How to play Wyrmrise

🗺 Getting around

• The map is the game. Tap one of your units and its action bar appears bottom-right — icon buttons with tooltips (🦶 move, 🔗 link, 🛡 fortify…). Tap the same stack again to cycle through the units on it; one more tap deselects. Zoom all the way in and your characters stand around the hex in full art.
• Tap your 🏯 Stronghold to open its full-screen panel (build, recruit, tame). The ☰ Views menu (top-right) opens Strongholds, Trade, Lore, Beasts and Standings the same way — ✕ returns to the map.
• Resources sit top-left (tap ‹ to collapse them). Cyan outline = where your selected unit can move; red hexes = what it can strike. Out of moves? The bar offers 🎯 Set destination — the unit marches next turn.

👑 Your Avatar

• Pick a lineage at the start — Human, Vampire, Minotaur, Half-Demon, Half-Dragon, Elf, Seraph, Deathless, Living Elemental… The disguise is a tradeoff: incognito, your champion fights with its guise's own kit — a "bard" brawls like a bard. Tap 🎭 → 👑 True form to cast the disguise off and wield every attack of the kin creatures you have tamed so far — but an unmasked Avatar is known to every rival court until it slips back into a guise.
• It travels in disguise as an ordinary wanderer. Rivals need a Scout beside it to mark it — unless you travel with a recruited 🎻 Bard, 🧺 Pedlar or ⛪ Pilgrim, whose company hides you from Scouts entirely. Approaching a "traveller" that can't be recruited unmasks a rival Avatar — and an unmasked (or battling) Avatar shows its true form for two turns before slipping back into its guise.
• 🔮 Scry from your towers: with a Mage Spire or Dread Tower, open the overview map and tap a region — spend ✨ mana and, if a rival Avatar walks that area, you get three hits around it. Stronger towers tighten the circle.
• Spy (ultimate risk): while disguised, stand beside a rival Stronghold and 🕵 Perform to see its buildings and production — but your win-condition champion is now inside their reach.
• If your Avatar is captured, you lose. Capture a rival's, and their entire realm passes to you.

🌱 Grow your realm

• Builders claim & cultivate — march one onto open land and 🌱 Cultivate for Food, Wood, Stone, Metal or Mana. Land changes hands only two ways: a Builder works it (🌱 Claim Fields on a rival's hex wins it over — the cultivation already in the ground carries across at the same level), or the Stronghold that holds it falls, which takes the keep and the ring of hexes around it. Armies marching over your borders take nothing — though barbarian raiders and wild beasts still plunder undefended fields.
• 🛡 Raise a Palisade (Builder, 1🪵 + 1🪨) on a worked hex — a thick ring in your colour marks it. It can't be plundered, defenders there fight at ×1.5, and enemies who cross it take stake damage on the way through.
• Settlers found new Strongholds on open land ≥4 hexes from any hold. Strongholds have denizens that defend them — beat the garrison down before a keep can fall. Build Walls for real defence.
• 💱 The market runs itself. Sell 💎 gems and 🟡 gold for 🪙 coins, and buy provisions when you're short — but set a standing order in the Trade view and it happens on its own every turn: an auto-sell turns a surplus into coins, an auto-buy keeps a store topped up, and Keep is the reserve a sell order will never dip below. ✨ Mana and 💎 gems can be sold but never bought — the arcane comes from ground you hold, not a market stall.
• Keep your realm whole. The larger your unbroken run of ground, the more the world respects you: a big contiguous domain trickles in ⭐ Renown each turn and steadily widens your 😎 Charisma ceiling. A realm split into scattered islands earns far less than the same land held as one.

