mundane

How to play

Two households face off across the kitchen table. Everything below is the gentle version of the specification — read that when you need the exact wording.

The goal: drain their Composure

Composure is your household’s patience with the world. You both start at 20. Knock your opponent’s Composure to 0 or below and their household falls apart — you win. From that moment the game is over and nothing else can happen.

The budget: Time

You pay for everything with Time. Every card costs some whole number of Time to play, and you simply can’t spend Time you don’t have. At the start of each of your turns your Time resets to 5 and you draw a card (if your deck still has cards in it). Time does not carry over — use it or lose it.

The cards

There are five kinds of card. Three of them stick around; two of them happen once and are gone.

Stays on your board (permanents):

• People — the dependable bodies around the house.
• Appliances — the gadgets you’ve talked yourself into buying.
• Habits — the routines, wholesome or otherwise.

When one of these resolves, it lands on your side of the table and stays there.

Happens once, then into the discard (one-shots):

• Tasks — chores and schemes you carry out. A Task goes onto the stack (see below), does its thing, and is discarded.
• Instants — quick reactions. Like a Task, but you can play one almost any time, even on your opponent’s turn.

That last difference is the heart of the game, so it has a name.

Timing: sorcery speed vs instant speed

• Sorcery speed is the slow, polite timing. People, Appliances, Habits, and Tasks can only be played on your own turn, during the Plan phase, and only when nothing else is waiting to happen. This is the restrictive timing.
• Instant speed is the quick timing. Instants can be played whenever it’s your moment to act — even in the middle of your opponent’s turn, even in response to something they just did.

A turn, phase by phase

Every turn walks through five phases, always in this order:

Reset  ->  Wake Up  ->  Plan  ->  Do Stuff  ->  Wind Down

• Reset / Wake Up — housekeeping. Your Time goes back to 5 and you draw.
• Plan — the phase where you actually play your People, Appliances, Habits, and Tasks.
• Do Stuff — where combat will eventually live. (Combat isn’t built yet — for now this phase is a quiet one.)
• Wind Down — the wrap-up before the turn passes to your opponent.

Here’s the part people find surprising: there is no “next phase” button. You never declare that a phase is over. A phase ends only when everyone has passed in a row with nothing waiting to resolve. Which brings us to priority.

Priority: whose moment is it?

Keep two ideas separate:

• The active player is whose turn it is. This changes once per turn.
• The player with priority is whoever may act this instant. This changes constantly.

They are not the same thing, and that’s the whole point: because priority can be held by the non-active player, you get to do things on your opponent’s turn.

When you have priority you may either play a card you’re allowed to play, or pass. Each time someone plays a card, priority snaps back to the active player (so they can respond first), and the count of “passes in a row” resets to zero. When players just keep passing:

• Once everyone has passed in a row, the game looks at the stack.
• If something is waiting on the stack, the top item resolves — then the active player gets priority again, in case anyone wants to react to that.
• If nothing is on the stack, the phase finally ends and the next one begins.

So phases don’t advance because someone says so; they advance because the table has gone quiet.

The stack: things wait their turn

When you play a Task or an Instant, it doesn’t take effect immediately. It goes onto the stack — a pile where the most recent card sits on top. The stack resolves top first: last in, first out.

This is why reacting works. If your opponent plays a Task and you respond with an Instant, your Instant lands on top of their Task — so your Instant resolves first, before their Task ever gets the chance. Permanents skip all this drama: when a Person, Appliance, or Habit resolves, it just goes onto your board.

Want to see all of this in motion? Head to the worked examples.

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