22. Cooperative Play --- The Crisis Format

22.1 Setup#

One Crisis Storyline is put into play for each player. They begin on the Map at the start of the game, on Chapter 1, and they belong to no player's deck.

Players build and play their own decks as normal and take their turns in the usual order.

22.2 The Opponent#

The opponent is not a player. It has no deck, no hand, no Treasury and no Homeworld, and the Lose conditions of §16 do not apply to it. It controls the Crisis Storylines and every card they create or put onto the Map.

The opponent may be automated or played. Crisis cards state every choice as "at random", so the role needs no judgement and the format runs with nobody in the seat. Where a real player takes the opponent's role, that player makes each of those choices instead of randomising them. Nothing else about the role changes, and that player is still the opponent rather than a player: they have no deck and cannot win as a player.

22.3 The Opponent's Turn#

An opponent turn follows each player's turn. It has the same structure as a player's turn (§10) and runs the same phases in the same order.

The opponent acts in a phase only where a Crisis Storyline, or a card the opponent controls, instructs it to. A phase in which nothing instructs it passes with nothing done. This is why card text addresses "each opponent's turn" and "each opponent's Admin Phase": those are real phases that occur once per player per round.

22.4 Time Counters#

During the Admin Phase of each opponent turn, place one Time counter on each Crisis Storyline in play.

Time counters are the opponent's clock. A Crisis Chapter's End condition is a number of Time counters, and the Chapter completes when that many are on the card (§8.5). Several Crisis cards let a player pay a cost to remove one; that is how the players buy time back, and it is the format's central tension.

Time counters are not Story Points. They are a distinct counter type (§18.37). They do not convert, they are not spent, and nothing that refers to Story Points refers to them.

22.5 Crisis Cards and Range#

A Crisis Storyline has no Band. It occupies no position on the Map, so range does not apply to it in either direction.

Damage dealt by a Crisis Storyline therefore carries a Power tag alone, and the card's own text says what it reaches — the ordinary treatment of an ability with no range in the ordinary sense (§11.2).

The Power check applies to a Crisis card exactly as it does to anything else (§11.2). A Crisis Storyline that targets a card must target one its Power permits. One that damages every permanent a player controls, or the card it is attached to, names its recipients rather than aiming at them, and no targeting check applies.

Low Power still reaches only Unshielded cards, unaimed or not. A Crisis Storyline dealing Low Power damage to every permanent a player controls hits their Characters, Ground Units and Non-Capital Spacecraft and leaves their Locations untouched. One dealing High Power damage that way hits everything.

Cards the opponent puts onto the Map — Drones, and the back faces of Crisis Storylines — are ordinary permanents of their printed type. They sit in the Band that type requires and they use range normally.

22.6 Control of Crisis Cards#

A Crisis card is controlled by the opponent, with two exceptions.

• Occupation takes control. A player who occupies a Crisis card takes control of it under the ordinary rule (§14.11): the card must be Contested, and that player's units must be the only units on it. This is deliberate. The Crisis ships are printed on Contested faces precisely so that they can be boarded, and taking one is a route to winning.
• An attached Device is controlled by the card it is attached to. Whoever controls the host controls the Device, and it changes hands with the host.

A Crisis card counts against a player only while that player controls it. A Contested or Fallen Crisis card the opponent controls counts toward nobody's Lose condition (§16). One a player has taken counts against that player exactly as any other permanent they control does. Capturing the Crisis is not free: you are holding its wreckage, and it is on your ledger while you hold it.

22.7 Destroying a Crisis Storyline#

Players may attack a Crisis Storyline and destroy it.

A destroyed Crisis Storyline stops the clock it carried. It takes no further Time counters and completes no further Chapters.

Destroying a Crisis Storyline awards the players 2 Story Points, added to the shared pool (§22.9). This is the players' principal way of scoring, and it makes clearing the board close to a win by itself: at two players the pool needs 4 and the two Storylines are worth exactly that, and at three it needs 5 against a board worth 6.