🤝 Recruits, ranks & the holy lines

• Wanderers join you — pay 🪙 or sway them free with 😎 Charisma. Fighters (Sellsword, Mage, Wild Beast) enlist; Rangers scout, Prospectors build; 🎻🧺⛪ civilians travel in your company (cover!) and bring a signing boon.
• The Monastery holds two ascension lines: a Sellsword is knighted a 🛡 Knight, and mounted on a Tenacion becomes a ⚜️ Paladin. A ⛪ Pilgrim takes up the staff as a 🥋 Warrior Monk, and is transfigured — riding a Unicorn — into a radiant 🌟 Tarstadan.
• Two darker houses run the same ladder. A 🏰 Dread Tower raises ⚔️ Barrowknights and the fell 🐴 Dathsral, fused into a ☠️ Shadowright — the Vampire and Deathless line. A 🕳 Hellmouth is the Half-Demon's own pit: ⚔️ Demon Warriors and burning 🔥 Nightmares, fused into a 🔱 Balor. Each is founded like the Monastery's orders, but on its own terms — the tower takes a swayed 💀 Necromancer, while the pit simply swallows an 👿 Imp.
• Found an order and the road stops mattering. At a Monastery L2, dedicate one Sellsword to raise the 🛡 Knightly Order, or one Pilgrim to raise the 🥋 Monastic Order. They're given to the house for good — but they teach the path itself, and that rank is mustered from your own people from resources alone ever after. Late in an Age, when the wandering roads run dry, this is how ⚜️ Paladins and 🌟 Tarstadans keep coming.
• Link units (🔗) to travel together — military squads merge into formations, three of each making the next: a Platoon holds up to 3 squads, 3 platoons make a Company, 3 companies a Battalion, and up through Brigade, Division and Army. Mixed formations fight as their strongest squad. Units earn ranks from Combat XP; creatures above a Mage climb the elite officer ladder (Officer → Master Chief) — an officer in your line makes the whole side hit harder, advance faster, and can 😎 Sway foes mid-battle just like your Avatar.

⚔️ Battle & the chain

• Typed attacks (Pokémon-style): Fire melts Frost, Shadow devours Life, Earth smothers Fire & Storm. Win the fight and you take the ground.
• Sway in battle — your Avatar or an elite officer can try to win a foe over instead of cutting it down. Odds rise with 😎 Charisma; a success spends some (it refills toward its peak each quiet turn).
• Climb the creature chain — Beastmaster research raises your Beastmaster rank; a cultivated 🐲 Dragon Cave + Draconic Binding opens the Dragon Den and its 🦎 Drakes, while the true 🐉 Dragons wait on Draconic Surge — and the lore climbs on past it through Demonancy to Draconic Domination, one of the 🐍 Wyrm's own gates. The 🐍 Wyrm demands total mastery: every building maxed, all lore learned, rank 5.

🏛 Quests (the dungeon crawl)

• Stand your Avatar on an Ancient Ruin to descend. Beasts start 💤 asleep — slip right past them; wake one (❗) and it hunts you step for step. Doors, side passages and cover are your friends; battle noise wakes the room.
• Move with the thumb-stick (bottom-right) — one square at a time, and it's the only way to walk (arrow keys or WASD on a desktop). You must be standing beside something to act on it: walk into a beast to give battle, into the Witch to speak, over an item to take it, onto a 🚪 door or 🔽 stairs to pass through. Every stride you take, the awake beasts take one too.
• Each quest tells a story with a choice in its depths — and finishing without a kill earns the 👻 Unseen bonus. Fall down there and your Avatar is lost — and so is the Age.

🏕 The wilds

• Barbarian outposts raid both you and your rivals. Assault one and beat or 😎 sway its garrison to claim it as a new Stronghold. Wild beasts prowl for exposed units and fields — guard your Builders, cull beasts for XP.

🏆 Win / lose

• Conquest is the only path to victory: capture every rival Avatar (their realms pass to their conquerors) and take or raze their strongholds. The 🐍 Wyrm is your ultimate weapon toward it, not a shortcut: raising one tears away the fog (the whole map and every rival Avatar revealed) and the Wyrm flies anywhere each turn to fall on a stronghold or a rival crown — but you must still finish the conquest yourself.
• You lose when your 👑 Avatar is captured or your last Stronghold falls. No time limit.

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