Ancients — Playtest Notes

You're playing ruleset v3.17. This page is the short version of what has changed in the rules and what we're trying to learn from your games — read it, play a few, and tell us what felt right or wrong. Every game you play is stamped with the ruleset version, so your feedback stays tied to the exact rules you saw.

What changed recently

• v3.17 — edge facing — a unit faces an EDGE — 1 August 2026
• v3.16 — give-ground pairing + army-morale weighting — 28 July 2026
• v3.15 — missilery rewritten + density states — 26 July 2026
• v3.14 — combat resolves + depth-shove curve — 26 July 2026
• v3.13 — split from an engaged block — 22 July 2026
• v3.12 — impetuous — the warband charge — 21 July 2026
• v3.11 — pursuit — the chase after fleeing troops — 20 July 2026
• v3.10 — routers stay on the board — rout in place — 20 July 2026
• v3.9 — push-back economy — give-ground cap & fall-back-not-break — 20 July 2026
• v3.8 — reform by articulation — 20 July 2026
• v3.7 — depth becomes a Base stat — 18 July 2026
• v3.6 — recovery = no rest while acting — 8 July 2026
• v3.5 — seam economy — split free, merge flat — 8 July 2026
• v3.4 — combat gang model — 7 July 2026
• v3.3 — massed-volley fix — 6 July 2026
• v3.2 — follow-up ruling — 5–6 July 2026
• v3.1 — rules-pass reconciliation — 5 July 2026
• v3 — design-review ledger — consolidated 3 June 2026

Full wording and section references live in the Rulebook (§14 changelog).

What we're watching — probe these

These are the open questions the rules deliberately leave to play. If a game lets you form an opinion on one of them, that's the gold — call it out.

• Recovery. An uncommitted Base recovers one Base's worth of Fatigue if, that turn, it did not act: its Block did not move or attempt to move, and the Base itself was not in combat, did not fire (§10), and (by the competition default) was not shot at. Because a combat loss went into a deep Base diluted (1/depth per point, §6), recovery comes out the same way — a depth-D Base's per-Base Fatigue drops by 1/D per turn, so a deep formation has inertia both ways. A failed move attempt counts as acting and denies recovery to the whole Block; Fatigue never drops below 1. (Recovery symmetry is flagged for playtest review — see decisions-log.)
• Local contagion: when any Block breaks, every friendly Block within one base-width gains Fatigue +1, so a broken wing rolls up the line. (The depth reservoir does not damp contagion — a deep block resists its own disorder but still catches a neighbour's collapse; watch it in playtest.)
• Combat outcome (§9.5): each point of the margin is taken as either +1 Fatigue (hold in place, absorbed by the Block average) OR a base-depth push-back (give ground). Push-back carries no Fatigue itself — only an incidental seam cost if it fragments the Block. Magnitude/balance flagged for playtest tuning.
• Judgment calls flagged for playtest: shock is written as a flat modifier for speed (it may instead be an extra die per the Evaluation); default weight ratings are starting points only.
• Watch in playtest: a push-or-hold choice on every losing base may slow a wide combat — keep an eye on combat speed.

Reporting back

There's no separate form to hunt down: when a game ends, the result screen will ask two or three quick questions and attach the game's own numbers automatically. Until then, jot the ruleset version (v3.17) with any notes so nothing is ambiguous about which rules you were playing.