Space combat

Space guns cycle twice — but every shot is a Quick

In space, your Colossus runs cold and its song carries, so a light gun can cycle a second time before it would overheat on the ground. Your weapon line says how many shots it gets per turn: 2 shots / turn means the weapon may be fired twice in one turn.

What it does not mean is a free second shot. Every attack spends one of your two Quicks. Firing the same gun twice is therefore your entire Quick budget for the turn: no Lock On, no Boost, no Song-Move. Rate of fire tells you what a weapon may do; the action economy still says what you can afford.

The heavy hitters cycle once: railguns, torpedoes, a capital's main gun. They hit hard enough that one shot is the whole story. The board enforces both limits, so you can't accidentally fire a third time or spend a Quick you don't have.

Range, and the guns that need room

A shot deals full damage out to optimal range, which is half the weapon's listed Range rounded up. Past that it still hits, but it lands lighter: Kinetic loses 2, Energy and Sonic lose 1. Melee never falls off, damage never drops below 1, and a Reliable minimum is untouched.

The opposite problem is Min Range N: ordnance and heavy snipers cannot fire at anything inside N spaces, and the board answers with TOO CLOSE. Torpedoes and railguns want room. If something is in your lap, that is the gun you can't use.

Capital ships have arcs — where the guns can bear

Big ships can't shoot in every direction at once. Two kinds of mounts:

• Broadside — the main batteries fire out the sides. A broadside weapon covers two wide beams off the port and starboard flanks, and can't hit what's dead ahead or directly behind. To bring a broadside to bear, you turn the ship so the target sits off your flank.
• Bow guns (chasers)— a narrow forward cone off the nose. Good for the ship you're charging; useless for anything beside you.

The board draws these arcs when you select the ship, so you can see exactly where its fire reaches before you commit. Facing matters: rotating a capital to line up a broadside is often the whole move. Rotate with the arrow keys or the facing controls; a Held or tractored ship can't turn.

Torpedoes — lock on, then let fly

Torpedoes are guided ordnance: one shot, launched on a Quick, that chases its mark. Click the torpedo on the board and it shows its lock state and tethers to its target. There are three tiers, best to worst:

• Laser-guided (best) — if the target already has a Lock On, the torpedo rides the beam in: +4 to hit and heavier damage.Spending a Lock On this way is never wasted — it's the biggest bonus a torpedo can get.
• Aimed — if you spent a Full action to Aim first, the torpedo delivers a second warhead: one launch, two hits worth of payload.
• Guided (baseline)— even with no setup, a torpedo is self-guiding and lands reliably. It just doesn't get the bonus.

So the two setup actions do different jobs: Lock On (a Quick) makes the nextattack — anyone's — land harder, and turns a torpedo laser-guided. Aim (a Full) is yours alone and adds a whole extra instance of the damage dice to any Aimable weapon, torpedo or not. You rarely have the actions for both in one turn; pick the one the shot needs.

Fleets warp in — and warp out

Capital ships don't linger on the board. A Hollow pulse warps in, fires or is fired upon for that one round, and is gone at the next round advance. The window is short and deliberate; a hostile warp-in is a beat to answer now, not a ship to grind down over five rounds.

Antiphon relief does not work that way, and does not leave you. A friendly fleet that arrives holds the field until no living enemy remains, and only then jumps. If your squad is still in the fight, so is the relief.

Anything that has just warped in is Orienting for its first round: it can move, but it cannot fire until the round after. That is your window to reposition before its guns come online.

Your squad's own ship — the one you launched from — is a persistent ally and stays. It fights alongside you the whole scene.

Seeing the enemy — and the Lapis eye

By default an enemy ship shows only its token and its name— you see it's there, not what it can do. Reading a foe is a Lapis specialty:

• One Lapis Cantor on the field reveals enemy ranges — how far a foe's weapons reach.
• Two Lapis Cantors reveal enemy weapon effects — what those guns actually do.

So scouting is a group asset, not a given. The other half of it is Search: a Quick, in ship mode, that pings an active sweep and reveals every hidden hostile inside your Sensors range (10 by default). Loud, immediate, and the counter to anything trying to close on you unseen.

A token belongs to whoever claimed it, and that is the whole of the rule: you move yours, nobody moves yours for you, and no player moves an enemy at any point in the round. Turn order has nothing to do with it. The other reason a token won't budge is a lock on the unit itself: Held (in a tractor or a grapple) or Captured.

Grabbed, and taken

Some things out here would rather hold you than kill you. A Grapple deals no damage at all: it makes you Held and drags you toward the thing that caught you. Held means no moving and no rotating, which for a capital means no bringing a broadside to bear.

Break grip costs a Quick and all your movement, then rolls 1d20 + Grit against 10. On a success you are Freed for a round, and the tractor cannot re-lock you while that lasts. You still have your other Quick, so a break-and-shoot turn is legal.

Worse is being Captured: stowed inside a prison hull, no actions, untargetable, and your own side cannot move you. You come back either when someone cracks the prison open (you redeploy on an open cell beside your rescuer, Freed) or when the relief fleet arrives and pulls you out at half HP.

This is also what changes dying. While a live prison unit is on the board, a Cantor dropped to 0 HP is taken instead of broken: captured at 2 HP. With no prison on the field, 0 HP runs the normal Structure spiral. Whether the scene is a rescue or a fight is a fact about what is flying out there.

Swarms, and the things that feed them

Small hostiles fight by piling on, and the engine rewards them for it: a Swarm-tagged gun gains +1 accuracy for every other friendly already adjacent to the target, up to +3. The same maths is yours to use when you gang up.

A swarm carrier keeps the pressure on by reviving its downed brood at every round advance, and it gets worse as the fight drags: two back per round through round 3, four per round after that. The pool it draws from is finite, and killing the carrier ends the cycle outright. Grinding the small ones down is not a plan; the heart is.