Rules

Welcome to the online Inevitable rules repository!

As of September 5, 2010, there are two hyperlinked rule sets available: The Citizen's Guide and Glorious Progress.

The Citizen's Guide tells you everything you need to know to play Inevitable: The object of the game, the rules of the game, and so on. There's even a quick start guide at the very beginning.

Glorious Progress provides in-depth explanations for certain spaces on the board. Some spaces are very simple and tell you to draw a FATE card or increase/decrease a statistic. Other spaces are more versatile or complex, like The Mailbox or HappyDale Sanitarium. When you land on a space whose function isn't immediately obvious, look it up in Glorious Progress.

You may also be interested in downloading a copy of the Catalog or Personal Data Form. The free demo PDF will be available for download when the Deluxe version is available for purchase.

The Exalted Decider Trophy is an extra-special online-only rules section that we added after PAX East 2011. If you (or someone you know) won one of the Inevitable demos we ran, there are extra-special rules here just for you. You should check it out.

Citizen's Guide

Welcome to the online version of The Citizen's Guide! This helpful resource tells you everything you need to know to start playing Inevitable quickly, and contains all the detailed rules you need to become a true Inevitable master.

The hyperlinked list below is the Table of Contents.

The Story So Far

Our story begins with the end of the world.

What caused it? No one knows. Robot uprising? Rogue nukes? Rapidly mutating super-virus? Sharks with thumbs? Some say it was all of the above. Regardless: just a few years down the road from the moment you’re reading this, nothing was left of global civilization but static, ash, and roaches.

There was, however, a Plan B: a top secret initiative orchestrated by men and women with code names and access to classified budgets. Men and women who took it upon themselves to make the Backup Copy of Western Civilization.

Foreseeing the very real possibility of catastrophic global collapse, these men and women created a self-aware supercomputer– HappyCOM-9 –and provided it with a blueprint for a massive reboot of society. This blueprint included a vast archive, intended to document the most lasting achievements of our culture, so that they could be recreated from scratch when the time came. They gathered DNA from the world’s great minds and leaders, so that humanity’s numbers could be restocked with clones. They allowed HappyCOM-9 to manufacture a legion of gentle robotic helpers, wise philosopher-kings designed to lead Humanity 2.0 boldly out of a shattered future and towards a shiny new tomorrow.

It was a great idea. It should have worked. But something went wrong. The apoca- lypse didn’t arrive as scheduled. There was some... lag time. And during that lag time, people just got bored. The visionar- ies who had set it up figured that they were done, and moved on to doing other visionary-type stuff. The day-to-day maintenance of HappyCOM-9 got handed off to grad students, interns, and slackers. This motley group deleted key works of Western Civics out of the archive so they could have more room for viral videos, downloaded movies, and porn. They moved the DNA of Nobel Prize winners out of cryogenic storage so that they could use the space to chill beers.

So when the day finally came, and the interns and the visionaries alike went down in flames (or possibly disappeared into the maw of the hyper-intelligent sharks), HappyCOM-9 was ready as ever, but... somewhat confused. It no longer knew what the civilization it was rebuilding was really supposed to look like or even how civilization was really supposed to work. But it had learned one thing from the interns: a willingness to wing it. And so it took Western Civilization and it winged the hell out of it.

When it was done, there was a City.

The City that emerged didn’t look entirely right, and people seemed to die a lot in it, but HappyCOM-9 didn’t care. It was proud of the world it had made. It would never let the organisms screw it up. It turned its robotic philosopher-kings into a crack team of enforcers designed to monitor and police the behavior of the clones who were now populating the City. It encased itself within a ring of fortress walls and from there, it ruled.

But deep down inside, it remembered that there were supposed to be Elections. That Elections were important, for some reason. And so, as Year Zero drew to a close, HappyCOM-9 announced that there would be an Election, and that any group that wanted to nominate a candidate to run against it could do so.

You, dear player, are one of those candi- dates. In order to succeed, you will need to best your opponents, avoid HappyCOM-9’s defenses and the Clone Police, weather the twists and turns of cruel fate, and, uh, not die. Or at least not die too often.

Good luck!

Quick Start

Don’t be intimidated by the size of this rulebook! You can start playing Inevitable just by remembering one basic goal and one basic action.

(You may also enjoy watching our quick start video.)

The Basic Goal

See that yellow thing in the middle of the board? That’s HappyCOM-9, the computer that maintains totalitarian rule over the world of Inevitable. Your goal is to defeat it in an Election. You play a member of a Group—basically a political party—and you have three primary Statistics: your Power, your Influence, and your Intelligence. You make progress towards the goal by making these numbers get higher.

The Basic Action

The basic action in a game of Inevitable is very simple: on your turn, roll a six-sided die, move the number of squares indicated, and take the results of the square you land on. It also helps if you ask for some money from the Bank every turn (your Income). If you can remember that, you can really figure everything else out as you go, although you’ll have a better sense of the strategic dimension of the game if you read all of the “Starting Play” section, and before you can get set up you’ll need to read “Setting Up”...

Setting Up (Quick Version)

The game contains a supply of 21 Group Information Sheets. If this is your first time playing, remove all the Groups except ACME, the Church, the Famous International Playboys, the Living Dead, and the Time Travelers. Distribute one of these randomly to each player, and give everyone a playing piece that corresponds to their Group.

The game also comes with a supply of Personal Data Forms, which will be your score-sheet for the game. Take one, and copy your starting Statistics (Power, Intelligence, Influence) onto this sheet. Your Power and Power Maximum are the same at the start of the game. You also have an Income, which you can copy to the “Income” area of the Form, and a Stress level, which starts at zero.

In the “Notes” section of the Form, add together your Power, your Intelligence, and your Influence. The sum of these three numbers are your current Base Votes. HappyCOM-9 also has a certain number of Base Votes. For your first game, HappyCOM-9 has 2,000 Base Votes. Re-calculate your Base Votes every once in a while throughout the game: when they get to a point where they’re above 2,000, you are beginning to have good odds of winning the game. (At that time, read the section on “How To Win The Game.”) Put simply: anything that brings those three Statistics up moves you towards winning the game. Your Stress, by contrast, is a Statistic you’ll want to keep low. The “All About You” section on page 6 explains the differences between the Statistics.

Your Group also has a Special Ability that allows you to bend the rules of the game in various ways. You can review this on the Group Information Sheet. Take a minute to read through it now. When everyone is done, explain your Special Ability to your opponents.

Select one player to be the Banker. The Banker gives each player a copy of the in-game Catalog and some starting cash— you get $360 plus your Group’s Income. Typically, you may spend any or all of this on Catalog items before the game begins. If this is your first game, purchase the “Outfitting Phase Special,” which is printed right on the front of the Catalog. Write down the Possessions you purchased in the Possessions column of your Form. You can review the rules on those Possessions later. You will continue to get your Income throughout the game: every time you move, if you remember to ask the Banker. You’ll also get more opportunities to buy things as the game proceeds.

Starting Play (Quick Version)

Place your playing piece on the Institute square. Then, each player rolls a die. The lowest roller will go first, and play will go around the table clockwise.

When it’s your turn, roll one six-sided die and advance that many spaces on the board. Before you roll the first time, declare whether you are traveling clockwise or counter-clockwise. (You’ll continue heading around the board that way until something happens to change your direction.)

In general, you roll the die, you move your piece, and you obey the instructions on the square that you land on. If these are not immediately clear to you, you can look up the square in Glorious Progress, a guidebook to the board.

Look at the outer ring of the board and note that six squares are larger than the others. These are the Major Squares, and they are the key points of business in the game. As you get close to each one, look it up in the Glorious Progress supplement and see if it’s going to be beneficial. If so, you can declare, before rolling for Movement, that you would like to stop at the Major Square. If you roll higher than the number required to reach the square, you stop in the square and do not complete the rest of your move.

Some Quick Strategy

Lots of things can help you raise your Statistics, like Possessions from the Catalog (which you can order when you're at the Mailbox), and “Holdable” FATE cards in the card deck. Holdable cards are marked with an icon of a hand holding three cards:

If you draw one, “hold it” until you need it, and keep it secret from the other players.

There are things that can hurt you, too, including your opponents. However, the first three rounds of the game are designated as “HappyTime.” During HappyTime, you may not attempt to harm (“Instigate”) your opponents. After that, however, it’s on. There are a lot of different ways to hurt other people in this game (see “Hurting Other People”). One common method is Combat, which is something you might want to think about if you have a higher Whup-Ass Factor than other players. (To calculate your current Whup- Ass Factor, use the Combat Workspace on your form, or follow the example that begins on page 15.)

These Quick Start rules have simplified some rules and omitted some others, and at some point someone in your play group should read the rest of this rulebook. But for now you can get started! As questions arise, you can look up the relevant page in the Table of Contents or Index.

Enjoy!

Getting Started: Full Version

The sections below explain how to start a game of Inevitable, step by step. Enjoy!

Setting Up: A Checklist

Before the first player can take a turn, you’ll need to do these four things:

Each of these are covered in detail below, and at the end are some basic instructions about what happens on the first turn.

Select A Duration

Before you start, agree on the number of Base Votes you will allot to HappyCOM-9. This, in large part, will determine the length of your game of Inevitable.

In the Short Game, HappyCOM-9 begins the game with 2,000 Base Votes; this produces a game that lasts about two hours, a little longer if you’re new to the game. You can also play what we call the Epic Game by increasing this number to 3,000, which will yield a game of around three hours, or possibly longer.

There are other factors that contribute to the length of a game as well, including the number of players and their relative level of familiarity with the game. For this reason, we strongly suggest that you play the Short Game if you are playing with five or more players, or if you are new to the game.

The “Election Day” Variant

If you only have a specific window of time available,¹ you may prefer playing an optional variant we call “Election Day.” When this rule is in effect, you and your play group simply agree upon a specific point in time at which the game will end. In this variant, the Inevitable endgame (“the Election”) triggers at the deadline. You will still need to assign HappyCOM-9 a certain number of Base Votes in order for the Election to occur. For more on how the Election works, you can jump ahead to the section on “How to Win the Game,” on page 21.

You may also activate the Election Day rules at any point in the Short or Epic Game if all players (including those who are temporarily out of play) unanimously agree to do so. (A few more details on the Election Day variant can be found under “ Notes on Variants,” beginning on page 23.)

Footnote 1: If you are tight enough on time that you have less than an hour or two for the game, you should probably play Inevitable another time. See, even in the “Election Day” variant we still recommend assigning at least 2,000 Base Votes to HappyCOM-9, and even the most fleet-footed players will have difficulty defeating HappyCOM-9 in under an hour. We eagerly await the speedrun videos that will prove us wrong.

Give Each Player A Group

This game comes with a supply of 21 Group Information Sheets contained in a handsome sleeve. Determine which player is going to go first, using a method that appeals to you (we roll both six-sided dice and force the lowest roller to go first). Present this player with all the Group Information Sheets, face down, and have him or her select one at random. Group selection proceeds clockwise. If you draw the Clone Police, re-draw and set the Clone Police aside (for now).

Once you have selected a Group, take a moment to review the sheet. You’ll see that the bulk of the sheet is taken up with a description of your Group’s Special Ability. This Ability allows your Group to bend, break, or re-arrange the rules of the game in various ways. This Ability is what truly makes your Group unique and special: it will most likely form the backbone of your strategy for the game. It’s a good idea to review this Ability now. (If you’re a new player, and your Ability doesn’t quite make sense to you yet, but you want to start playing, we advise that you look up any terms that perplex you in the Index, rather than reading straight through this manual.)

Once all players have a Group, each player, starting with the first player and proceeding clockwise, declares whether they will keep their Group or discard it and take a second randomly-selected Group. Once a Group is discarded, it is no longer eligible for play. If you don’t like the second Group you get, that’s tough, because you’re stuck with it.

When Group choices are settled, explain your Group’s Special Ability to the other players.

Transcribe Your Statistics

Also listed on that Group Information Sheet are your Group’s starting Statistics.

The Statistics are Power, Intelligence, Influence, Income, and Stress. (The Group Information Sheets don’t list your starting Stress, because all Groups start with zero Stress.)

Take a Personal Data Form from the game’s supply of them² and copy the starting Statistics of your Group into the relevant spaces on the Form.

The three main Statistics are Power, Intelligence, and Influence. These will fluctuate during the game, and you’ll use the Form to keep track of them. The really central thing to know about them is that Power, Intelligence, and Influence are the Statistics that measure how well you’re doing in the game: the more points you have in these three categories, the better you’re doing, and the closer these Statistics are to zero (no Statistic can ever be below zero) the worse off you are. Therefore, you have two main goals within a game of Inevitable: improving your Statistics, and preventing your opponents from improving theirs.

We’ll provide more details about the Statistics, including Stress and Income, in “All About You,” the next section in these rules.

Footnote 2: Don’t worry about using these up. You can download a free PDF of them through our online Catalog, at bit.ly/invtblctlg.

Complete the Outfitting Phase

The game comes with a few copies³ of the Catalog, which contains various items you can purchase to provide in-game benefits.

Take those out and begin to look them over now.

Determine one player to be the Banker. The Banker organizes the Scrip that comes with the game into a Bank. Out of this Bank, the Banker pays every player a starting stipend: their Income (which is listed on their Group Information Sheet) plus $360.

You may spend any or all of your stipend on Catalog items before the game begins during a special period we call the Outfitting Phase.

Any portion of your starting stipend not spent during this phase may be kept as “walk-around cash,” to be used later. Even though you get your Income almost every turn, we still recommend beginning your first turn with around $100 of walk-around cash on hand, so as to avoid the danger of being driven into Bankruptcy. (See page 21.)

