You have a plan. So does the player across from you.
Otherkind’s combat starts with that tension. Both sides commit to their intentions, and the encounter resolves through a shared set of rules. A good decision has to account for what someone else might do.
Three slots to make a plan
Each round has three planned action slots. The basic choices are Move, Skill, and Reset, with at most one ordinary Move in a round.
The rules currently give each actor nine distinct cards. A used card stays locked until a successful Reset, so choosing when to recover your options is part of the exchange.
You might move before using a skill. You might hold your position and save movement for later. You might need to Reset while an opponent is ready to press you. The same tools can produce different encounters depending on when you use them.
Commitment leaves something unknown
Plans are sealed before the actions commit. When a visible, living opponent commits, their current action is announced. Their targets, routes, and later actions remain hidden.
That distinction matters. Seeing a skill begin gives you information, but it doesn’t hand you the opponent’s whole plan.
One set of rules for both sides
Ordinary movement resolves simultaneously. Skills then begin from the shared state after movement. The rules handle the resulting effects in a defined order, including protection, damage, forced movement, healing, and terrain.
Animations communicate what happened. They don’t decide who wins an exchange because a particular frame happened to arrive first.
The current rules cover encounters from 1v1 to 3v3. Our work includes a deterministic combat engine and a local skill lab for exercising these interactions. The public game is still in development; this is a look at its foundations, not a playable release announcement.
What we’ll be writing about
As combat develops, we’ll share specific encounters: what a player can read, where an opportunity to respond appears, and how movement changes a decision. Those examples will give the rules room to speak for themselves.
For the world these encounters take place in, start with our introduction to Lost Earth.