You can play on your ipad switching between PDFS (or your desktop). I recommend reading the rules, but the books you will most use are Adventure, and events, and rules till you get used to the game. . I also recommend printing out the Aids sheet that list all the actions you can take and the roll charts. It makes it soooo much easier to jump in and play. Once you played a few times, if you like it, you’ll want to print out the books and folder them (if you are anything like me lol).
Game play basically you have 12 turns to solve the adventure.
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You start with the adventure book, Adventure prologue (its a easier adventure). Roll a dice for which adventure, This tells you what your potential enemies, characters you can/befriend, Event types, plots and locations you can visit.
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Turn 0 you roll for first encounter, if you have n encounter roll again to determine if its event, enemy, character or location. (Their is a enemy book, and for everything else the event book)
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On turn 1 You can potentially take a slew of actions, Relax, explore, Investigate, Seek information, Plan, Research, Seek help, to name a few. Take 1 resolve it (usually be referring to a table or a event or a enemy may be encountered)
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End of turn you roll for another encounter and resolve
Do this for a total of 12 turns and either solve the adventure, or fail it and face the consequences. If you win, you gain Luck (which you use to gain new allies, raise a stat, gain a skill, or roll for new equipment- I really need my sonic screw driver).
Game Goal: In the 12 turns the goal of the game is to find out who is the enemy, then discover their goal, their goal will determine how many DM you need to gather to have a option to defeat the enemy (the enemy will list the oppose options from sabotage, to outwit, to foil their doomsday to play, to outright combat. The enemy you are facing can potentially make the DM you need to gather less. Facing Daleks has a modified of 0, while facing Cassandra (I think is +3). So if the goal has a DM of 7 and you are facing Cassandra who give you +3 you only need to gather 4 DM! An easy adventure (maybe).
As you explore, you will find allies, you will sometimes get separated from them, they sometimes even get captured, run into a big group of enemies and decide to fight or RUN!, or you can event run across UNIT soldiers who, if you outwit them, will join you. You can convert allies into companions.
What makes this game so fun, is that the experience for each adventure is often NOTHING like the previous one.
in one adventure I encountered the Mondasians (specifically the hospital orderlies), who are trying to convert themselves into the cybermen. However since my Companion got separated from me (happens on doubles, rolling doubles is bad!), they ignored me since I had no humans with me. I now knew my enemy and decided to follow them to find out their goal, hoping my companion would get a little lucky on her and find her way back to me. She got captured sadly, but on the plus side she met in a ally in prison who had important information on the goal and gave us plus 1DM. Ok…after finding out Mondasians goal the next turn I went about rescuing my companion and her new ally. The game is full of unique and narrative moments like this!
Hope these summaries gave you a brief overview of how the game is played to make it a little easier to jump into. A few youtube videos exist as well, showing play.
Let me know if you have other questions :)