During this phase, you can buy something from the Catalog by simply declaring what you’re buying, and paying the Banker from your starting stipend. Copy whatever you bought into the Possessions column of the Personal Data Form. You don’t need to declare everything all at once, but when you’ve made up your mind that you’re not going to buy anything else, you should say so.

If you’re a new player who is eager to get started, we recommend purchasing the Outfitting Phase Special, printed right on the front of the Catalog. It gives you three popular Catalog items at a low introductory price, and purchasing it helps to get the game moving quickly.

The Outfitting Phase lasts until all players have spent their entire stipend or until each player has decided not to buy anything else.

Don’t fret: you’ll have opportunities to purchase more items from the Catalog later. Your ability to do so will be a little bit limited, however. Typically, you’re only permitted to purchase Catalog items from specific spots on the board (the Mailbox or the Convenience Stores). Certain Possessions also allow you to place Catalog orders and certain Groups can order items as part of their Special Ability.

Footnote 3: These get handled a lot during game play, and may eventually fall apart. You can download a PDF of the Catalog for home printing by visiting bit.ly/invtblctlg.

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.

All About You

All About You

This section discusses the Personal Data Form and the Statistics, Power, Influence, Intelligence, Income, Stress, the Combat Workspaces, the Election Workspace, and Possessions.

The Personal Data Form and The Statistics

Picture: The Personal Data Form

Most of the Data Form is taken up by blanks to chart your changing Statistics, which will each be handled briefly below.

All information on the Data Form is considered part of the public record; this means that if a space exists on the Data Form for you to record particular pieces of personal data, then accurate and current information about that data must be provided to any player who asks. Note, however, that anything that the Data Form does not provide space for documenting can be kept secret, including the amount of money you have at any given time, or the nature of any Holdable cards in your hand.

The Statistics:

In brief: the three main Statistics tracked by the Form—Power, Intelligence, and Influence—measure how well you’re doing in the game. The three of them, added together, represent your Base Votes: the number of votes guaranteed to you in an Election. Roughly speaking, the higher your Base Votes are, the closer you are to winning the game. (For a closer look, see the rules pertaining to the Election Workspace on page 9, or the rules pertaining to the Election itself on page 21.)

Some helpful details about each Statistic are covered below. But, in a nutshell: each of the main Statistics carries equal weight in the Election, so anything that raises those Statistics pushes you closer to victory. However, there is a key difference between the three: the cost of bringing them up. Influence is the cheapest Statistic to increase, but it’s also the most unstable—it’s easy for your opponents to bring back down. Intelligence, by contrast, is the most expensive to increase, but it tends to remain more stable and there’s no easy way that your opponents can deprive you of it. Power is in the middle: it’s fairly expensive, but in order for your opponents to bring it down they typically have to defeat you in Combat— and a higher Power makes you more difficult to defeat in Combat. (For more details, see the section on the Combat Workspaces, or the extended Combat example beginning on page 15.)

Now that we’ve covered the Statistics in brief, let’s look at each of them in a little more depth.

Power and Power Maximum

Brute strength, physical fitness, endurance, how fast you can throw a baseball, vitality, shine, sexual prowess—all of these are measured by the Power Statistic. Power is important because it helps you whup the asses of your opponents and it contributes to your Base Votes, which determine how well you’ll do against HappyCOM-9 in an Election. Also, it keeps you alive: a low Power means that you’re staggering around the City on death’s door—in fact, if your Power ever drops to zero, you Die. If this happens, you should jump ahead to “Death,” as covered in the “Things That Suck” section of these rules (page 19), to see what to do about it. You should expect your Power to go up and down a lot during the game. 350 points is about average to start with.

Your Power Maximum is a measure of how healthy you can potentially be at a given moment. At the beginning of the game, your Power and Power Maximum are equal (but that will change). For now, simply note that no game effect can raise your Power above your Power Maximum.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that your Power Maximum itself can go up. The most common means of increasing your Power Maximum is by eating a certain potted meat product—you can find it in the front of the Catalog.

Intelligence

Can you cite Maxwell’s Equations? Calculate the trajectory of a nuclear missile? Hack? Aim a rifle and figure out how to get the safety off? Write something in iambic pentameter? Do you simply see things differently than the automatons that surround you? If all of the above apply, you’ve got a high Intelligence Statistic. Like Power, a high Intelligence also helps you defeat opponents in Combat (only less so) and it helps you negotiate a host of minor game effects. Like each of the three main Statistics, Intelligence also contributes to your Base Votes, which determine how well you’ll do if you run against HappyCOM-9 in an Election. A low Intelligence renders you susceptible to some nasty game effects, but you can wander around with a zero Intelligence and still basically function. Intelligence builds slowly, but has the advantage of being more stable than the other Statistics. An Intelligence of 500 is about average human Intelligence.

If you want to use the Catalog to improve your Intelligence, purchase a Diploma By Mail. Your Intelligence can also be raised by a few board effects and a few cards in the FATE deck.

Influence

Connections and ties of the political, commercial, and public varieties. Among other things, the Influence Statistic measures your clout with the famous, your position in the social registers of the rich, and the sway you hold over a mindless, sheep-like public. Influence doesn’t help you very much during general game play, but just like Power and Intelligence, it contributes to your Base Votes. A low Influence means that you’re either unknown or universally reviled, but you’ll be able to function perfectly well for long periods of time even if your Influence is zero. Influence is cheap, and so are the methods of depriving players of it, so you should expect it to go up and down considerably during the game. About 300 points is average for a fresh new face on the political scene.

The most common way to increase your Influence is by stopping at the Network to run a Publicity Campaign, although you can also do it through the Catalog by purchasing Celebrity Endorsements. Full rules on the Network can be found in the Glorious Progress supplement.

Income

Your Income is a Statistic representing the amount of money that the bosses of your Group allot you each turn, and it probably won’t change much over the course of the game. A high Income makes it easier for you to survive and improve; it permits you to buy more powerful goods and services, and correspondingly enables you to more easily crush all those who stand against you. Income has no direct bearing, however, on the votes you need to win the Election.

An Income of $120 is considered middle-class by Inevitable standards. Your Income might end up considerably higher, but HappyCOM-9 has designed it so that no City ATM will release more than $300 per transaction. This means that you cannot collect more than $300 in Income on a given turn, even if your Income Statistic is higher than 300.

Stress and Stress Tolerance

Your Stress measures your psychic wellness. The more miserable and unhappy you are, the higher your Stress. You’ll notice that your Group Information Sheet (probably) contains no information on it about Stress—that’s because (almost) all Groups start with the same amount of Stress—zero—and the same Stress Tolerance Level—twenty. Stress is different from the other Statistics in that you want to keep your Stress as low as possible, and your opponents’ Stress as high as possible. (That’s what those Dead Raccoons in the Catalog are for.) The closer your Stress is to your Stress Tolerance Level, the closer you are to cracking up. If your Stress ever exceeds your Stress Tolerance Level, refer to “Insanity” under the “Things That Suck” section of these rules on page 20 to see what to do about it. Your Stress will vacillate throughout the game; your Stress Tolerance Level will probably remain at twenty.

The Combat Workspaces

The Combat Workspaces are areas where you can calculate what we call your “Whup-Ass Factor.” Your Whup-Ass Factor is a measure of your ability to, well, to whup another Player’s ass. As you can see from the Combat Workspace, you can derive your Whup-Ass Factor from your Power and Intelligence. Specifically, your Whup-Ass Factor is the sum of two numbers—your Power, divided by ten (round down) plus your Intelligence, divided by 100 (round down).

Sometimes, in the heat of battle, people get perplexed by the mechanics of dividing and rounding, so the Combat Workspace instructs you to simply drop the final digit from your Power and the final two digits from your Intelligence, and add the two resultant numbers. For instance, a player with a Power of 300 would drop the last digit to get 30. If this same player had an Intelligence of 750, she would drop the last two digits and get seven. Adding these two numbers would give her a Whup-Ass Factor of 37.

The player with the highest Whup- Ass Factor is the player most likely to be able to mop up the bar with all the other players, although a non-trivial element of chance always exists. (You’ll note that the Combat Workspaces also contain an area to record die rolls.) The rest of the details on how to use these Workspaces are covered in the section on “Combat” in the “Hurting Other People,” segment of these rules, beginning on page 14.

The Election Workspace

Way down at the bottom of the form is another Workspace, the Election Workspace. This area is designed to help you calculate your Base Votes. Your Base Votes are how many votes you are guaranteed should you run in an Election against HappyCOM-9. You can derive the number of Base Votes you have at any given time at any point by adding your Power, Intelligence, and Influence Statistics.

If you run against HappyCOM-9 in the end- of-game Election, you will generate a random three-digit number (000-999) to represent a number of unpredictable “Swing Votes” that go to you in the Election. You will add this number to your Base Votes to yield your Total Votes. Note that the Election Workspace has a slot for each of these figures.

In order to win the game, you need to have more Total Votes than HappyCOM-9 in the Election. In the Short Game, HappyCOM-9 has 2,000 Base Votes. HappyCOM-9 will also capture a random number of Swing Votes (again between 000 and 999). The important thing to note here is that when your Base Votes equal HappyCOM-9’s, you have a fifty-fifty chance of winning the Election and the game. If you have 1000 more Base Votes than HappyCOM-9 has, you have an almost-certain “lock” on the Election, and you should definitely attempt to move to the center of the board and end the game. One restriction applies: there is no theoretical limit to how high your Statistics can get, but in the Short Game, no single Statistic may provide over 1,500 points towards your Base Votes. This means that if, for instance, your Influence was 2,100 at the time of the Election, you may still only count it as though it were “capped” at 1,500.

The Epic Game works similarly, except HappyCOM-9’s Base Votes are 3,000 instead of 2,000, meaning that you should get to at least 3,000 if you want a fair shot in the Election. Also, in the Epic Game, no single Statistic may provide over 2,000 points towards your Base Votes.

All the rest of the specifics on ending the game or triggering the Election can be located in the section called “How To Win The Game” on page 21.

Remember, you can figure out what your Base Votes are at any point in the game without using the Election Workspace: simply add your current Power, Influence, and Intelligence. You should do this whenever you want an idea of how close you are to winning, or when an opponent asks you to.

Possessions

The Possessions section is a section to record products that you’ve purchased from the Catalog. If you purchased anything during the Outfitting Phase, you may already have things recorded here. You can learn more about Possessions by referring to the Catalog, or by checking out the two sections about Possessions on page 12 (Mailable Possessions and Using Possessions).

On Your Turn

Here's what you can do (and what can happen to you) on your turn...

Normal Turn Sequence of Phases

Here’s what a normal turn looks like, although not all of these steps will occur during all (or even most) turns. Note that a simplified version of the Turn Sequence is printed on the back of your Group Sheet.

1. Declare Direction or Stops (if applicable)

Direction

On your first turn, you will declare whether you’re going to begin heading around the board in a clockwise or counter-clockwise direction. Once you’ve declared a direction, you maintain that direction unless it’s changed by a game effect (any of the squares that say “Reverse Direction” for instance) or until a game effect transports you to another point on the board (being moved to Jail by a “Go To Jail” square, for instance). If you were transported into a square by a game effect, instead of by rolling and moving, you may leave that square in either direction. When this is the case, you must declare out loud which direction you are going to move in before you roll the dice for Movement. If you fail to do so, the other players may demand that you declare your direction and then re-roll your Movement roll. Once you have begun to move in a particular direction, you’re back to maintaining that direction until it’s changed or disrupted by another game effect.

Stops and Major Squares

Certain squares on the game board are considerably larger than others—these are the Major Squares. The Major Squares are places where you’ll frequently want to conduct business or perform tasks. In the core Inevitable game, the six Major Squares are: The Institute, The Mailbox, The Network, County Hospital, HappyDale Sanitarium, and Jail. Using these Major Squares effectively is one of the keys to success in this game. Each Major Square is explained in depth in Glorious Progress, and you’ll note that there’s a Quick Reference to the Major Squares on the back of it.

If you wish to use a Major Square that you are approaching, you may declare, before you roll the die for Movement, that you plan to stop there. If you do, and the result of your Movement roll is equal to or greater than what you need to roll to reach the square in question, you only move your piece as far as the square. Then you stop, and may perform your task or conduct your business. Stops may only be declared if you have “legitimate business” to perform; you must use the square if you declare a stop there.

2. Challenge Opponents to Combat (and allow opponents to challenge you)

If, on your turn, it looks like you could reach or move through a square inhabited by another player, you may want to consider challenging them to Combat. Compare Whup-Ass Factors, weigh the pros and cons, engage your opponent in petty extortion schemes, but eventually— before you roll for Movement—make a declaration as to whether you intend to do battle with them. If you fail to declare it before your roll, you can’t fight that opponent, even if you reach or pass through her or his square.

If it looks like you might reach a square inhabited by another player, not only do you have the ability to challenge him or her, but you must also allow him or her the opportunity to challenge you⁵. If they want to call you out, they must make the challenge before you roll for Movement. To be fair, you should give them an opportunity to declare it, or, better yet, ask them straight-out if they intend to attack you—trying to rush through this phase is a cheap strategy.

During your Movement phase, if you roll equal to or higher than than the number necessary to reach the square of an opponent who has challenged you, you must stop in his or her square, and the Combat is officially Instigated. If you’ve been stopped by an opponent in a Major Square, you may take the effects of the square before beginning Combat. If you are stopped by an opponent in any Minor Square, you ignore any effects of the square. Instead jump ahead to following the “Combat” rules in the “Hurting Other People” section on page 14.

You may also challenge an opponent to Combat if you are starting your turn in the same square as that opponent. Doing so, however, means that you are choosing to fight instead of moving, so you will need to pass the Movement phase of your turn (see below). If you are passing your Movement phase at a Major Square, you may make use of that square before Combat initiates.

