Each player including the Director will need a poker deck to play. The players will form their action deck with the cards indicated by their character archetype. The Director will form the destiny deck with the cards from Ace to 4 of each suit of his deck. He will then form the enemy deck with cards 5 to 10 of each suit.

Tests

When a player is going to perform an activity that does not imply a sure success, he must perform a test using his action deck. There are 2 different types of test.

Skill tests

When a character wants to perform an action, he and the Director will establish which of the 4 skills that define a character must be used. The 4 skills that define a character are Body ( ♠ ), Dexterity ( ♣ ), Spirit ( ♥ ) and Mind ( ♦ ). The Director will set a difficulty for the test, this difficulty indicates how many cards the player can draw from their deck. If on at least one of those cards he manages to draw the symbol of the skill tested he succeeds in what he wanted to do.

Success with benefit

If in a test the player draws more than one required symbol, it is considered that there has been a benefit added to the action. This is up to the Director. For example, the character may take less time to perform the action, or he may have consumed less materials than necessary to build something, or he may have obtained a discount in a negotiation, or he may have discovered a small chest in addition to the lever that opens the secret door. Everything is at the discretion of the Director, and it is legitimate that in some tests no benefit is granted because it is not applicable.

Body indicates the physical capacity of the character in terms of strength, endurance and athletic ability.

Dexterity measures manual dexterity, coordination, acrobatic ability...

Spirit is the will, the ability to empathize, charisma, leadership ability.

Mind is the intellectual capacity of the character, his intelligence.

Examples of skill tests:

Attempting to push a stuck door: Body test.

Defusing a trap: Dexterity test

Dribbling: Spirit test

Finding Magus Infernus' tome of sorcery in a library: Mind test.

Difficulty

Difficulty is the number assigned to a test by the Director. The lower this number the more difficult the test is, as this number tells us how many cards a player can draw to try to get the required symbol. The range of Difficulty is from 1 (very difficult) to 4 (easy). 

If the difficulty ever drops to 0, there is still a chance to achieve the action: draw a card and have it be the highest value card of the suit tested. If the difficulty drops below 0, the action will be impossible to perform.

Competitions

When two or more characters face each other in something other than combat, a competition takes place. The Director will establish which skill is appropriate for the competition (it can be different for each character, for example, someone trying to go unnoticed would use his Dexterity skill against the guard's Spirit skill). The participating characters will draw 5 cards each (there may be modifiers that allow more cards to be drawn) and count as successes the symbols of the skill they were testing. Whoever has the most successes wins. In case of a tie, the winner is the one with the highest number of successes. If the tie persists, the confrontation is a draw or 5 cards are drawn again, whichever the Director decides. If a character has a modifier to the number of cards he can draw in a test for that skill, it also applies to competitions.

In case a player character makes a competition with a non-player character this procedure is not followed, but the Director sets a test at the difficulty he deems appropriate, if the player character passes it he will have won in that competition, if not he will have lost. 

Examples of competitions:

Making a pulse: Body competition.

Trying to sneak away from a guard: Dexterity vs. Spirit competition.

After each test the deck is reshuffled with the used cards to have the action deck complete again.

Skills

Competences are the skills learned by the character, no list is provided as they can be anything the player wishes (fighting, computer, photography, psychology, origami...). A skill grants +1 card in a test related to it. When choosing new skills, you can instead choose to become an expert in one you already have, in which case the bonus becomes +2 cards to the test.

Advantage 

Especially in competitions (but also in other tests) the Director can decide that in a certain test a character has an Advantage over the others due to a specific circumstance. Characters who have an Advantage can draw one more card from their deck in the test. An advantage can be having the right tool for the task or being better positioned than the opponents.

Help

There are tests in which a character can receive help from others. It is up to the Director to decide if in a certain test it is possible to receive help and from whom. If help is received, one more card can be drawn, no matter how many people help.