Masters of the Manifold

A Deck- and Map-Building Game of World Conquest

Masters of the Manifold is a tabletop strategy game developed by Shadecap Gameforge in Petalcap Vale. Featuring a morphic play space, territorial control mechanics, customizeable card engines for each player, and trading card game elements in the form of expansion packs, Masters of the Manifold is simultaneously a complex territorial control game and a debatably subtle commentary about the geopolitical state of the Manifold Sky from the Vale Verdial perspective.

Mechanics & Inner Workings

Masters of the Manifold is a game for up to ten players. Play takes place on a world map which is constructed, connected, and shaped over time through each player's placement and movement of hexagonal 'world tiles.' There are 80 illustrated world tiles representing the cube layers of the Manifold, with each broken up into sets of 10 for each tesseract and numbered to help differentiate them. Placing these tiles obeys certain rules, such as only certain tiles of one tesseract can be placed adjacent to those of another and each in given tesseract has another within that tesseract that it can never lie adjacent to. Players may move a tile they occupy so long as they obey these rules. Player starting territories start separate and, over time, become connected together and sculpted to keep the strategic situation constantly in flux.
Players draw cards from a combination of their personal decks (generally notable characters, vehicles, organizations, or items) and the deck included with the game (generally types of military or similar assets) to create several stacks that represent the forces represented by each of the army tokens moving around the world map. Generally, unique cards can only be used in stacks for tokens lying in an associated territory or require a certain number of an associated territory to be under the owner's control, making these potent cards require more careful risk analysis than using generic - but weaker - cards. The goal of the game is to control the most enclosed territory and, if possible, to eliminate the other players from play by destroying all of their tokens. Conflicts between armies are modeled by comparing the features of these cards to determine who gains 'advantage,' draining the token's stack of cards until it is destroyed when no cards are left. Generally, when no other players remain or a stalemate is somehow reached, victory is determined by the surviving player with the most territory unreachable by other factions through adjacent world tiles. There are, however, special cards that allow (or impose) different victory conditions on players that go beyond simple territorial control.

Significance

Sprucehaven Exports is a prominent exporter of both the base game and expansion sets for Masters of the Manifold, but the game generally sells poorly in the human markets because of its unfortunate relationship with ongoing geopolitical conflicts. Citizens of Voxelia and the several states of the Coalition of Breakaway Colonies are, understandably, sensitive about depictions of the War of Reunification. This circumstance is not helped by the fact that the developers of Masters of the Manifold intentionally satirize the events and some of the most well-known figures operating in the geopolitical arena with every expansion, exhibiting the stereotypically Vale Verdial cynicism towards human territorial ambitions.

Item type

Miscellaneous

Rarity

Masters of the Manifold is growing in popularity throughout The Verdial Arc, but is seldom found beyond the Vale. There is a small, but growing, community of Masters fans in the Rostran Archipelago Confederacy, particularly on Exivaun and Kalqa where fans of strategy games like Triortan are already found in abundance.

Raw materials & Components

For all its complexity, all of the components of Masters of the Manifold are made of thin sheets of clapboard or card stock and, thus, pack flat for easy storage. Upgrade kits featuring world tiles and faction tokens made of compressed cellulomold are available for those looking for more durability. Deck expansion packs often come with their own deck boxes, and game boxes featuring extra space for these deck boxes are also available.