If you begin your turn in the same square as an opponent and do not wish to initiate Combat, your opponent may not prevent you from leaving. If you plan to pass your Movement phase, though, you’re fair game, and you should offer your opponent the opportunity to challenge you.

Footnote 5: Only one Combat may occur on any player’s turn. Every once in a while, the possibility arises where more than one player wants to challenge an opponent to Combat on a given turn. In these instances, Combat Priority is determined by the order that the potential for them arises during the Move phase of the turn. For instance, you want to fight Alice, four squares away, so you challenge her. But Bob is between you and Alice, and he’s only two squares away. He challenges you. You have to fight Bob, since his potential to fight you arises before your potential to fight Alice. (He’s closer.) Combats initiated between players beginning a turn in the same square are always awarded Combat Priority.

If Combat Priority is impossible to determine in this fashion because more than one player is already inhabiting the same square, Combat Priority goes to the opponent with the highest Intelligence. If a Combat with Priority ends up being called off (see page 11), re-figure Priority among remaining declared Combats.

3. Roll and Move (or Don’t)

Normally, if you wish to move, you roll one six-sided die and advance that many spaces on the board. In most cases this is pretty self-explanatory: you roll, you move, you proceed to the “Take Board Effects” phase of your turn, covered in Step 4, below.

Some exceptions:

Declared stops. If you’ve declared a stop at a Major Square, and you roll equal to or higher than the number required to reach the square, simply move your piece to the Major Square, stop, and proceed to the “Take Board Effects” phase of your turn.
Declared Combat. If an opponent has challenged you to Combat—or if you have challenged an opponent—you must reach his or her square before the Combat will initiate. But if you do reach that square, you must stop.

Once stopped, you and your opponent have one final opportunity to engage in the negotiation that we call “Wheeling and Dealing.” The two of you might strike a bargain that causes you to mutually agree to call off the Combat. (See an example of this on page 13.) If this happens, you must complete your Movement phase as normal: continue as far as your die roll would have taken you, and proceed to Step Four, “Take Board Effects,” below. However, if no suitable non-violent method of conflict resolution can be found, then the Combat is officially Instigated: proceed to the “Combat” rules in the “Hurting Other People” section (page 14).
Passing. You may also choose to pass the Movement phase of your turn entirely. If you pass the Movement phase while stopped on a Major Square, you may conduct business at that Square as though you had landed or stopped on it. If you pass a turn voluntarily while stopped at a Minor Square—to initiate Combat, for instance—the square has no effect on you that turn. If you pass the Movement phase of your turn, you may not collect Income.

If you are voluntarily passing the Movement phase of your turn while on a square inhabited by an opponent, you may challenge (or re-challenge) that opponent to Combat, and you must give that opponent the opportunity to challenge (or re-challenge) you. These instances take effect in exactly the same way as they would if you had rolled for Movement and then stopped at your opponent. If you are passing your Movement phase at a Major Square, you may make use of that square before Combat initiates.

4. Take Board Effects or Resolve Combat

Typically, once you’ve Moved, you simply obey the instructions on the square that you land on or have stopped at. If the instructions are not immediately clear to you, or if the square doesn’t have instructions, look it up in Glorious Progress.

As mentioned above, if you have passed the Movement phase of your turn on a Minor Square, you cannot take the effects of that square. If you have passed the Movement phase of your turn at a Major Square, you may use the Major Square as though you had just landed or stopped there.

If you have stopped moving as a result of becoming embroiled in Combat (or passed your Movement phase to engage in Combat), you do not take the effects of the square you’re on: instead, jump ahead to the “Combat” rules found on page 14 and follow them. One exception: if this Combat is occurring on a Major Square, the player whose turn it is may use the Major Square before the Combat initiates. In some cases, this may mean that the Combat is narrowly averted (if you check yourself into the Sanitarium, for instance).

5. Declare the End of Your Turn

When you have completed the above sequence, and when you have done any of the “Other Things You Can Do On Your Turn” (see below) that you wish to do—most importantly, collecting Income—declare, out loud, that your turn is completed. This helps to keep the game moving.

Other Things You Can Do On Your Turn

There are some other things that you can do on your turn. These things may be done between any two phases of your turn. Unless specifically stated elsewhere, these things may not be done during any of your turn’s phases (in the middle of Combat, for instance) or if you are out of play (described below).

Collect Income

You may receive your Income every turn, if you remember to ask for it. When you ask the Banker for your Income, the Banker will provide you with an amount of Inevitable Scrip equal to your current Income Statistic. ATMs in the City will not dispense more than $300 at once, so even if your Income has somehow gotten to a point where it exceeds $300, you may only collect $300 per turn. Once you have declared the end of your turn, you may not (“I forgot”) collect your Income. And, finally, if a player, caught up in all the fun, cannot remember whether or not they have already collected their Income on a turn, all other players, including the Banker, may refuse to answer the hapless player’s queries. In these instances, the player receives no Income, regardless of whether they already collected or not. And remember: if you passed (or will pass) the Movement phase of your turn, do not collect Income.

Mail Mailable Possessions

You can mail certain Catalog items to other players. If a Possession can be mailed, the Catalog description will include instructions on how and when to mail it. On your turn, you may mail up to three of these “mailable” items. You do not need to be at the Mailbox in order to mail items to an opponent, it just needs to be your turn. Once you’ve declared that you’re mailing an item, it is immediately received by your opponent.

Mailing an item is different from “giving” an item away to an opponent. The mailable Possessions are generally unpleasant traps, and mailing them is simply the means of forcing an opponent to spring the trap. The recipient does not add them to his or her own list of Possessions unless explicitly specified elsewhere (as in the case of the Fruitcake, for instance).

Mailing an item to an opponent nearly always counts as an Instigation, and certain merciful rules limit and restrict the ways you can Instigate your opponents. Refer to the “Hurting Other People” section for the full scoop.

Things You Can Do At Any Time

There are also some things you can do at any time, including in the middle of a turn’s phase, and including during another player’s turn.

Use Your Special Ability

In general, most Groups can use their Special Ability at any time. Certain restrictions, which differ from Group to Group, occasionally apply, so refer to your Group Information Sheet for the exact particulars.

Use Your Possessions

The Catalog typically explains the circumstances under which Possessions can be used. Unless otherwise specified, however, you should treat Possessions as being useable at any time. You may use any number of Possessions at one time, unless the rules pertaining to the Possession indicate differently. (For instance, you can only use one Combat weapon at a time, and you can’t mail more than three Mailable Possessions at once.)

When any Possession is used, its use must be declared to other players in the game.

Use Holdable FATE Cards

Cards bearing the Holdable icon (see above) are Holdable cards, which means that you can “hold” onto them until you need to play them (or until you give them away). Most Holdable cards specify the circumstances under which they can be played, but if not, you should treat them as being able to be played at any time that you are in play. When out of play, you may only use a Holdable card if the card permits it—for instance, if you are in Jail, you may play any Holdable card that explicitly specifies that you may play it while in Jail.

Give Stuff Away

Usually, you are allowed to give away money, Possessions, or Holdable cards at any time during the game. This is commonly done in response to some sort of favor or in exchange for some tangible or intangible reward. You may not, however, transfer your Statistics.

You may continue to give stuff away when out of play, although it is also important to note that some game effects do block your ability to give stuff away: for instance, you may not give items away in the middle of being Mugged.

Wheel and Deal

Negotiating with other players is a big part of a game of Inevitable. It may be the prime skill that enables you to strategically overcome some of the setbacks that the game will throw in your way.

Here’s a simple example: let’s say it’s Alice’s turn. She’s four squares away from Bob, and so during the “Challenge Opponents to Combat” phase of her turn, she declares her intent to stop at Bob and do battle with him.

Bob, seeing an opportunity to Wheel and Deal, offers Alice $100 to retract this intention and move past him. She eyes Bob’s pile of money and requests $200. That seems high, thinks Bob, and Alice is four squares away, so there’s no guarantee that she’ll even reach him. “Forget it,” Bob says.

Alice rolls to Move and rolls a six: more than enough to reach Bob. She moves to Bob’s square and stops. Bob has one final opportunity to Wheel and Deal before Combat begins. “OK, OK, here’s the $200,” Bob says.

“The time for that deal has passed,” Alice says. “Now you have to pay me $300.”

Bob doesn’t want to blow that much money—he’s saving up for a Clone Replacement—so he has to think fast. Bob is playing as the Church, and the Church has a Special Ability to “bless” die rolls, making them more favorable. He realizes that this is a negotiating chip. “I’ll pay you $150,” Bob says, “and I pledge to bless one of your die rolls the next time you need it.” Alice grudgingly agrees, and she takes the money and bypasses Bob’s square, completing out her Movement roll. Bob’s quick thinking has saved him from defeat in Combat, but it’s also put him in debt to Alice...

Just because you’ve made a deal with someone doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to stick to your word. The details on going back on your word are covered under “Screwing,” on page 18.

Out of Play

Certain game effects—we call them Things That Suck—can result in a player being required to lose turns, a state that we refer to as being “out of play.” Players in this state are effectively considered “inactive.” Being out of play prohibits you from taking your turn as normal, so you may not Move, collect Income, Challenge other players to Combat, or mail Mailable items. In most cases, it also prevents you from using your Possessions or Holdable cards you may have. Depending on your Group, it may also prohibit you from using your Special Ability. Your Group Information Sheet will specify whether or not this is true.

In addition, when you are out of play, you are not considered to be a “player” or an “opponent” by any game effect that targets, say, “all players,” “all opponents,” “a player of your choice,” or “the player to your left (or right).”

And finally, some good news: if you are out of play, you may not be Instigated (see “Hurting Other People” below).

When out of play, flip your pin upside- down to indicate that you are out of play.

All other particular specifics about being out of play are covered in the section on “Things That Suck” beginning on page 19.

HappyCOM-9 Victorious!

If three or more players are out of play, even momentarily, HappyCOM-9 seizes this moment of advantage and executes all remaining “active” players for treason. With no one left on “the outside” to hold HappyCOM-9 accountable for its actions, HappyCOM-9 decides to let all players languish in their out of play states forever. This ends the game, with HappyCOM-9 victorious.

In a game where one or more players are playing the role of the Clone Police, this victory condition triggers when three of more players are either out of play or playing as the Clone Police. See page 19 for more on the Clone Police.

Rounds

One last piece of terminology before we move on. Inevitable uses the convention of distinguishing between a “round” and a “turn.” A round is a complete series of turns. So when each player has taken, passed, or lost one turn, a round has passed.

Certain Groups have Special Abilities that may only be used “once per round.” If you are one of these players, it is important to be aware of the difference between a turn and a round. Since you may use your Ability only once per round, if you use it on your turn, you must wait until it is your turn again before using it again. Similarly, if you use it during the turn of the player to your right, you have to wait until that player's turn comes around again before using your Ability again.

If you can't remember when you last used your Ability, treat it as though you just used it and wait another round.

Hurting Other People

Inevitable is a competitive game. Consequently, there are quite a few rules that govern how players can interact.

Instigation

Instigation is any action you do directly and willfully to an opponent with the intent to impede his or her chances of success.

Types of Instigations

The following list specifies precisely which actions qualify as Instigations:

Instigating Combat. Using Weapons, dealing Damage and any other related consequences of the Combat do not qualify as subsequent Instigations.
Mailing a Mailable Possession (for instance, a Box of Dead Raccoons) to an opponent, or utilizing a Possession which contains the phrase “Counts as an Instigation” in its Catalog description (look in the “Some Restrictions Apply” section).
Funding an Attack Campaign at the Network (see “The Network” in Glorious Progress).
Taunting a Prisoner or Poking Them With Sticks (see “Jail” in Glorious Progress).
Using your Special Ability to directly target an opponent against his or her will or to interfere with any of their non-instigative actions
Playing a FATE card against your opponent’s will to directly target that opponent or interfere with any of their non-instigative actions
Screwing an opponent (see “Screwing,” page 18)

If you are forced to do something bad to an opponent by a game effect, this isn’t really “willful” on your part, and conse- quently it isn’t considered an Instigation. (This includes things like giving someone a negative FATE card when on the “Sympathy Card” square, collecting money from opponents when on the “Out- of-Court Settlement” or “Con Game” squares, or engaging opponents in violent games like Forks or Bludgeoning For Bucks.)

Immunity to Instigations

Players who are out of play, as defined in the “Out Of Play” section of “Your Turn” above, cannot be Instigated unless specified otherwise elsewhere.

HappyTime

The first three rounds⁶ of the game, are designated as “HappyTime.” During HappyTime, no player may Instigate any other opponent. This time is also the only time when players should forgive minor infractions in game play (i.e., if a player declares the end of their turn before collecting their Income, you should gently remind them and allow them to collect their Income). You do not need to bend over backwards to help your opponents, but you should treat HappyTime as a period during which you should be vaguely charitable to them. After HappyTime, of course, that crap goes out the window.

Footnote 6: Remember that a “round” is different from a “turn.” A round is the full cycle of every player’s turn.

Combat

Combat begins when one player has Instigated it. The ins and outs of Instigat- ing Combat begin on page 10, but as a reminder, Combat is Instigated when two opponents share a square, provided that one opponent has challenged the other, during the Challenge phase of a turn. If a combatant lands exactly on the square containing their opponent, Combat begins. Combat will also begin if a combatant rolls higher than the amount necessary to move through the other combatant’s square—Combat “interrupts” the Movement phase of a turn, so the moving player stops when he or she reaches the square that contains his or her Combat opponent.

