Welcome to the dystopian world of Oligarchy. This guide is designed to get you started straight away.

Your Oligarchy™ starter pack contains 4 pre-constructed decks, known as ‘Life piles’. We recommend you start playing with these card decks to get a feel for the game before coming up with your own combinations and strategies. Oligarchy™ booster packs include more cards to add

to your collection. Simply shuffle your affluence and influence cards into your chosen Life piles and you are ready to go!

You start the game with 12 Power Base. Set these points on your Chosen faction’s spinner(s). These are capped at 12 so you put all your power into one faction or spread your Power base across more than one. In the example below a player has given themselves

7 Military and 5 Religious Power base to represent their 12.

OBJECT OF THE GAMETo reduce all opponents’ Power base to 0. Alternatively depleting your opponent’s Life pile so they can no longer draw a card when required to (or put a card from the top of their Life pile into their

History pile) will defeat them.

SPINNERSOligarchy™ utilises spinners to keep track of your current status. There are 2 types of spinner, ‘Power base’ and ‘Status’.

HOW TO PLAYEach turn, known as a Sphere, you must follow a se-quence of phases in a specific order, outlined here:

AFFLUENCEPlay one affluence or influence card per Sphere (a turn). Each Sphere, these cards allow you to

gain 1 Affluence point (AP) on your status spinner. One Affluence or Influence card can be discard-ed from your hand to your History pile during your discard phase to allow you to draw a card.

CARD TYPESEach Life pile contained in this box (or any you create for yourself using cards from your collection) can have a mixture of the following cards:

INFLUENCEPlay one affluence or influence card per Sphere (a turn). Each Sphere, these cards allow you to

gain 1 Influence point (IP) on your status spinner. One Affluence or Influence card can be discard-ed from your hand to your History pile during your discard phase to allow you to draw a card.

RESOURCE Can be played under any player’s possession.

Typically cheap to play cards that will help you boost your status or flexibility in some way.

INCIDENT Can be played to alter the game in some way as a one-off effect. Some incidents can be played in

all Spheres allowing you to surprise your op-ponents by playing them when least expected!

SCENARIO Can be played under any player’s possession They

stick around and usually trigger some form of positive or negative event passively or when used.

ITEM Can be played under any player’s possession They are your things and will typically affect your play statistics in some way. They can also be sold by abiding with the gain/cost of their ‘sell value’.

CHARACTER Can be played only under your possession. These

cards represent your people, they will work for you and provide you access to abilities and also allow

you to attack your opponent’s Power base directly.

PROFESSIONCan be played under any player’s possession. They are powerful cards so you may only possess one

profession at a time. They will afford you very strong abilities to help you take down your opponents.

There are some limitations to card’s you can have under your posses-sion. If a card is UNIQUE then you pay only possess 1 of that named card at any one time. If a card does not state that it is unique then there

is no limit to how many of that card you can possess.

ATTACKINGEach Sphere, you may either use your character’s abilities or attack.

If you choose to attack a players’ Power base they must take damage equal to the total current Power base level(s) of your attacking

characters in the faction(s) they choose.

If you have a character that can attack other characters, or a defending player uses a character to defend, those characters they

will damage each other. For example, if a Power base 1 character at-tacked (or was defended by) a Power base 2 character the following

would occur:

The power base 1 character would be resigned to it’s owner’s Histo-ry pile and the Power base 2 character would be reduced to 1 Pow-er base. You mark character damage with the supplied -1 markers.

CARD ANATOMYEach card has many components so the below guide helps to break down the information each card is presenting to players

POWER PLAYSWhen attacking a single opponent’s Power base with 3 characters from the same faction you may activate that faction’s Power play as

an additional effect. This occurs before defense is assigned; assuming your 3 characters are still in play and attacking. The faction Power plays are also written on your Power base spinners. If you activate

multiple power plays the attacking player decides the order in which they occur.

HOW TO STARTThere are 8 factions to ally yourself to. We have supplied you with 4 Life piles (comprised of 2 factions each) to get you started. For your

fist few games play them as instructed to get the best start.

QUICK START GUIDE

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The play zones you will use are detailed here:

POWER BASE SPINNERPower base spinners help you keep track of

your Power in each faction. They are capped at 12. If a faction reaches 0 you can no longer play cards from your hand belonging solely to that faction. When you are damaged in combat or

gain Power base this is where you keep track of it

STATUS SPINNERStatus spinners are used to help players keep track of their current Affluence and Influence points (known as AP and IP). Set them to 0 AP and 0 IP to start the game. Each player accumulates status during their own Devel-opment phase. This is done by adding the

amount of AP and IP that cards you possess can generate to your current status totals. To play a card, deduct its cost from your spinner’s totals. A card’s play cost is found in the purple and blue circles on the bottom of each card.

SETUPEach player shuffles and draws 8 cards from the top of their Life pile. If you don’t like what you see, you may shuffle all your cards back into your Life pile and redraw 8 new cards. (You may only do this once).

Roll a die or choose some random method of determining who goes first. Then follow the How to play steps in the next column.

© Entropic games Ltd. All images copyright Entropic Games Ltd 2016. Illustrative credit is present on cards. All trade-marks, card designs, spinner designs, characters’ distinctive likenesses, and the faction symbols are property of Entropic

Games Ltd.We can be contacted via our website www.oligarchygame.com

Exact cards shown may not be contained in your product and are not to scale.

If a faction reaches 0 Power base you may no longer play cards from your hand that solely require that faction to play.

Unwrap your Life piles from their cellophane wrappers, sniff the card-board, and get down to the dirty business of world domination.

The MILITARY/GOVERNMENT Life pile should play against the ECO/MEDIA Life pile and the CORPORATE/CRIME Life pile against the ILLUMINATI/RELIGIOUS Life pile for your first games. This will

illustrate the differences between those factions and how they like to counter each other. If you want to jump straight into multi-player then feel free to play any of the Life piles and ignore our sagely advice.

VSMILITARY / GOVERNMENT ECO / MEDIA

CORPORATE / CRIME

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RELIGIOUS / ILLUMINATI