The First Turn

Get your playing piece⁴ and place it on the Institute (unless your Group Information Sheet specifically states an alternate starting square).

On your first turn, begin by asking the Banker for your Income. Typically, you will get your Income every turn, but you must remember to ask for it. Then decide whether you are leaving your starting square in a clockwise or counter-clockwise direction. Once you’ve chosen this direction, you’ll maintain it until some game effect transports you to a different point on the board or until something occurs that specifically reverses your direction as a game effect.

If you begin at the Institute, you’ll note that leaving in a counter-clockwise direction might take you through one of the six large squares around the perimeter of the board (the Mailbox). These larger squares are the Major Squares, and you have the ability to stop at these squares to do business. To do so, you simply need to declare your intent to stop, although you must make this declaration in advance of your roll. In order to know whether you want to stop at one of the Major Squares, you’ll need to know what it does, so now might be a good time to look up the Mailbox in Glorious Progress. Glorious Progress is a guidebook to the board: it explains many of the squares and what they do. Note that for convenience, a quick guide to the Major Squares is printed on the back cover of Glorious Progress.

Once you’ve declared direction and whether you plan to stop, you’ll follow this up by making a Movement roll. On a typical turn, you’ll roll one six-sided die, and advance that many spaces on the board. If you declared a stop and you get to the Major Square you wanted to stop at, you go that far and then stop. Once you’ve finished moving, simply obey the instructions on the square that you land on. If these are not immediately clear to you, or if the square doesn’t have instructions, look up the square in Glorious Progress: the squares that require additional explanation are listed there alphabetically.

Here’s an example of a typical turn, for review: our first player is Alice. Alice is playing the Living Dead, so she has an Income of 100. She asks the Banker for her Income, and receives it.

She hasn’t moved yet, so she doesn’t have an existing direction. This means she needs to declare one. Hmmm... does she want to try to get to the Mailbox? She looks it up in Glorious Progress and reads the description to the other players. Turns out it’s a place where you can order more Catalog items. She just bought a bunch of stuff in the Outfitting Phase, and she wants to try to rebuild her supply of Scrip, so she decides to go the other way, clockwise. She has to declare this to the other players, out loud. There are no Major Squares approaching, so she rolls the die. She rolls a one, which puts her on “Newspaper’s All Wet.” This adds six to Alice’s Stress: that’s pretty self-explanatory, so she doesn’t need to look it up in Glorious Progress. This ends Alice’s turn.

The second player, Bob, is playing the Church. His Income is 160; he asks the Banker for it and receives it.

He’s a bit frightened of Alice (she’s a freakin’ zombie, after all), so he declares that he wants to head counter-clockwise. He has a little more money than Alice and he decides that he wouldn’t mind blowing some of it on more stuff, so he declares that he’ll stop at the Mailbox. He throws his Movement roll and rolls a 6: he goes as far as the Mailbox and then stops to purchase a few things there. Since he declared a stop, his turn ends at the Mailbox, and he does not move on.

Alice will continue moving clockwise around the board on her next turn, and Bob will continue moving counter-clockwise.

More details about exactly what happens on an average turn are covered in the section titled “On Your Turn,” beginning on page 9. You can read through it now, or just begin playing and refer to it when questions arise.

Footnote 4: If you purchased the Deluxe Set, you’ll have a supply of pins that correspond to the 21 Groups, which are intended to be used as pawns. Otherwise, use pawns from your other games, or miniatures, or small toys... use your imagination.