You may also Instigate Combat if you begin your turn in the same square with your victim, and you choose to pass the Movement phase of your turn. (As a reminder, passing your Movement phase means that you must forfeit your Income.) If you begin your turn in the same square as an opponent and do not wish to Instigate Combat, your opponent may not prevent you from leaving. But if you choose not to leave, your opponent may choose to Instigate Combat.

When Combat begins, the Instigating player⁷ must state whether they are initiating a normal Combat, in which each player is trying to do garden-variety physical harm to the other, or a Mugging, a special type of Combat in which the initiator is attempting to steal Possessions or cash from his or her opponent. Once a player has declared the intent to Mug another player, the victim may not transfer Possessions or cash to any player, aside from the Mugger, until the Mugging ends or until it is called off.

Resolving Combat replaces the “Take Board Effects” phase of a turn, so if Combat occurs on your turn, you should not take the effect of the square on which the Combat is occurring. The sole exception is if the Combat is occurring on a Major Square, in which case the player whose turn it is may use the Major Square before Combat initiates.

Calling It Off

Frequently, a player challenged to Combat will attempt to buy, bargain, or otherwise Wheel and Deal their way out of actually having to fight. Combat can be called off by mutual agreement of both parties at any time prior to the throwing of the first Combat Rolls (see below). If Combat is called off in this fashion, and your movement was interrupted by the Combat, you must finish out your Movement phase as though no Combat had ever been declared. You can see an example of this exact scenario on page 13, in the “Wheel and Deal” section.

Similarly, if you decided to voluntarily pass the Movement phase of your turn to initiate Combat, you may choose to Move after all if the Combat is called off, provided you have not yet taken any board effects gained by voluntarily passing. If there are additional already declared Combats that did not receive Priority (see the footnote on page 10), these Combats may still take effect if the one that received Priority is called off.

Footnote 7: In the event that two players each Challenge the other, the player with the highest Intelligence is considered the official Instigator. Break ties by playing Rock-Paper-Scissors or something.

Normal Combat Sequence

Note that a simplified version of these rules appears on the “Common Sequences” reference on the reverse of your Group Information Sheet.

The sequence of events listed here is for one round of Combat; frequently Combat will go on for more than one round, in which case you simply cycle through this sequence a second, third, fourth time, etc. Once the Combat ends, however—either by being called off, or by the Retreat or Death of one participant—there cannot be a new Combat until the next player’s turn.

1. Declare Use of Weapons

You may have noticed by now that the Catalog contains a few Weapons. If you have one, and you’re planning to use it in this round of Combat, now’s the time to say so. You may only use one Weapon per round of combat. Use of Weapons must be declared each round.

2. Calculate Whup-Ass

At this stage, both participants calculate their Whup-Ass Factor. Your Personal Data Form has three “Combat Workspace” areas that will help you through this process. Essentially, your Whup-Ass Factor is the sum of two numbers—your Power, divided by ten (round down) plus your Intelligence, divided by 100 (round down). Sometimes, in the heat of battle, people get perplexed by the mechanics of dividing and rounding, so you can simply drop the final digit from your Power and the final two digits from your Intelligence, and add the two resultant numbers.

Here’s an example... Alice and Bob are engaged in Combat. Alice has a Power of 500 and an Intelligence of 400. She drops the final digit from her Power, yielding 50, which she enters in the appropriate blank in the Combat Workspace.

She then drops the final two digits from her Intelligence, yielding four.

Adding these two numbers in the Combat Workspace shows that her Whup-Ass Factor is 54.

Now, on to Bob. Bob has a Power of 600 and an Intelligence of 280, so, when he goes through the same process, his Whup-Ass factor ends up as a 62, because 60+2=62.

In most cases, your Whup-Ass Factor will be a two-digit number: very powerful players may end up with three-digit numbers.

3. Make Combat Rolls

Whichever player has the lower Whup-Ass Factor (“the underdog”) rolls a six-sided die two times. Read the result as a two- digit number, with the first roll providing the digit in the ones’ place and the second roll providing the digit in the tens’ place. This player adds the result to his or her Whup-Ass Factor to yield a Combat Total. The second player rolls his or her own two-digit number in the same fashion, and adds the result to his or her own Whup- Ass Factor.

Note again that the Combat Workspace on the Personal Data Form provides blank areas to record your die rolls and to do the necessary math.

To continue with our earlier example, Alice, with a Whup-Ass Factor of 54, is the underdog, so she rolls first. On that roll, Alice rolls a three, which goes in the “ones’ space,” conveniently labeled “1st die” on the Combat Workspace.

Then Alice rolls a six, which she puts in the “tens’ space”—conveniently labeled “2nd die” on the Combat Workspace. This leaves her with a pretty formidable 63 for her Combat Roll.

She adds that 63 to her Whup-Ass Factor. 54 plus 63 is 107, and that is Alice’s Combat Total. Yikes!

Bob rolls a four first and then a three—so that’s a 34—and adds it to his Whup-Ass Factor of 62, yielding a 96. Close, but no cigar! Alice’s Combat Total is higher, which means that she wins, and gets to deal Damage, covered in Step Four below. Whichever player has the highest Combat Total is the winner of this round of the Combat.

One important note: If you roll a naturally occurring 11 for your Combat Roll you automatically lose the round; similarly, if you roll a naturally occurring 66 for your Combat Roll you automatically win the round. Naturally occurring 66s or 11s rolled for Combat Rolls cannot be modified by any Group’s Special Ability, and 66s or 11s produced by Special Abilities do not count as “naturally occurring.” Once a 66 or an 11 is rolled, the Combat immediately resolves for that round, and no additional die rolls are thrown.

In the event of a tie, the player with the higher Intelligence is the winner.

4. Deal Damage

The player who won the round rolls the twenty-sided Damage die and multiplies the sum by ten. This is the Damage dealt in the round; this number is subsequently modified by any Weapons in use or other applicable Damage modifiers (Cards, Special Abilities, etc.) and then subtracted from the losing player’s Power (but not Power Maximum).

Continuing our previous example, Alice rolls a twenty-sided die and gets a 12. Bob takes 120 points of damage and reduces his Power to 480. (Note that this also means he would need to re-calculate his Whup-Ass Factor the next time he engages in Combat. With a Power of 480 and an Intelligence of 200, his Whup-Ass is now only 50, making him less likely to win the next round of Combat.)

If Damage reduces a player’s Power to zero, that player has Died (see “Death” under “Things That Suck” on page 19) and the Combat draws to a close. Otherwise, go on to Step Five. Keep in mind that no Statistic can ever drop below zero.

5. Continue or Call It Off

Each participant must declare, at this stage, whether they wish to continue the Combat or whether they are interested in calling it off. The player that won the round must declare first, although either player may Wheel and Deal prior to declaring. If both players are interested in continuing, the players go back to Step One of this sequence. Remember that the player who took Damage will need to recalculate his or her Whup-Ass Factor in Step Two.

If both players are interested in calling it off, the Combat ends with no loss of face to either party.

If the players disagree — if one wants to call it off and the other wants to continue — the one who wants to call it off has the option to Retreat, covered below in Step Six. If that player opts not to Retreat, he or she must fight, and the Combat cycles back to Step One.

To continue with our example: Alice, heartened by her unexpected good luck, decides she wants to keep fighting. Bob is scared, wounded, and freaked out, and he decides he’d prefer not to fight Alice for another round. He offers her all his money in an attempt to get her to call it off, but he only has $30, and she scoffs at his pitiful offer. Bob remains unwilling to fight for another round, so he must Retreat.

6. Retreating (Optional)

If you’re Retreating, your opponent (the one you’re Retreating from) gains 200 points of Influence. Place your piece three squares ahead of your opponent. “Ahead” means that you are now also traveling in the same direction as your assailant, regardless of what direction you were previously traveling in. (If your assailant’s direction had not been determined at the time of the Combat, he or she must declare it before you can resolve this step.) You do not take the effects of the square you land on when you Retreat, although you do trigger any “secondary” game effects that might be triggered by traveling to that square or landing on it, For instance, if you Retreat into a square containing an opponent bearing a Warrant for your arrest, that opponent may opt to have you arrested.

Mugging

In most ways, a Mugging is similar to Combat, but the differences are key. If you have initiated a Mugging, you are not attempting to damage your opponent, but instead attempting to steal cash and/or Possessions from him or her.⁸

1. Declare Your Plunder (Initiator Only)

If you have initiated a Mugging, you may choose how much money and/or what Possessions you are going to attempt to Mug your opponent for. Add up the value of all Plunder declared in this fashion (the value of any Possessions is their price as listed in the Catalog) and drop the ones digit (just like you do to your Power when claculating your Whup-Ass Factor). Add the resulting number to the victim’s Whup-Ass Factor as a Mugging Defense Bonus. For example, if you're mugging someone for $1,437 of Possessions and cash, your victim gets a Mugging Defense Bonus of 143. This Bonus remains in play only until the end of the Mugging. If your victim uses up their Possessions after they are declared as Plunder but before the first Combat Roll, you may declare new Plunder, and recalculate the Mugging Defense Bonus. Remember, however, that once a Mugging is declared, a victim may not give money or Possessions to any player other than their assailant.

2. Declare Use of Weapons

If either participant is using Weapons in the Mugging, now’s the time to say so. You may only use one Weapon per round of Combat, and Mugging only lasts one round, so this is your only chance to do this.

3. Calculate Whup-Ass

The same as listed under “Normal Combat,” above, only don’t forget to factor in the Mugging Defense Bonus.

4. Make Combat Rolls

The same as listed under “Normal Combat,” above.

5. Denouement

If you’re the victim and you win the round, deal Damage as outlined under “Deal Damage” in the section on “Normal Combat” above. If you’re the Mugger and you won the round, you deal no Damage. Instead, you receive all Possessions and cash you declared as Plunder at the beginning of the Mugging⁹.

If you lost the round, place your piece three spaces in front of the winner, as described in “Retreating,” above, only no Influence is lost or gained by either player.

Regardless of who wins the round, the Combat ends here and does not cycle into another round.

Footnote 8: You may not Mug a player for “Possession-like” things like a Holdable card or an Arrest Warrant.

Footnote 9: If you accidentally declared more cash as Plunder than the Victim possesses, you must give the difference to the Victim so that you can take the complete sum all at once. If you cannot cover the difference, then, in an wacky twist, you go Bankrupt and are immediately Incarcerated (as described in “Things That Suck,” below). A Victim may not lie about how much money they possess in order to trigger this game effect.

Screwing

Wheeling and Dealing is a crucial component of a game of Inevitable. However, just like in the real world, Wheeling and Dealing can devolve into lying to people, scamming them, and otherwise going back on your word. Screwing an opponent consists of violating the terms of an agreement that you have made with him or her. Traditionally, when breaking an agreement, the violator of the agreement turns to the person with whom they have made the agreement and flatly states “You’re screwed.” Failure to do this does not mean that no Screw has been committed.

Arrest Warrants

If a player has Screwed you, you may acquire a Warrant for their Arrest at Jail. To do so, you must stop on the Jail square, and declare the particulars of the Screw- ing. Make a note that you have received a Warrant on your Personal Data Form, including the name of the opponent who the Warrant is for. You may only hold one Warrant for a given opponent at any time, regardless of how many times the player has Screwed you. Getting the Warrant for a particular offense “evens the score,” so you may not get a second Warrant for the same Screw later.

You may declare your intention to use a Warrant any time you and the opponent named in the Warrant occupy the same square (even if this shared occupation occurs only for an instant, as in the middle of a Movement phase). Simply declare use of the Warrant at the moment of shared occupation and your opponent will instantly be Incarcerated (this may be a good time to refer him or her to “Incarceration,” on page 20). This overrides any other game effect that hinges upon sharing space on the board (before your opponent can Damage you with Combust- O-Pills, for instance).

If two players have Warrants for one another, priority goes to the player who declared use of their Warrant first. If both players declare simultaneously, they both go to Jail simultaneously.

A player who is out of play cannot be served with an Arrest Warrant.

Use of a Warrant preempts any declared Combat, but you may not declare its use in the middle of a round of Combat.

When a player is arrested, all Warrants bearing that player’s name are considered fulfilled, and are rendered null and void: all players who have one must cross it off of their Personal Data Form. In addition, since the arrested player is busy paying his or her debt to society, all outstanding Screws (against any player) are “cleared” from that player’s record.

You may sell, trade or give a Warrant to other players, who may also make use of it to arrest the player named in it. You may even sell it to the player it targets: this renders the Warrant “inactive” until it was re-sold, traded, or given away.

Strictly speaking, Arrest Warrants are “retaliatory,” and for this reason the acquisition or use of an Arrest Warrant does not count as an Instigation.

Disputes and Loopholes

Frequently, you can find some loophole that allows you to fulfill an agreement in a way that is loyal to the specified terms of the agreement but not the agreement’s cooperative spirit; this is encouraged and does not count as Screwing. However, this can lead to disputes. If the parties involved in a dispute cannot agree whether the terms of an agreement have been violated, refer to the section on “Rule Disputes” in the Troubleshooting section of these rules (page 22)¹⁰.

Screwing the Bank

The Banker is not allowed to cheat when they give a player their Income or when making change, and you are not allowed to cheat the Bank in any way, such as asking for your Income twice or asking for more change than you deserve. To allow players to cheat the Bank makes the game frankly unplayable. But, hey: you bought the game, you and your friends can try playing it any way you want.

Footnote 10: Some play groups—and we’ve been a part of them—have grown so dysfunctional that they devolve into legalistic squabble about whether an agreement has even been made in the first place. The first time this happens, you can refer to the section on “Rule Disputes,” but if it happens more than once you may want to consider developing a system for formalizing agreements. For instance, you could have the players shake hands after they completely understand the terms of their agreement. In such a scenario, if the hands are never shaken, then the agreement can be broken and neither player can count any perceived violation as a Screw. You may use whatever formality strikes your fancy: exchange of signatures, tiny contracts on tiny slips of carbon paper, clicking “I Agree,” whatever.

