the bad effects of Blight happen again.
Tags: Blight, Kingdom of Sweden
What's the timing of ongoing effects expiring?
All "this turn" effects wear off at the same time. For now, assume
all normal Time Passes activity
(discard, lose elements, clear damage, ongoing effects expire) is simultaneous. Cards like "Gift of Constancy" (which modify discarding Powers) or "Unquenchable Flames" work because they explicitly specify a timing.
Rules for non-standard things that happen during Time Passes (like Shroud of Silent Mist's "Slow and Silent Death") can be done before or after effects wearing off unless otherwise specified.
Actions are everything the card
does - turning it over to read it isn't something the card
does. (Also, Event Cards always result in multiple actions, and Fear cards often will as well; including "turn over the card" as part of the first action on the card would make "what's involved in an action?" a little inconsistent.)
Tags: Actions, Events, Fear Cards, Open the Ways (Finder of Paths Unseen), 0 more...
- There are no adjacent lands to add Blight to, so Blight does not cascade.
- Push can't Push anything (unless you can Push to a land 2 away - eg, Many Minds Move as One - and there's a land 2 away, see below).
- Whether you can target the land depends on whether you can measure Range from your Presence to it. If you made a disjoint land via Cast Down into the Briny Deep + Absolute Stasis, yes, because the land is Range 2 from other lands. But if you completely wall off a land via Repeats of Absolute Stasis, then there's no way to measure Range to it, so the only way to target Powers there would be to either have Presence in the land or the ability to ignore range (eg, Finder of Paths Unseen).
Note that Isolate is NOT usually sufficient to generate any of these situations, since it only affects adjacency for Invader pieces
(JE rules, p. 10).
Tags: Island Boards, Push, Range, Targeting, 2 more...
For example, if you deal 2 Damage to a City and then replace it with a Town, that Town is immediately destroyed.
If you replace a damaged piece with two or more pieces (as when "Dissolve the Bonds of Kinship" replaces a City with two Explorers), the damage (and Strife tokens, if applicable) get divided between the new pieces as you choose.
- For a slight difficulty decrease, give each Spirit one free Growth at the end of Setup. Then take your first turn, which will start with Growth.
- For a moderate decrease, skip the Explore that's normally at the end of Setup. Don't even reveal the Invader Card.
- For a large decrease, do both of the above.
Also worth noting: a few rules can cause sudden, crushing losses if played incorrectly. When Invaders Ravage for 2+ Damage, add only
one Blight to the Ravaged land. (
Not 1 per 2 Damage!) When you add Blight to a land with Blight and it cascades, you add an additional Blight to
one adjacent land. (
Not all of them!) You start with your four unique Power cards in hand. (You do
not have to gain them!) See also the
Rules semi-commonly misplayed.
But different people cue into some of the bread-and-butter techniques for fighting the Invaders at very different speeds.
The entire "how many actions is it?" determination is:
- If it just does 1 thing, it's 1 action.
- If it has only "each" instructions, it's 1 action per "each".
- Otherwise, it's 1 action, and "each" instructions cause 1 nested action per "each".
- Pieces representing humans (Dahan / Invaders) are cleaned up to the closest legal land — this is not considered a move, is not an action, and does not trigger anything, it is simply a correction of the game state. This happens only once you are not in the middle of an action, and there are no pending triggered actions (i.e., after each action tree), just before checking for victory/defeat.
- All other pieces remain where they are, but are considered out of play unless/until they're no longer in an illegal state.
On the other hand, if the place was destroyed and pieces within it somehow survived the destruction, they all get cleaned up.
This sort of thing can happen if pieces survive the sinking of a board (like Dahan via
Infinite Vitality with threshold or Explorers via the Tsardom of Russia's
A Sense for Impending Disaster), if an Ocean stops being a land (by Ocean's Hungry Grasp losing its Presence there) while other Spirits' Presence is there, or if Invaders/Dahan are left in the Ocean after an action but manage not to Drown in some way.
If the nearest legal land is unclear, use your best judgment, based on physical distance if necessary. If there is literally no legal land to put the pieces in, return them to the supply; this is still considered
cleaning up (not an action, not a move/remove/destroy, does not trigger anything).
Tags: Pieces, Illegally placed pieces, Victory and Defeat, Action tree, 12 more...
While this tends to be pretty obvious when the cost is paying Energy, it's less clear if the cost is performing some other effect, like discarding a card or removing Presence.
