Cross The Ages | Game Rules Overview

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Cross The Ages

6 min readJun 14, 2022

Our NFT presale ended, the next milestone is now the early access for all the people who own an Arkhante NFT pack. In this article, you will find out about the core mechanisms of the Cross The Ages Trading Card Game. Allowing you to have a better understanding of how you are going to play with your cards available in your packs in-game.

Please note that this document isn’t representative of the final version of the game rules as we are currently iterating on some features before the official release of the early access. Take this guide as an overview!

Basic Concepts of Cross The Ages: Trading Card Game

Fundamentals

To play Cross The Ages: Trading Card Game (TCG) you will need a deck of 20 cards, and an opponent.

How to win?

In Cross The Ages TCG, players compete to take control of the board by using the power of their cards. There are 2 ways of winning the game:

Once the board is filled, you own more cards on the board than your opponent. If it’s equal, it’s a draw.
Your opponent’s remaining time reaches zero.

Types of Cards & Elements

You learned previously that a deck in CTA: TCG is composed of 20 cards.
This deck will be composed of 3 types of cards.

Battle Cards

Most important cards in the game are the battle cards! They are also the most common ones, as they are the cards that you play on the board to capture your opponent’s cards and/or defend your positions.

All battle cards have multiple information displayed on their front, the most important ones are:

The element (on the top right): nature, earth, fire, water, air, darkness, light
The power value (at the bottom): a number representing the strength of your card

Field Cards

While most of the cards you play on the board are battle cards, some of them are field cards.

Those are special in the sense that those cards will not take space on the board, but will rather modify it and apply effects (increase/decrease power value…) that can last multiple turns or until negated by the opponent.

Effects are related to the element of the cards and when the card is played it will not end your turn. Meaning you can combine it with other effects such as the Special Attack from your Leader.

Leader Card & Special Attack

When building your deck, you will have to define one of your battle cards as your leader. Every battle card can be defined as a leader, but you will only be able to choose one.

The card defined as your Leader, in addition to being drawn systematically at the beginning of a game gives you a special effect that can be applied on the board.

How to play Cross The Ages: TCG?

Now that you’ve learned the 3 different types of cards you will use to build your deck, let’s get a step on the fundamental rules of a CTA game and discover the board on which you are going to play those cards!

Board

In Cross The Ages TCG, players share the same board and their goal is not to defeat their opponent hero, but to control as much cards as possible on the shared board to claim victory.

The board is a grid of 4x4 cells. Each player can play on every empty cell, there are no restrictions on which cell you can place your card.

Once a card is put on a cell, it cannot be removed.

When a card is played, the ownership is set to the player who played it.

The ownership of a card can change during a game, it means that the opponent can use your own cards against you and vice-versa by capturing them.

Capture

To change the ownership of a card, you need to put a card in a cell that is adjacent.
Adjacent means that both cards have a side in common (whether it is top, bottom, left or right).

When you put a card that is adjacent to an opponent card, your card will try to capture the opponent card. The attack is automatically started against every eligible adjacent card at the same time.

If your attack is successful, you claim the ownership of the card. Otherwise, nothing happens.

Your attack is based on the power of your card, including every modifier such as Affinities (read below) applied to it. It is then compared to the power of the card you attack, including every modifier applied to it.

In addition to the power shown on the card, some rules apply such as Advantages and Chains. Those features are explained in the mechanisms section below.

Turns

When the game starts, a coin flip determines which player will start.

Each player starts by drawing 10 cards randomly from their deck: 9 battle cards and 1 field card.

Out of the 9 battle cards, you are guaranteed to draw your card defined as Leader.

In case you feel like you are out of luck in your hand, there is a limited feature that lets you discard cards and draw new ones from your deck.

A turn is always ended by playing a battle card on the board.

Time

Each player has its own countdown that is active whenever it is its turn (currently 5 minutes per player).

If the countdown reaches 0, the player loses by timed out.

Mechanisms

Advantages

When an attack is attempted, the element of both cards is compared.

Some elements are superior to others and vice-versa, whenever an element is superior to another one during an attack, it gains a bonus of power during the realization of the attack.

Chains

When your attack is successful and you take the control of a card that has adjacent cards also owned by the opponent, the captured card will attempt an attack on every eligible adjacent card too. We call this behavior a chain.

Chains are limited by a chain counter determining the maximum reaction possible. The reaction will stop once it reaches this number or if all the attacks fail.

This counter is determined based on the card played, more details to come in the future.

Affinities

In addition to the field cards, we defined a system called affinities to make your own cards stronger. This system will allow you to boost the power of your cards if they are close to an allied card with an element related to them.

Example: If you own a water card next to an ally earth card, they will boost each other with a fixed amount of power value.

There are two types of affinities:

The first one is called simple and is an affinity between two cards.
The second one is called double and is an affinity between three cards.

The fact that an affinity can be triggered between cards is related to their element. In the future, we will share with you a graphic that synthesizes the elements relationships in-game.

This brief overview is a first look at the core mechanics that you will learn to play with in the Cross The Ages Trading Card Game. During the following weeks, get ready to go deeper into the details on multiple aspects of the gameplay of Cross The Ages!

About Cross The Ages

Cross The Ages (CTA) is a mobile-first collectible card game set in a dystopian clash of worlds, based on seven fantasy and science fiction novels. Players compete individually and in teams for valuable NFTs while going on Metaverse quests to discover priceless ‘easter eggs’ hidden in the novels. CTA, built on blockchain technology, offers a full value cycle from mobile gaming to desktop gaming, then finally to physical collectible cards, leveraging near-field communication technology.