Things That Suck

Life is The City is unpredictable and dangerous. Life in The City as a candidate is veritably peril-fraught...

Death

Any time your Power drops to zero (and, remember, no Statistic can ever drop below zero), you have Died, and are considered to be out of play. Unless you have purchased a Clone Replacement from the Catalog, you must move your pawn instantly to one of the ICUs (Intensive Cloning Units) at the County Hospital. Remember to flip your pin upside-down to indicate that you are out of play.

Coming Back To Life

The County Hospital has the technology to clone you from all but the most ruined remains. However, it’s an expensive and time-consuming process. Thus: you must spend one full turn out of play in the ICU. At the start of your second turn in the ICU, you must pay the Hospital one dollar for every point of your Power Maximum Statistic to be cloned. You must pay the full amount all at once: you can’t be brought “halfway” back to life. You return to play the moment you deposit the money into the Bank, and you may take your turn as normal. Begin your turn by declaring which direction you are traveling.

Permanent Death

If you Died without having enough cash on hand to pay the Hospital in full, and if you can’t Wheel and Deal the necessary money out of your opponents, then at the start of your second full turn in the ICU, the Hospital staff remove your remains and leave them out back, in the alley, sitting in the hot sun. You are Dead for good.

If you have the funds necessary for a Clone, you may withhold funds from the Hospital if you wish to Die permanently. You might do this if you were interested in playing the Clone Police. See below for details.

If you permanently Die, any Possessions, Scrip, Warrants, or Holdable cards that you may have possessed must either be given away to opponents or simply reabsorbed by HappyCOM-9 and the Bank. At this point, you re-enter the game as a member of HappyCOM-9’s shock troop: the Clone Police.

Re-Entering the Game as The Clone Police

Your goal, as the Clone Police, is to get at least two other players out of play or converted to Clone Police. This will trigger the victory condition described on page 13—“HappyCOM-9 Victorious!”

Find the Clone Police’s Group Information Sheet and review it. Fill out a new Personal Data Form to reflect your new stats. Place one of the Clone Police pins at Jail and begin your turn by declaring a direction. You do not get a starting stipend or an Outfitting Phase like other players, but you do begin with an Arrest Warrant for every opponent, including those who are out of play.

More than one player may simultaneously play as the Clone Police. They play as allies, and if HappyCOM-9’s victory condition is triggered, they share the win.

You may not re-enter the game as the Clone Police during the first three rounds of the game (HappyTime). If you are unfortunate enough to Die permanently during HappyTime, simply discard all your belongings, randomly select a new Group and begin again (including receiving Outfitting Phase money and an opportunity to purchase items from the Catalog).

Insanity

Any time your Stress exceeds your Stress Tolerance Level, you have gone Insane. Move your piece directly to one of the Relaxation Suites attached to the HappyDale Sanitarium square—you’ve gone out of play. All restrictions of being out of play, described fully on page 13, apply. Remember to flip your pin upside down to indicate your status.

Getting Well

For each full turn you spend out of play in HappyDale Sanitarium, you lose five points of Stress. Once your Stress has been reduced below your Tolerance Level, you have the option, at the end of that turn, to “check out.” If you decide to check out, re-enter play, flip your pin right-side up, and take your next turn normally. Once checked out, you remain on the HappyDale Sanitarium square, regardless of where you were when you went Insane. You begin your next turn by declaring your direction.

If you decide to stay in, you remain out of play for another round. Lose another five points for the next full turn you pass in HappyDale, and then you once again have the option to check out or stay in.

You may not elect to stay in HappyDale if your Stress has reached zero.

Not Getting Well

When Insane, you also have the option to declare your character Hopelessly Insane, in which case you will remain in the Sanitarium’s comforting rubber womb forever. In this case, you may re-enter the game at the start of your next turn as an agent of the Clone Police, as described above. Note that you must have been Involuntarily Admitted to the Sanitarium—in excess of your Stress Tolerance Level—in order to make this declaration.

You may not declare yourself Hopelessly Insane during the first three rounds of the game (HappyTime).

Incarceration

Any time you are sent to Jail by a game effect, you immediately move your piece to one of the Cells at the “Jail” square, and go out of play. (Remember to flip your pin upside-down to indicate that you’re out of play.) All restrictions outlined under the “Out of Play” section of “Your Turn,” above, apply, with this sole exception: an Incarcerated player may still be Instigated. Only two types of Instigations are permitted, however: Taunting or Poking with Sticks. (Both of these are covered in full under “Jail,” in Glorious Progress.)

Unless an opponent has paid your Bail (see below) or you have freed yourself by playing a FATE card, you must submit yourself to Morning Beatings every turn you begin under Incarceration. During your Morning Beating, lose either 50 points of Power or half of your Power (your choice).

If Incarcerated, there are five ways to get free:

Roll doubles—For every turn you begin in Jail, roll two dice (after your Morning Beating). Doubles indicate that a clerical error has set you free. Return to play immediately and take your turn as normal.
Post bail—If another player pays your Bail, you are set free. Bail is $50 the first time you are Incarcerated, but it doubles each additional time you are Incarcerated. ($50; $100; $200; $400, etc.) You may wish to make a note of how many times you (and your opponents) end up Incarcerated in a game.

When your Bail is paid, you remain out of play until the beginning of your next turn. Although you begin your turn in Jail, you do not receive Morning Beatings: you simply take your turn as normal. Remember to declare your direction before rolling for Movement.

Opponents who are out of play may not pay your bail, and you may not pay your own Bail (although you may offer opponents money to pay your Bail).
Play a FATE card—Playing a card that has getting out of Jail as a game effect sets you free. You remain out of play until the beginning of your next turn. Although you begin your turn in Jail, you do not receive Morning Beatings: you simply take your turn as normal. Remember to declare your direction before rolling for Movement.
Drop Dead—If your Power goes down to zero, you Die, and your lifeless body is unceremoniously deposited in one of the Intensive Cloning Units (ICUs) at the County Hospital. You are free, but still considered out of play until you are brought back to life (follow the rules under “Death,” on page 19).
Go crazy—If your Stress exceeds your Stress Tolerance Level, you go Insane, and are retroactively found Not Guilty By Reason Of Insanity. You are still considered out of play—you are just moved to HappyDale Sanitarium, as outlined under “Insanity,” on page 20.

Bankruptcy

If you incur a financial penalty—usually via a board effect or FATE card—which you cannot afford to pay, and you cannot raise the necessary funds via Wheeling and Dealing, then you have gone Bankrupt. Give all of your money to the debtee and immediately proceed to Jail, as described above in the section on “Incarceration.” (In most cases, the debtee will be the Bank. If the debtee is an opponent, this opponent may choose to offer alternatives to payment, but if a satisfactory agreement cannot be worked out, you are Incarcerated as normal.)

Everybody Losing

If any three players are either out of play or playing as the Clone Police at any given time, you have triggered the ultimate Thing That Sucks: HappyCOM-9 wins the game and all remaining candidates lose. The full details on this outcome are covered under “HappyCOM-9 Victorious!,” on page 13. But enough about losing...

How To Win The Game

Reaching HappyCOM-9

To win the game, you must first initiate an Election. In order to do this, you must move into the center of the board. You may move into the center from any of the four Take Two Cards squares immediately after you have taken the effects of the cards.¹¹ Note that you must land exactly on a Take Two Cards square in order to use it as an access route to the center. They are not Major Squares, and as such you may not declare a stop at them.

Be sure that you’re ready to enter into an Election before you enter the center of the board, as there can be no turning back once you make the decision to go. Once you move to the center, the game will be over for you in a matter of moments—if you win the Election, the game will be over for everyone else as well.

The Election

When you move into the center of the board, you stride into the awesomely-lit cathedral-like space housing HappyCOM- 9’s Central Processing Unit. Long-dormant defense measures suddenly activate! Deafening acoustic cannons blare powerfully demotivational tones at your fragile skull! Antipersonnel darts are precision-fired into your seven chakras, disabling your etheric body and the large majority of your motor functions. As you collapse in confusion and pain, HappyCOM-9 stares down at you, grinning its hideous, soulless grin. The Election has begun.

Calculating Base Votes

To calculate your Voting Base, add your current Power, Intelligence and Influence. If you are playing the Short Game, in which HappyCOM-9’s Base Votes are set at 2,000 or lower, “cap” each individual Statistic at 1,500 when calculating your Voting Base (if any of them are over 1,500). If you are playing the Epic Game, with HappyCOM-9’s Base Votes set at 3,000 or higher, cap your Statistics at 2,000.

Calculating Swing Votes

Break out the ten-sided Election Die and roll it three times. Read the result as a three-digit number, with the first roll providing the digit in the “ones place,” the second roll providing the digit in the “tens place,” and the third roll providing the digit in the “hundreds place.” Use the Election Workspace at the bottom of your Personal Data Form to help if necessary.

If you roll a “zero” on the Election Die, count it as a zero, not a ten.

An opponent—traditionally, the opponent who had the worst luck of the game—rolls the ten-sided die three times for HappyCOM-9’s Swing Votes, and adds this result to HappyCOM-9’s Base Votes to provide the Total Votes for HappyCOM-9.

If HappyCOM-9 rolls a "zero" on the Election Die, treat it as a ten.

If your Total Votes exceed HappyCOM-9’s, you have won the game.

If You Lose

If you lose, HappyCOM-9 goes into Kill Mode, activating its whirling blades and reducing you to a fine mist. All of your assets, including Possessions, Holdable cards, Arrest Warrants, and Scrip are all reabsorbed into the system. Clone Police swarm into the homes of your friends, family, followers, and acquaintances and detain them for “questioning.” The Network Archives are combed for any evidence of or allusion to you or your organization, and any found are erased. You are now considered to be out of play and will remain out of play until the start of your next turn. There may not ever be a next turn, because other players may challenge HappyCOM-9 in the Instant Runoff, covered below, but if the game continues, you will re-enter as an agent of the Clone Police. (See “Re-Entering the Game as the Clone Police,” page 19.)

The Runoff

If a player has lost an Election, any other player may choose to challenge HappyCOM-9 in an Instant Runoff election. HappyCOM-9 keeps the number of Total Votes it has, and the new contender calculates his or her Base Votes, rolls the Election Die three times to calculate Swing Votes, and the Election resolves a second time.

If more than one player wants to confront HappyCOM-9 in the Runoff, the player with the highest number of Base Votes goes first. Remember that if three or more players go out of play, HappyCOM-9’s victory condition will trigger, as described on page 13. This means that HappyCOM-9 may win the game before every player gets a shot in the Runoff.

If You Win

If you win, the outpouring of support from the masses inspires you to stagger back to your feet, whereupon you bravely yank the Plug from HappyCOM-9’s Outlet. A terrible darkness falls across the City. Revel in your power over millions—if you like, you may describe what your first actions are as Exalted Decider, including the horrible vengeance you will wreak on your former opponents.

The End

Don’t forget—after your victory declarations, describe the twist of fate that resurrects HappyCOM-9 as HappyCOM-10, who subsequently throws you out of office and has you and the other players executed for treason. Hey, it’s Inevitable.

Winner has to clean up.

Footnote 11: Or one of the two cards, if you’re entering through one of the “Take Two Cards, Choose One” Squares.

Troubleshooting

The Bank

The lowest increment the Bank recognizes is $10. If you need to spend an amount indivisible by $10 (for instance, if you need to heal five points of Damage at the County Hospital) you must simply round up and wave goodbye to the difference. When in doubt, screw the player.

The Bank never runs out of money. This does not mean, however, that the Bank will continue issuing money to people that HappyCOM-9 feels are already too rich. If you attempt to collect your Income or money from any other game effect, and the money provided with the game is depleted, you simply collect nothing. No raincheck, no draw-a-$100-on-a-piece- of-paper, no I’ll-write-an-IOU-for-the-Bank: you simply get nothing. If the Bank merely lacks correct change, players need to pony up for larger bills until enough change has accumulated.

Timing

All events happen in the order they are declared (or discovered), just like in real life. This also means that the effects of FATE cards take place in the order in which the cards lists them. If a card effect causes you to go out of play, do not take the remaining effects of a card.

Unless otherwise specified, no effect or power can retroactively prevent something that has already happened. If you have been dealt lethal Damage, you cannot attempt to eat your Combust-O- Pills as some kind of “fast effect” response—nope, you’re Dead. Cope with it. In the previous example, you could have eaten the Pills before you knew how much damage you were going to receive, but not once you knew you had been dealt lethal Damage. In Inevitable, awareness of an event is equivalent to that event’s reality.

Rounding

Whenever there is a question about how to round off any number that needs rounding, always choose the result least favorable to the player. Remember: when in doubt, screw the player.

Rule Disputes

In the event that a rule dispute should arise that cannot be answered by this rulebook, don’t bother our tech support personnel—let the player with the highest Intelligence Statistic resolve the dispute. Yes, even if the dispute involves them. If two players have equal Intelligence, I don’t know, flip a coin or something. Use the wide outer margin of this rulebook to record precedents, if you like..

House Rules / Errata

Inevitably, we will find some error within this book that we’ll need to correct. Watch the website for errata announcements, and feel free to use the wide outer margin of the pages to make a record of our acknowledged failures. Or use it to record your own house rules!

Notes on Variants

The Two-Player Variant

Inevitable can be played with two players, but it is important to make a few changes.

