Beginner's Guide
Terrain & Resources
Every tile keeps a secret until you tend it. Learning to read the land — and to gamble on what it hides — is half the economy.
The three working families
Land you can work comes in three families, each feeding one resource and one recipe line:
| Family | Resource | Structures |
|---|---|---|
| Fields | food | Granary → Farm → Well |
| Forest | wood | Lumber Camp → Hardwood Grove → Tapping Line |
| Hills | ore | Quarry → Mineshaft → Deep Shaft |
Water is scenery in the current game — you cannot tend it or build on it. Mountains block movement.
Food, wood, and ore are parallel currencies of equal worth: each buys the soldiers of its own line (militia and friars eat food, archers and catapults want wood, swordsmen and knights want ore). No family is "the good one" — what matters is having income at all, and eventually more than one family so more of the roster is open to you.
Subtypes: the face-down cards
Every workable tile has a hidden subtype — revealed the moment you tend it:
- Fields hide grain (common), livestock, or a water vein.
- Forest hides timber (common), hardwood, or sap.
- Hills hide stone (common), an ore seam, or coal.
The common subtype feeds the basic recipe; the rare ones unlock the +2 and +3 tiers. You can see a revealed subtype's icon sitting on the tile ever after. This is the little push-your-luck game inside the economy: you never know quite what you're tending toward, and a lucky coal reveal can reroute a whole city's plan.
Special resources: the surprises
Rarer than subtypes, some tiles hide a special resource — invisible to everyone until someone tends the tile. Discovery is a small event: a card, a name, and usually a new door opening, because specials gate the better soldiery:
| Special | Unlocks |
|---|---|
| Iron Deposit | Spearman, Swordsman, Knight |
| Wild Horses | Light Cavalry, Knight, Mounted Archer |
| Ancient Scrolls | Archer, Catapult, Mounted Archer |
| Herbs | Friar |
| Carved Stone | Monk |
The rule is possession by use: the unit stays recruitable while you have a worker tending that special tile. Lose the tile, lose the recruitment (units already fielded survive).
Full details and discovery art in the Resources & Specials reference.
Star fragments
The rarest thing in the land is a wild star fragment — a lost point of the broken star. Tend it and it counts toward victory, exactly like a capital's star. Wild fragments are the cheapest star you will ever take: no siege, no war, just a tend. If you scout one, claiming it outranks nearly everything else you could be doing.