The award is for destroying the Storyline, by whatever means. It is not awarded for a Chapter completing, for the Storyline flipping to its back face, or for destroying that back face afterwards.

22.8 Completing a Crisis Storyline#

Nothing special is needed to turn a Crisis Storyline over. §8.9 already governs: when a Storyline's final Chapter is completed it flips to its back face, and that back face may be any card type. A Crisis Storyline needs no printed flip instruction, for the same reason an ordinary Storyline needs none.

The back face is a permanent of its printed type, controlled by the opponent, in whatever Band that type requires, using range normally (§22.5). It is the Crisis arriving in person.

A flipped Crisis Storyline stops taking Time counters. §22.4 places them on each Crisis Storyline in play, and a card showing a back face of another type is no longer one. Its clock has already run out.

A Crisis back face is not removed at the end of an Act. §8.9 clears completed Storyline cards when an Act ends; a Crisis back face is a permanent of its own printed type and is not one of those. It stays on the Map until something destroys it.

There is no second award for the back face. The 2 Story Points in §22.7 are for destroying the Crisis Storyline, which means destroying it before its final Chapter completes. Once it has flipped that chance is gone, and killing what it became scores nothing under §22.7 — though an ordinary §15 award may still apply, as it would to any permanent. The players are racing the clock for points as well as for survival.

A Crisis that flips is expensive. At two players the shared pool needs 4 Story Points and each Crisis Storyline is worth 2, so letting one turn over costs the players half their target. At three it is 2 of 5. There is no way to earn those points back from that card, so a Crisis allowed to complete does not merely add a boss to the Map — it closes off a route to winning.

22.8a A Back Face That Flips Back

Where a Crisis back face prints a clause returning it to its Crisis Storyline face, it becomes a Crisis Storyline again and resumes taking Time counters.

It returns with no Time counters on it, and on Chapter 1. This is an exception to §13, which otherwise leaves every counter but a Liberation counter in place through a flip. Without it the counters that completed the card's final Chapter would still be on it when it returned, the final Chapter would complete again immediately, and the card would turn over on the spot and go on doing so without end.

Beating a Crisis back into its Storyline therefore buys the players the whole clock again rather than nothing. It does not award the §22.7 Story Points, which are for destroying a Crisis Storyline outright.

22.9 Winning and Losing#

Players share a single pool of Story Points. A Story Point awarded to any player is added to that pool, and the players win or lose together. The players are one side for every purpose that §15 distinguishes sides.

Let N be the number of Crisis Storylines put into play at setup, which is the number of players.

• The opponent wins at N + 1 Story Points.
• The players win at N + 2 Story Points.

Whichever side reaches its number first wins immediately. With two players there are two Crisis Storylines: the opponent wins at 3 Story Points, the players at 4.

Where each side's Story Points come from

The opponent scores only from the Lose conditions of §16. They continue to apply to each player individually, and because they award a Story Point to an opponent rather than ending the game, in this format that Story Point goes to the opponent. A player running their Treasury to 0, decking out, losing their Homeworld or holding 5 or more Contested or Fallen permanents advances the adversary's clock rather than a rival's.

That is the opponent's whole engine, and it is what the Crisis Storylines are for. They do not award Story Points themselves. Every Chapter exists to push the players toward a §16 condition — draining Treasuries, breaking permanents to Contested, grinding Characters down — and the opponent wins by driving the players into their own failure states rather than by scoring against them directly.

The players score from §15 as one side, and from destroying Crisis Storylines (§22.7). Two consequences follow from the players being a single side:

• A §15 award keyed to an opponent's card means a card the adversary controls. The players gain nothing for a Character of their own falling, whichever player controlled it — §15's rule that a player gains no Story Point for the fall of a Character they control themselves extends to the whole side.
• A §15 award keyed to destroying a card is collected normally when the players destroy a card the opponent controls, and is collected by nobody when the opponent destroys one of theirs.