Group Restriction

The following Groups are “cleared” for two-player play:

ACME,
the Adrenaline Junkies,
the Child Prodigies,
the Church,
the Famous International Playboys,
the Handmaidens of Cthulhu,
the Living Dead,
the Mental Patients,
the Ministry of Truth,
the Paparazzi,
the Taxi Drivers, and
the Time Travelers.

Each of these Groups has two small circles behind its name on the Group Info Sheet. You should remove any Group without these circles from play before you select Groups.

HappyCOM-9’s Victory Condition and the Clone Police

The two-player variant does not use the Clone Police. However, HappyCOM-9 still retains a victory condition: if both players are out of play, even for an instant, HappyCOM-9 wins the game.

Since there are no Clone Police, players may not declare themselves Hopelessly Insane in the two-player variant, nor may they opt not to come back to life in the Hospital ICU if they can afford to be healed.

If you Die in the two-player game and cannot afford to be healed, you may either come back into the game with a new randomly selected Group (with a starting stipend and Outfitting Phase) or you may opt to trigger the Election. You may not participate in the Election, but you may sit back and enjoy the view as your unprepared opponent crashes and burns.

The “Election Day” Variant

Since the Election Day variant (see page 4) is time-sensitive, it is important to manage your Statistics more strategically: you have to make sure you’re in the lead at a particular time. As such, players holding on to a narrow lead occasionally feel the temptation to stall strategically—taking a lengthy smoke break, for instance, while precious minutes on the clock tick away. This is not good form.

While it’s impossible to positively identify every behavior that might be an example of strategic stalling, we find that the most egregious occurrences can be eliminated by invocation of Wheaton’s Rule.¹² Play hard, but play fair. If the other players think you’re stalling for dick-ish reasons, don’t escalate the situation by defending yourself. It’s a given that your friends are paranoid nutjobs, and defending yourself will simply waste more time. Just apologize, and finish out your turn as quickly as possible.

Footnote: 12 “Don’t Be a Dick.”

Acknowledgements and Credits

Design Team

Jeremy P. Bushnell conceived of the game, and made basically all of it not attributed to someone else elsewhere, including this text. He made this iteration of Inevitable by using a bunch of badly outdated software: PageMaker 7.0, Photoshop 7.0, and Illustrator 8.0. He uses Pigma pens and prefers sketchpads made by Michael Rogers Press.

Jonathan A. Leistiko made the second working Inevitable set, and playtested the game through its early iterations, designing many of the Groups and mechanics. Every rule in this rulebook that didn’t originate with him was either refined by or discussed with him.

Crystal Joseph Olesh contributed immeasurably to the visual look-and-feel of Inevitable, designing or refining every single physical component. In addition, she designed the “Buy Friends” mechanic and helped troubleshoot the Rent-A-Bureaucracy. The Apocalypse Timeline was her idea and many of its entries are her contributions. She named the Adrenaline Junkies, wrote their flavor text, and did fashion research for their illustration. She also wrote the flavor text for the Famous International Playboys, helped name the Special Abilities of the Ninjas, and performed general pandemonium control.

Lex Terenchin has drawn the money for at least three different iterations of Inevitable. He drew the Clone Police Flavor Art that runs through this manual, the back of the FATE cards, the Apocalypse Cloud on the front of the box, the Sewer square, the Chainsaw, the Nest of Hornets, and the Tasteful Plaster Dalmatian.

Additional Design Contributions

Amy L Clark wrote the first draft of the Paparazzi flavor text, helped design the Combat Workspaces, and contributed the slogan for the Mandatory Winter Holiday.

Sharon Cichelli designed the Leaping mechanic for the Post-Apocalyptic Beasts.

Tom McCarthy contributed some FATE Card mechanics.

Bill O’Neill generated the name Inevitable for a project of his own: a proposed short film about love and nuclear holocaust. I basically stole the title from him and am not sure I ever properly thanked him.

Christopher Takacs created several FATE cards, Groups, and Catalog items (although most of them are not in the core set). He was tremendously influential in the creation of two-player variant rules, and contributed (literally) hundreds of hours of playtesting. He also coined the phrase, "When in doubt, screw the player."

Rich Thomas contributed to the first working Inevitable board, which was drawn in pen on posterboard at his parents’ dining room table. He also contributed the mechanics for the “Catch A Cold” card.

Playtesters and Quality Assurance Team

Amanda Agudelo, Jake Alper, Taury Anderson, Anna Beeler, Jack Berkenstock, Aaron Bolding, Craig Bowser, Erika Bowser, Danika Brown, Dan “The Stand Up Comics” Brown, Leif Brown, Kat Budni, Paul Carrilo, Sharon Cichelli, Jim “Lord Sluk” D’Elia, William Eddy, Jlynn Erikson, Jonah Erikson, Josiah Erikson, Dave Evans, Andrew Scott Flahive, Dax Finley, Mike Ford, Elina Frumkin, Benjamin Gibbs, Lorraine Gilman, Michael Haydel, Cathy Heard, Stephen Hegadus, Michael Hummel, E. P. Johnson, Nick Jowdy, Tina Kaltezas, Dave Kelch, Michael Kelch, Theresa Kelch, Alec Koumjian, Raphael Landaverde, Thomas Landaverde, Daniel Letendre, Christopher Lim, Lena Liu, Sabrina Lowther, Sharon Malloy, Jake Matilsky, Joseph Mattleman, Kat McLellan, Anthony Pereira, Nancy Pokrywka, James Price, Ben Prisament, Julie Rosenberg, Solon Sadoway, Brad Senz, Lydia Simas, Bruce Squier, Brian Starr, David Stern, Cat Stolz, Emmette Stroh, Eric Switzer, Kelly Taylor, Thor Thomforde, Seth Thompson, Cora Vestal, April Walker, and Brandon Wiley.

Wizard, Tinkerer, and Weary Traveler

Jeremy Coonradt

Mild Ill Son

Matthew Dixon

Most Oddly Shaped Head

Joseph L

Exalted Producers

Jonah Erikson, Susan Milligan, and Lord Sluk.

Producers

Rachael Acks, The Amazings, Adam Bain, Paul Bort, Carson Dylan Brown, Dave Burchill, Shannon D. Bushnell, Kimberly Lynn Campbell, Matt Canale, Peter Carey, Kris Chickey, Joshua Christain, Joe Cool, Saint Dogbert, Kate Drefke, Carlos Finlay, Dax Finley, Dave "Elder5" Freireich, Christopher Fritel, Cliff Fuller, Anand "Would this make a good mustache?" Gaitonde, Ben Gibbs, Herbert Elwood Gilliland III, Cara Gillotti, gpsychosis, Ben Griffiths, A. K. Hamilton, Tony Hauber, Michael Haydel, Erica P. Johnson, Nick Jowdy, Theresa Kelch, Sam Kendig, Kyle Kohler, Keith Koleno, Alec Koumjian, Andrew Laine, Jonathan H. Liu, Edwin Love, Penelope Marvel, Jeffrey Maslany, Bryan Mellott, Jason Mical, Kevin Miller, Aaron M Nessim, Johan Nordberg, Mangus Nyberg, Spencer Kahn Olson, Thomas Palmer, C Matt Pappathan, Zac Parsons, James Price, Ben Prisament, Ross Ramsay, Joy Reed & Nancy Pokrywka, Mr. Rooz, Solon Sadoway, Dana Sheikholeslami, Louis Silverman, Gabe Smedresman, Christopher "Chunga" Smith, Nicholas H Smith, Matt Spindler, Justin Steinhouse, Jake and Jen Sulpice, Frank Swehosky, Carlton Swift, Paul “Ducky” Tenk, Lex Terenchin, Patrick Terenchin, Nissanthen Thiruravichandran, Kilgore Trout, April Walker, Rich Walkling, Donald Wheeler, Brandon and Aimy Wiley, Highland Wolland, and Patrick "Indigo Ferret" Wyrick.

Each of you should know that you completely made our day.

Thanks To

Lisa Butler, Craig Jewell, and Heather Truelove.

Additional Support From

Rev. Ivan Stang gave us permission to use the trademarked J.R. “Bob” Dobbs head.

Janice gave us permission to use her likeness for the Makers picture.

Chaosium gave us permission to use H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu in a game.

And this project would not have been possible without the immeasurable support of Kat McLellan, the Ben and Gregory Teich Home for Wayward Adults, the Endowment for Unexceptional Humans, the Massachusetts Department of Unemployment Assistance, Kickstarter.com, and Ed Grabianowski and Analee Newitz (io9.com).

Glorious Progress

This is the Table of Contents for Glorious Progress: a guide to the board squares in Inevitable.

General Rules about Major and Minor Squares

General Rules Applying to Major Squares

The Major Squares—the six large ones around the Outer Ring of the board—are the key points of business in the game. As such, you can declare, during the “Declare Direction or Stops” phase of your turn, that you would like to stop at any of these squares. You can only do this if you plan to use the square.

If you roll higher than the number required to reach the square, you stop in the square and do not complete the rest of your move.

The Major Squares are the only squares you can use additional times by voluntarily passing the Movement phase of your turn while stopped on them. Remember that if you do this you may not collect Income.

The Major Squares cannot be destroyed (by the Nuclear Missile, for instance).

General Rules Applying to Minor Squares

If you ever cannot afford to pay a fee incurred by a Minor Square or other board effect, you must pay whatever money you have to the debtee, after which you are immediately Incarcerated, as described under “Jail.” (In most cases, the debtee will be the Bank. If the debtee is an opponent, this opponent may choose to offer alternatives to payment, but if a satisfactory agreement cannot be worked out, you are Incarcerated as normal.)

Board effects that affect players other than the one who is presently taking her or his turn (as in the case of squares that call for “all players” or “the player to your left” to do something) have no effect on players who are out of play. When resolving these effects, simply treat it as though the out-of-play players do not exist. For example, if the player to your right is out of play when you land on “Con Game,” collect the money from the next player to the right.

Minor Squares can be destroyed (by the Post-Apocalyptic Beasts, for example) and any destroyed Minor Square will be treated as a “blank square.” If you land on a blank square, you may draw an optional FATE card, otherwise the square has no effect (unless an effect is specified elsewhere).

Avenge Your Parents

The full details on Arrest Warrants can be found under Jail.

Selecting an opponent to be the target of this Warrant does not qualify as an Instigation.

Classified Area

The second roll forced by Classified Area is considered an extension of your Roll and Move phase, not a second turn, so do not collect Income again. However, Groups that receive benefit from their Movement rolls (such as the Adrenaline Junkies or the Child Prodigies) may receive a second benefit.

You may have a new opportunity to Challenge opponents to Combat if they are within range of your second roll, and you must allow them an opportunity to Challenge you.

Any non-permanent effects that altered the previous roll (such as a Black Cat or Rabbit’s Foot) do not apply to this new roll.

Coffeehouse, The

The second roll forced by the Coffeehouse is considered an extension of your Roll and Move phase, not a second turn, so do not collect Income again. However, Groups that receive benefit from their Movement rolls (such as the Adrenaline Junkies or the Child Prodigies) may receive a second benefit.

You may have a new opportunity to Challenge opponents to Combat if they are within range of your second roll, and you must allow them an opportunity to Challenge you.

Any non-permanent effects that altered the previous roll (such as a Black Cat or Rabbit’s Foot) do not apply to this new roll.

Convert To Communism

When you land on this square, you must choose an opponent who is poorer than you and designate them as the recipient of your Income for the next three rounds. If you are the poorest player at the time you land on the square, it has no effect.

Players are not permitted to lie about how much money they have or give money away in order to manipulate use of this square. (Your opponents may choose not to reveal how much money they have, but this voids them from being able to receive the Communism benefit even if eligible, and you need not reveal exactly how much money you have, but you must answer truthfully if an opponent asks you if you have more money than the amount that they have.)

Communism always stays in effect for the full three rounds, even if the opponent who was poorer than you becomes more wealthy than you at some point during Communism’s duration or goes out of play.

It is your opponent’s duty to remind you each turn to give him or her your Income. If he or she fails to remind you before you declare the end of your turn, he or she does not receive your Income that round.

If you go out of play or pass your Movement phase during Communism’s duration, you are under no obligation to provide Income to your opponent during those turns, although they still count towards Communism’s three-round duration. If you take your turn, however, and could collect Income, you cannot opt to forgo or “forget” your Income phase.

County Hospital (Major Square)

At the County Hospital, HappyCOM-9- trained doctors stand ready to put the latest in expensive and awesomely technical medical hardware to use for the benefit of you, the organism.

Healing

You may use the County Hospital to regain lost Power, or to close the gap between your Power and your Power Maximum. Each point of Power you wish to acquire costs you $1. Even at the Hospital, you may not increase your Power over your Power Maximum. (There is a particular item in the Catalog—a potted meat product of special note—that increases your Power Maximum).

There are a few other places on the board that can increase your Power—the Glistening Biceps Gym, the Hit the Diner square, and the “Bleeding Edge” GameShow—but the Hospital is the one that’s the safest and easiest to land on.

Coming Back to Life

The County Hospital can also bring Dead players back to life, although Dead players must pay to have themselves healed all the way up to their Power Maximum. The full details on this—including what happens if you can’t pay—are covered under “Death,” in the “Things That Suck” section of the Citizen’s Guide (page 19).

Gambling Problem: Dealer’s Choice

When you land on the Dealer’s Choice square, you suddenly succumb to an unquenchable desire to hold a game night, and must throw a $100 ante into the center of the board. If you cannot afford the ante, the game is called off and you go into Bankruptcy (you can refer to the section on Bankruptcy in the Citizen’s Guide, page 21, but the short version is: go to Jail).

Assuming that you can put up the ante, you must then declare the means that will be used to determine the winner of your game. You may declare any means that strike your fancy: low roll on a twenty- sided die, a fake Combat involving all participants, a hand of poker, quarter-mile-dash, whatever. If you’re stuck and can’t think of anything, default to the following: all players roll two six-sided dice and whoever rolls the highest wins.

