How does combat work in Sonsgorod?

In Sonsgorod, victory or defeat means taking control of the circle; preserving your cards, and defeating your enemies. Let’s start with the absolute basics.

1 - CARDS ARRIVE

When combat starts in Sonsgorod, you’ll see a map unfurl, and then three types of cards will drop down onto the board.

Character cards are the ones arranged in a circle. The lighter ones belong to you the player, the darker ones are the enemy, controlled by the AI. Each character card has a number of hearts representing its health - if it loses these, it dies.

The cards over to the right of the image are action cards. These represent the things the player can make their characters do, as they fight for control of the board. There are lots of different actions, allowing the player to attack the enemy, support or heal friendly characters, move around the board, and more.

2 - ENEMY PLANS

After the cards have arrived, the enemy plans its actions for the first round.

The actions the enemy characters will take are shown with these symbols (hovering on them shows a tooltip, so you don’t need to remember what they mean). The numbers displayed over the symbols indicate the turn order.

The actions the enemy cards may take depend on the specific cards. Some are fast and dangerous, liking to move and strike across the board, others play more of a support role.

In the above scenario, the enemy destroyer got the first move, which is good for the player, as it isn’t adjacent to a player character so can’t attack. It has decided just to swap with its neighbour, which will bring it in range for an attack next round.

The torpedo boat got to plan second, and is much more mobile. After the destroyer swaps with it, it’s going to come charging across the board, then attack its new counter-clockwise neighbour.

The third destroyer thinks it will be in range of a player character after all this has unfolded, so is planning to fire a torpedo at its counter-clockwise neighbour.

3 - PLAYER PLANS

Now the player gets to choose their actions as well.

Action cards are dragged from the hand onto player character cards, to decide what each character will do during the round and in what order. Each character can play only a single action each round.

Your job as player, is to use the actions in your hand, as well as information about the enemy’s plans, to save your characters while destroying the enemy’s. The player has one important advantage: the enemy characters only get to act after all the player characters have finished acting.

The player gets as much time as they like during this phase, and the cards can be picked up, placed elsewhere and retargeted at your leisure. So there’s plenty of time to find that perfect move that destroys all the enemy characters in one go and wins you the battle without taking a single hit.

So what’s first? Enemy torpedo boats are annoying. They often plan these kinds of move-attacks which hurt your characters but also reorient the board, making it a headache to work out what effect the other enemy actions will then have. Luckily, they also only have one heart, so die in a single attack.

We drag our card “THE LONG GUNS” onto our character. This is a ranged attack which targets the space opposite on the circle (indicated by the red outline) and will remove a single heart. So that’s the torpedo boat out of commission, what next?

Next we have a conundrum. After the torpedo boat is destroyed, there’s still a destroyer threatening one of our characters. There isn’t a good way to avoid that damage with the cards we have right now, so we’ll just have to suck it up and lose a heart (we have a card, “FIRE CREWS”, which will let us heal the damage in a future turn).

But our other characters can still make themselves useful. We drag an action, “THE TELESCOPE” onto the one in the middle of our formation. This is a support card (indicated by the blue targeting outlines) which grants the acting character or one adjacent a buff that will enhance the damage of their next attack. It means one of our characters will be able to destroy an enemy card in a single hit on the next turn.

The last card we’ll playing is “GATHER STRENGTH”. I’ll leave this one for a future post but in brief: it’s always in your hand, and you have to play it to get action cards back into your hand once they’ve been discarded. If you’re not playing this card often, you’ll quickly run out of actions and your characters will be sitting ducks.

4 - IT ALL PLAYS OUT

So now we’ve finished planning, we ding the bell and it all plays out. Here’s the result after the fireworks are over.

The end result is, one lost character for the enemy, one lost heart for the player, one buff gained for the player. Not the best trade, but decent enough given the state of the board.

It all happened exactly as we anticipated - Sonsgorod is designed to be almost entirely deterministic, with very sparing use of randomness in abilities (associated only with certain specific upgrades to your cards - more on those in a future post).

5 - AND ON TO VICTORY (OR DEFEAT)

And that’s pretty much all there is to it. The process repeats, usually with some more enemy characters arriving in later rounds, to make sure it doesn’t get too easy for you.

You win when all the enemy characters are destroyed. You lose if that happens to you first.

Thanks for reading! I hope it was interesting. Remember you can already wishlist the game on steam, and on the off chance you’ve not yet joined the mailing list, it will be the best way to keep up with the game’s progress and play early, if you so choose.