This is also the case for Powers like The Jungle Hungers, where a threshold modifies the instructions earlier in the Power. Technically, every use of "Instead..." in an innate power works this way; it's pretty simple for human minds to understand the intent, but the formal specification is messier.
The practical upshot of this is mostly "you can't both prevent something from happening and do extra stuff because it's happening" – e.g., if Volcano Looming High's Presence would be destroyed, but it's saved somehow, you don't get to deal damage.
If a modifier cancels just
part of something, modifiers to that part don't apply. Eg:
"Entrap the Forces of Corruption" doesn't stop Blight from being added, but it does stop it from cascading, so another modifier which changed how cascades worked wouldn't apply.
As before, if you have multiple modifiers with no clear order, you get to pick which happens first. For instance: you play
"Infestation of Venomous Spiders" with threshold on a land with Dahan about to Ravage. A Fear Card says "Invaders do not Ravage in lands with Dahan". When that Ravage would happen, there are two different "skip this Ravage" modifiers. You get to decide which one to do first, so can choose it to be the Venomous Spiders. This wouldn't be true if the entire Ravage Step got skipped, or if the Ravage Card were changed to match different lands – those happen before you ever reach the individual Ravage Action – but as of
Jagged Earth, the only Fear cards that work this way are
"Explorers Are Reluctant" and "Immigration Slows", levels 2 and 3.
If Finder of Paths Unseen moves Heart of the Wildfire's Presence to many different lands, "in the land it goes to" is ambiguous and Wildfire's player chooses which land its "Blazing Presence" special rule applies to. If a since Ravage action adds Blight to two Coastal lands (by cascading), "Runoff and Bilgewater" (The Kingdom of Scotland Level 5) adds a single blight is to that board's Ocean; if the two lands were on different boards, "that board's Ocean" is ambiguous and the players choose which it applies to.
The effect of Vengeance of the Dead (extra Damage when Towns/Cities are Destroyed) and the Health boost wear off at the same time in Time Passes, so you don't get the extra Damage. (Health bonuses also wear off during Time Passes, so you need Shroud of Silent Mists to prevent the healing for the Invaders to actually die.)
Remember that partial damage heals at the end of the turn. Typically it will be to your advantage to kill Cities or Towns when you can.
(Discussion elsewhere) Tags: Damage, Ravage
If a Spirit's Presence counts as Beasts (say, due to Settle Into Hunting-Grounds), and a "destroy Beasts" effect destroys their Presence, is it still considered destroyed Presence? More generally, if Piece A also counts as Piece B, and a "destroy/remove Piece B" effect destroys/removes it, does it go to the supply for A or B?
It's considered destroyed Presence. When a piece is removed from the board, it goes to the supply (or other destination) for that physical type of piece.
Tags: Presence, Pieces, Counts As, Beasts, 14 more...
The only things cleared at the end of the turn are those listed in the "Time Passes" section
(p. 10).
(Discussion elsewhere) Tags: Energy
It really depends hugely on the specifics. If the two don't interact much, it could be as low as "the higher of the two Difficulties", perhaps +1 or 2. If they synergize, it could be much higher than additive. (And sometimes player skill level or the Spirits involved can influence how the two combine.) Coming up with a generic, accurate formula is more or less impossible.
If you're scoring games, go with "add them together", but trust your gut about how hard the game
felt (presumably you have some experience to go on by the time you're combining Adversaries + Scenarios) and adjust Difficulty up or down accordingly. Not a truly satisfying answer, I realize, but I suspect it's the best one practically possible.
(Discussion elsewhere) Tags: Difficulty, Scoring
Thematically, the piece has moved within the land.
Note that if you use "add Presence" to instead reposition Presence already on the island (usually because you have run out – sidebar p.14 core rules), that is still considered an "add" rather than a "move".
For instance, if Pillar of Living Flame does enough damage to destroy the last needed Invader and then adds the last Blight to the island, that is a sacrifice victory. If a Ravage in a land adds the last Blight, but then the Dahan retaliate and wipe out the last Invaders for the current victory condition, that is also a sacrifice victory.
However, Ravages are evaluated land-by-land (in an order you choose), so a Ravage in one land can cause a victory before a Ravage in another land can add the last Blight and cause defeat.
You only check at the end of the action tree, so, for instance, Confounding Mists can prevent loss against the Kingdom of England by pushing out a building the moment it is built.