Once you’ve declared the final version of your rules, the other players declare whether they are “in” or not by tossing an ante ($100) into the “pot” in the middle of the board. Resolve the game according to the declared rules and the winner takes the entire pot. Opponents who are out of play may not participate.

If no one is interested in playing against you, the game is called off and you take back your $100 ante.

Gambling Problem: Roshambo

When you land on the Roshambo square, you are deeply compelled to take on any opponent who may wish to challenge you to a game (or a best-out-of-three match) of Rock-Paper-Scissors (aka “Roshambo”).

You begin by throwing a $50 ante into the center of the board. If you cannot afford the ante, the game is called off and you descend into Bankruptcy (you can refer to the section on Bankruptcy in the Citizen’s Guide, page 21, but the short version: you go to Jail).

Assuming that you can afford the ante, any opponent in play may respond by throwing $50 of his or her money into the center of the board to challenge you. Whichever player is quickest to throw in their money is the one you’ll throw down against first.

Declare whether you play a single round or a best-out-of-three match. Resolve the match in the traditional manner and the winner takes the $100.

You must then throw another $50 ante into the center of the board to see if a second opponent is interested in challenging you. This process continues until all players have challenged you once or until no other players are interested in challenging you.

No opponent may challenge you more than once on a given turn, and no opponent who is out of play may participate.

GameShow!: Are You Stronger Than A Third Grader?

And, if so, are you stronger than ten third graders?

When you land on this square, declare the number of third graders you feel capable of defeating in open combat. You may not declare “zero.”

Each third grader has a Whup-Ass Factor of 10, but they tend to attack in a “swarm” configuration, so their Whup-Ass Factors “stack.” That is to say, if you are fighting seven third graders, they attack with a cumulative Whup-Ass Factor of 70.

Once you have made your declaration, your Possessions are taken from you, and each of the third graders is given a box cutter¹. You are then lowered into a glass cube containing the number of third graders you declared. You must immediately fight a single round of Combat against them, as described in “Combat” in the Citizen’s Guide.

If the third graders win the Combat, have an opponent roll the 20-sided Damage die and take Damage as normal. If you are the winner, you receive $100 for each third grader you defeated. You do not need to roll the Damage die unless it gratifies your sensibilities².

At the conclusion of this GameShow, your confiscated Possessions are returned to you.

Footnote 1: Note that these box cutters qualify as Weapons. This is important for Groups like the Post-Apocalyptic Beasts, who have a Special Ability that hinges upon whether Weapons are being used in Combat.

Footnote 2: Or if you are playing the Living Dead, in which case you may add the Damage you deal by feeding upon the third graders to your Power Maximum.

GameShow!: Bleeding Edge

When you land on this square, a dart is fired into your neck and you pass instantly into unconsciousness. You awaken in a surgical arena in a special wing of the County Hospital³, surrounded by four charismatic surgeons wielding an awe- inspiring array of medical technology. They lean in and, in chorus, ask you the show’s trademark question: “Are you going to take it... all the way to the Edge?”

Your answer comes in a declaration of how many times you will roll the Bleeding Edge 20-sided die. You may choose to roll it anywhere from one to five times, but before the surgeons set in on their work, you must make your declaration. Roll the die the number of times you have declared, tabulate the total, and take the result.

Total	Result
1-19:	+6 Stress;-100 Influence
20-35:	+100 Power Maximum; +100 Power
36-49:	+200 Power Maximum; +100 Power
50-59:	“The Edge”: +200 Power;+200 Power Maximum;+100 Intelligence
60-69:	-100 Power;-100 Intelligence
70-79:	-1/2 Power;-100 Intelligence; +10 Stress
80-100:	Died on the operating table: -200 Intelligence; Power goes to zero

Footnote 3: Your playing piece does not actually leave the GameShow!: Bleeding Edge square.

GameShow!: Bludgeoning For Bucks!

When you land on this square, you are instantly abducted by a crack team of television producers and stripped of all Possessions and clothing. You are subsequently placed in the Bludgeoning For Bucks! Arena armed with only a truncheon⁴ and wearing only a Bludgeoning For Bucks! jumpsuit, emblazoned with the colorful logos of dozens of corporate sponsors. Each of your opponents in play⁵ must roll a six-sided die, and the player with the lowest roll is similarly stripped of their belongings and deposited in the Arena as well.⁶ The two of you immediately fight one round of Combat, as detailed in the “Combat” rules under “Hurting Other People” in the Citizen’s Guide (page 14). The loser of this round takes Damage as normal; the winner receives... fabulous prizes!

Let’s bring back Alice and Bob to explain how the Damage and prizes work. Let’s say that Alice won the Combat. She rolls the 20-sided Damage die as normal, multiplying the result by 10, and reducing Bob’s Power by the result. She rolls a 13 and deals 130 points of Damage to Bob. She also takes this result—the 13 showing on the Damage die—and multiplies it by 50 to calculate her prize money. 13 x 50 = 650, so Alice receives $650 in Catalog credit. There's a handy lookup table for multiplying the number 1 to 20 by 50 at the end of this page.

You must immediately spend your winnings on Catalog items. You do not need to travel to the Mailbox, and you are not bound by the three-item limit that constrains Mailbox purchases. You may have one round to figure out what you’re buying, but whatever money is not spent by the beginning of your next turn is re-absorbed by the Bank. You may not use Scrip to supplement the use of this credit, and you may not apply your Group’s Special Ability to the use of this credit.

Because this Combat is forced by a game effect, it does not count as an Instigation.

At the conclusion of this GameShow, each player has their confiscated Possessions returned to them.

B4B Damage Result	Catalog credit
1	50
2	100
3	150
4	200
5	250
6	300
7	350
8	400
9	450
10	500
11	550
12	600
13	650
14	700
15	750
16	800
17	850
18	900
19	950
20	1,000

Footnote 4: Note that these truncheons qualify as Weapons. This is important if you are playing a Group like the Living Dead or the Post-Apocalyptic Beasts, who have Special Abilities that hinge upon whether Weapons are being used in Combat.

Footnote 5: If you are the only player in play, you must fight an agent of the Clone Police, who has a Whup-Ass Factor of 110. If you win in this scenario, you may want to spend your winnings before declaring the end of your turn, because your next turn may come around rather quickly...

Footnote 6: Your opponent’s playing piece does not actually move when summoned to the Bludgeoning for Bucks Arena, and thus does not trigger game effects that are contingent upon sharing space with an opponent.

GameShow!: Bucks Or Dollars?

When you land on this square, your surroundings drop away, revealing themselves to all be part of an elaborate sound stage constructed at staggering expense. Before you can fully recover from the shock, deafening amplifiers blare out the question “Bucks... Or Dollars?” At this point, the thousands of studio audience members who had been there behind the scenes observing you for God-only-knows-how-long all begin shrieking “Dollars, dollars, go for the dollars!” (It is customary for your opponents to shriek this as well.)

At this point, you have a choice—you can take the Bucks, or go for the Dollars. If you take the Bucks, you receive $50, the audience boos, and the GameShow! ends, returning you to a convincing simulacrum of reality. If you opt to go for the Dollars, you must roll the six-sided die three times. If the total of these rolls is 12 or higher, you have won “the Dollars”— multiply the total by 100 and take that amount in prize money. If you roll 11 or lower, however, the audience cheers with glee as you are lowered into the Churning Humiliator. Multiply the total of your failed roll by ten, and subtract the result from your Power, your Influence, and your Intelligence.

GameShow!: The Running Guy

When you land on this square, you become the “Running Guy.” Your face is broadcast on the Network and a $1,000 bounty is put out for your maiming. Camera crews follow you everywhere and broadcast your every move and anxious tremble to hundreds of thousands of Network devotees. You receive a $50 bonus to your Income Statistic for as long as you remain the Running Guy. You remain the Running Guy until one of the following occurs:

Defeat—An opponent defeats you in a non-GameShow! round of Combat. If this occurs, the player who defeated you receives $1,000 in cash.
Forfeit—You go out of play (via any of the methods covered under “Things That Suck,” in the Citizen’s Guide). If this occurs, no one wins any prize money, the GameShow! simply ends.
Replacement—An opponent lands on the Running Guy square. If this occurs, your opponent becomes the new Running Guy and you receive a one- time $500 bonus for having success- fully eluded your captors for the duration of an entire season of the program.

If you land on the Running Guy square while you are the Running Guy, you may Taunt your would-be bounty hunters from the studio. Each opponent in play loses 50 Influence, and you gain the sum total lost in this fashion.

GameShow!: Wheel of Misfortune

When you land on this square, roll the twenty-sided die to simulate the spinning of the giant Wheel of Misfortune. The listed effects occur instantaneously upon completion of your roll.

Win $20 or Spin Again
Publicly Exalted: +200 Influence
Arrow to the Head: -200 Power
Free Rocket Roller Skates
Boa Constrictor: -200 Power
Forced to Do Six Hundred Reps!: +300 to your Power Maximum; +6 Stress
Burst Into Flames: -200 Power
Free Chainsaw
Beartrap!: -200 Power
Ingest Growth Hormone: +200 Power Max +200 Power
Psychic Leeches: -100 Intelligence
Free Diploma By Mail: +100 Intelligence
Jackpot!: Roll two six-sided dice, multiply the result by 100,and receive that amount from the Bank
Ejecton Seat!: Take another turn
Publicly Decried: -200 Influence
Free Lucky Rabbit’s Foot
Nameless Horror!: +12 Stress
Go To Jail
Win three Boxes of Dead Raccoons
Win $20 or draw a card

GameShow!: You Bet Your Clone!

All players are rounded up and forced onto a stage, where they sit around a table lit by a halogen spotlight. In the middle of the table is a six-chambered revolver with a bullet in one chamber. Beginning with the player who landed on the square, each player picks up the revolver, spins the chamber, places the gun against their temple, and rolls the die to simulate the pulling of the trigger. If he or she rolls a 1, bits of bone, hair and blood spray out onto the studio audience, the curtain falls, the player’s Power Statistic is reduced by half, and the game ends. If he or she does not roll a one, the charming host gives the lucky contestant $100. Play proceeds clockwise.

If each player makes it through the first round without incident, they are released from their restraints and are invited to leave the studio if they wish. If any players decide to remain behind, the prize money for success doubles, and another bullet is placed in the chamber. The second round is played the same way as the first one, only the failure roll is now a one or a two, and the prize money is now $200 instead of $100. After each round players are given the option to declare that they are leaving the studio. Subsequent rounds are the same, only another consecutive digit is added to the pool of possible failure rolls each round, and the prize money doubles.

This GameShow ends as soon as a player takes the result of a failure roll (Yay!) or when a round ends and no players choose to go on to the next round (Boo!).

HappyDale Sanitarium (Major Square)

We all need rest. Yes, everyone—even a big-shot politico like yourself—needs a little rest sometimes. And in the hustle- and-bustle of today’s modern world, sometimes we’re not all able to rest on our own. Sometimes it helps to have the aid of expensive tranquilizing chemicals and state-of-the-art restraints. Some- times it helps to have the finest trained orderlies remove your belt, necktie, and any ballpoint pens you may be carrying, and then wrestle you into a cozy cell. Ah, but there are no “cells” here—here there are only Luxury Relaxation Suites, with patented Comfywalls, padded with the gentle opulence of pure rubber to prevent you from dashing your skull open against the hard cinderblock surface hidden beneath them. HappyDale Sanitarium: Because sometimes... it helps.

Voluntary Admission

At HappyDale Sanitarium, you have the option of declaring yourself “checked in” immediately before declaring the end of your turn if your Stress is higher than zero. At that moment, move your playing piece to one of the available Suites, and flip your pin upside down to indicate that you are out of play (see “Out of Play” in the Citizen’s Guide).

After you have spent one full turn out of play in the Sanitarium, lose five points of Stress. If your Stress is still above zero, you have an option: you may “check out” or remain in. If you decide to check out, you return to play and you may take your next turn normally. If you remain in, you remain out of play for another round, and the process repeats itself.

If your Stress has been reduced to zero, you are released from the Sanitarium. Move your playing piece back to the main area of the Sanitarium square and return to play. You will take your next turn normally. No player with a Stress of zero may be admitted into or remain committed in HappyDale Sanitarium.

Involuntary Admission

If your Stress exceeds your Stress Tolerance Level, you have gone Insane. Go out of play and move your pin to HappyDale Sanitarium for Involuntary Admission. Please refer to “Insanity” in the Citizen’s Guide.

HappyRail

The squares considered to be “connected” to HappyRail by a rail line are the two Outbound Line squares closest to it, and the Take Two Cards square closest to it.

Using HappyRail allows you to take the effect of the square you travel to, as though you had landed on it normally. This means that if you use HappyRail to travel to an Outbound Line square, you could then pay the $50 and continue traveling to the nearest Inbound square. This also means that you could move from the Take Two Cards square into the center of the board to initiate an Election (once you have taken the effects of the two cards).

Remember that if you use HappyRail to move to a different square, you should begin your next turn by declaring your direction.

Although larger than some other squares, HappyRail is not considered a Major Square, and you may not declare a stop at it.

Hit the Diner

The second roll is considered an extension of your Move phase, not a second turn, so do not collect Income again. Groups that receive benefit from their Movement rolls (such as the Adrenaline Junkies or the Child Prodigies) may receive a second benefit, however.

You may have a new opportunity to Challenge opponents to Combat if they are within range of your second roll, and you must allow them an opportunity to Challenge you.

Any non-permanent effects that altered the previous roll (such as a Black Cat or Rabbit’s Foot) do not apply to this new roll.

Institute, The (Major Square)

Science! By its very definition, we aren’t exactly sure what Science is. Some people believe that Science is the exciting process of gathering and organizing knowledge. Others believe that Science is stuff that burns real bad when it hits your exposed skin.

In either case! HappyCOM-9’s Department of Defense needs to know more about the frail bodies and precious fluids of common organisms like yourself. To this end, they have set up a series of Human Research Pods at the Institute. When you are at the Institute, you have the option to check yourself into one of these Pods. If you elect to do so, move your playing piece to one of the open Pods, and go out of play: turn your pin upside-down and end your turn. On your next turn, enact one of the following results (your choice):

Lose 50 points of Intelligence
Lose 150 points of Power
Gain six points of Stress

You will note that none of these results are particularly friendly. However, your time as a human research subject does not go unrewarded: at the exact moment that the result takes effect, you may collect $500.

As long as you are still alive and sane, you go back into play once you have undergone the results of the experiment and collected your money. Simply turn your pin right-side up again, move from the Pod to the main area of the Institute square, and end your turn. Take your next turn normally.

If you are killed or driven Insane as a result of Institute effects, remain out of play and simply move your pin to the Sanitarium or the County Hospital, as covered under “Death” and “Insanity” in the Citizen’s Guide. You still receive your $500 payment even if the research renders you Dead or Insane.

You can subject yourself to multiple experiments in a row, but note that this is time-consuming. Once checked out, if you want to use the Institute a second time, you will need to pass the Movement phase of a turn in order to stay on the Institute and check yourself in again. You will then need to spend the following turn out of play inside the Institute to undergo the experiment.

Jail (Major Square)

Jail is more than just a cool place to loaf around with other criminals and traitors. It’s a complete experience package! HappyCOM-9’s state-of-the-art Detention Cells are frequently updated to include the latest and greatest in punitive technologies, so there’s always something exciting to do, from being “depth interrogated” in the onyx hell of the CruciForge to having your personality professionally “cleansed” in the Effigy Scrambler. All this without the hassle of even being permitted to pack a bag!

Incarceration

The most common way to end up at Jail is by becoming Incarcerated, either by landing on a Go To Jail square or by some other means. When Incarcerated, move your playing piece immediately to one of the free Cells. This renders you out of play: flip your playing piece upside-down.

To learn more about what you can’t do when out of play, see page 13 of the Citizen’s Guide.

Unless an opponent has paid your Bail (see below) or you have freed yourself by playing a card, you must submit yourself to Morning Beatings every turn you begin under Incarceration. During your Morning Beating, lose either 50 points of Power or half of your Power (your choice).

On the up side, becoming Incarcerated voids any existing Warrants for your arrest, and it clears any outstanding Screws that you committed from your record.

Getting Free

If Incarcerated, there are five ways to get free:

Roll doubles—For every turn you begin in Jail, roll two dice (after your Morning Beating). Doubles indicate that a clerical error has set you free. Return to play immediately and take your turn as normal. Begin by declaring which direction you will be travel- ing when you leave.
Post Bail—If another player pays your bail, you are set free. Bail is $50 the first time you are Incarcerated, but it doubles each additional time you are Incarcerated. The second time, it is $100; the third time it is $200; the fourth time it is $400, and so on. You may wish to make a note of how many times you and your opponents are Incarcerated during the game.
When your Bail is paid, you remain out of play until the beginning of your next turn. Although you begin your turn in Jail, you do not receive Morning Beatings: you simply take your turn as normal. Remember to declare your direction before rolling for Movement.
Opponents who are out of play may not pay your bail, and you may not pay your own Bail (although you may offer opponents money to pay your Bail).
Play a FATE card—Playing a card that has getting out of Jail as an explicit game effect sets you free. You remain out of play until the beginning of your next turn. Although you begin your turn in Jail, you do not receive Morning Beatings: you simply take your turn as normal. Remember to declare your direction before rolling for Movement.
Drop Dead—If your Power goes down to zero, you Die, and your lifeless body is unceremoniously deposited in one of the Intensive Cloning Units (ICUs) at the County Hospital. You are free, but still considered out of play until you are brought back to life (follow the rules under “Death” on page 19 of the Citizen’s Guide).
Go crazy—If your Stress exceeds your Stress Tolerance Level, you go Insane, and are retroactively found Not Guilty By Reason Of Insanity. You are still considered out of play—you are just moved to HappyDale Sanitarium, as outlined under “Insanity,” on page 20 of the Citizen’s Guide.

Just Visiting

Like all of the Major Squares, one can also use Jail for certain transactions. These are accomplished by stopping in the “Just Visiting” section. From this section, a player can Instigate a prisoner (by Taunting them or Poking them with Sticks) or obtain an Arrest Warrant.

Taunting and Poking With Sticks

When you are visiting Jail and an opponent is Incarcerated within, you have the option to Taunt them or Poke them with a Stick. If you choose to Taunt them, roll a six-sided die. Add the result to their Stress, and subtract the number times ten from their Influence. If you choose to Poke them with a Stick, roll a six-sided die. Add the result to their Stress, and subtract the result times ten from their Power. You may not Taunt an opponent and Poke them with a Stick on the same turn. Both Taunting and Poking With Sticks count as Instigations.

Obtaining Arrest Warrants

If an opponent has Screwed you (see “Screwing” in the “Hurting Other People” section of the Citizen’s Guide, page 18), you may acquire a Warrant for that opponent’s Arrest at Jail. To do so, you must stop on the Jail square, and declare the particulars of the Screwing. Make a note that you have received a Warrant on the Personal Data Sheet, including the name of the opponent who the Warrant is for. You may only hold one Warrant for a given opponent at any time, regardless of how many times the player has Screwed you. Getting the Warrant for a particular offense “evens the score,” so you may not get a second Warrant for the same Screw later.

You may declare your intention to use a Warrant any time you and the opponent named in the Warrant occupy the same square (even if this shared occupation occurs only for an instant, as in the middle of a Movement phase). Simply declare use of the Warrant at the moment of shared occupation and your opponent will instantly be Incarcerated (this may be a good time to refer her or him to page 20 of the Citizen’s Guide). This overrides any other game effect that hinges upon sharing space on the board (before your opponent can Damage you with Combust- O-Pills, for instance).

If two players have Warrants for one another, priority goes to the player who declared use of their Warrant first. If both players declare simultaneously, they both go to Jail simultaneously.

A player who is out of play cannot be served with an Arrest Warrant.

The Warrant preempts any declared Combat, but you may not declare its use in the middle of a round of Combat.

When a player is Incarcerated, all Warrants bearing that player’s name are considered fulfilled, and are rendered null and void. In addition, since the arrested player is busy paying his or her debt to society, all outstanding Screws (against any player) are “cleared” from that player’s record.

Arrest Warrants do not count as Possessions, and as such you cannot be Mugged for them. However, you may sell, trade or give a Warrant to your opponents, who may also make use of it to arrest the player named in it. You may even sell it to the player it targets: this renders the Warrant “inactive” until it was re-sold, traded, or given away.

Strictly speaking, Arrest Warrants are “retaliatory,” and for this reason the acquisition or use of an Arrest Warrant does not count as an Instigation.

Left at the Altar

If your Stress is over 20 when you land on this square, you feel nothing more than a quiet sense of shameful relief. Clearly you weren’t right for one another. Reduce your Stress to 20.

Mailbox, The (Major Square)

HappyCOM-9 kind of remembers e-commerce, mostly as a thing that made stock prices go up and then down again. But HappyCOM-9 vividly remembers... mail order. Oh, yes. Deep in its memory banks you can still find scans of ancient, tome-like catalogs crammed full of useful items and dangerous sundries. These scans have led HappyCOM-9 to under- stand that postal commerce is central to a thriving economy. Consequently, it has provided the citizenry with access to a single Mailbox, located in an district of the City eternally ravaged with violent skirmishes. This Mailbox will be your source for tapping into many of Inevitable’s most valuable resources.

When stopped at the Mailbox, you may order up to three items from the Catalog. Simply select the items you desire, declare what you’re purchasing, and pay the amount you owe to the Bank. The item(s) that you ordered will be delivered to you instantaneously, to be recorded on your Personal Data Form, and you may use them at an appropriate time (see “Use Your Possessions” on page 12 of the Citizen’s Guide.)

Although you may hold on to items listed as Enhancements, many players find it safer and more desirable to make use of them immediately. In this case, they do not need to be recorded as Possessions on the Personal Data Form: simply make the appropriate adjustment to your Statistics.

There are other places on the board where you can order items from the Catalog (the two Convenience Store squares, for instance), and if you have the Smart Phone (an item in the Catalog) you can place orders from anywhere. But you should think of the Mailbox as the most convenient place to order from: you can order items without the annoying surcharges of the Convenience Store and without having to waste time standing around using the Phone. Plus you can do three at once!

Deferred Orders

Ideally, you should always know exactly what you want to order before you reach the Mailbox, but if you need some time to decide (beginning players often do), you may wait until your next turn to declare what you will order. When your next turn comes around, simply declare what you have ordered, pay for it, receive it, and then take your turn as you normally would. You must complete your Deferred Order before taking any other phase of your turn, and any money that you may have acquired between the end of your last turn and the beginning of the turn on which you are placing your order may not be used in the Deferred Order.

Any other player may demand that you place your order on your turn if they feel that what you are going to order will significantly affect the game.

Need Your Fix

Moving to the Coffeehouse disrupts your existing direction, so you will need to declare your direction before you take the “roll again” effect of the Coffeehouse.

Travel to the Coffeehouse takes place instantly, so you may not declare stops en route to the Coffeehouse, and you ignore any game effects that would typically result from sharing a square with any opponent during your Movement.

Similarly, you may not engage opponents in Combat if you “pass” them on way to the Coffeehouse. However, before taking the “roll again” effect of the Coffeehouse, you may Challenge opponents to Combat if they are within range, and you must allow them an opportunity to Challenge you.

If the Coffeehouse has been destroyed, move to the blank square where the Coffeehouse was formerly located and receive +6 Stress. As with other blank squares, treat the destroyed Coffeehouse as a place where you may choose to draw a FATE card.

For questions about the Coffeehouse’s effect, see Coffeehouse, The.

Network, The (Major Square)

The Network is your number one source for media in the City. In fact, it is your only source for media in the City. Yes, from sunup to sundown to sunup again, Channel One is the station against which any resistance is futile. But the Network doesn’t just produce high-quality TV programming, oh no. The many Content Production Divisions of the Network are hard at work round the clock fabricating magazines, newspapers, radio programming, feature films, and downloadable content. Exposure to this content is mandatory.

Publicity Campaigns

You may increase your Influence—or the Influence of an opponent—when on the Network by running a Publicity Campaign. For each dollar you spend on a Publicity Campaign, the targeted player’s Influence goes up one point. You may run Publicity Campaigns for multiple players on a single turn, but you may not spend more than $500 (cumulatively) on Publicity Campaigns on a single turn.

You may run a Publicity Campaign for an opponent who is out of play.

Attack Campaigns

You may also “go negative”—decrease the Influence of your opponents (or yourself)— by running an Attack Campaign against them. For each dollar you spend on a Attack Campaign, the targeted player’s Influence is lowered by a point. You may run Attack Campaigns against multiple players on a single turn, but you may not spend more than $500 (cumulatively) on Attack Campaigns on a single turn.

Running Attack Campaigns counts as an Instigation, which means that you may not run an Attack Campaign on an opponent who is out of play.

You may run up to $500 in Attack Campaigns and $500 in Publicity Campaigns on the same turn.

Newspaper's All Wet!

Newspaper's All Wet

The "official" effect of this space is, "+6 Stress."

Personal Time Off

When you land on Personal Time Off, your Special Ability is “shut off” for a round. This means that for that round, you may not use any Ability listed on your Group Information Sheet. For many Groups, what occurs in these instances is self-explanatory: the Church, for instance, may not modify anyone’s die roll while enjoying Personal Time Off.

However, this square affects some Groups more complexly. If you are playing a Group with more complex Abilities, the Group Information Sheet should provide some information about what happens when those Abilities are shut off, and what happens when they are “turned on” again.

Personal Time Off is only intended to temporarily “turn off” any secondary benefits associated with your base Abilities. So a Group like the Handmaidens of Cthulhu does not lose their Adherents when they take Personal Time Off. (In fact, the Adherents may continue using their card-transferring Ability, since they aren’t under the affect of the Personal Time Off square.) Similarly, a Group like the College Students or Identity Thieves—who may have built up many Abilities over time—have all their Abilities turned off when taking Personal Time Off, but all their accumulated Abilities return when their base Ability is turned on again.

Rail Lines

The Rail Lines are not Major Squares, and as a result you may not declare stops at them. You may not use them if you are moving past them: you must land exactly on them as the result of a die roll or some other game effect.

If you use a Rail Line for travel, remember to begin your next turn by declaring your direction.

Unlike HappyRail, the Rail Lines do not allow you to immediately take the effect of the square that you move to. Additionally, you may not use the Rail Lines to move to the HappyRail hub.

If you opt not to travel, you must draw a FATE card. For general rules governing the drawing of cards, see “Take Two Cards” below.

Sewers, The

When you land on a Sewer square, you may enter the Sewers, or stay where you are. Entering the Sewers allows you to instantly go to any other Sewer square on the board. If you choose to travel through the Sewers, don’t forget to begin your next turn by declaring your direction.

Traveling through the Sewers is not exactly flying first class: in fact it inevitably leads to a Hideous Encounter of one form or another. Thus: when you are in the Sewers, roll the six-sided die, and add the result to your Stress. It is customary to regale the other players with details of your Hideous Encounter upon emergence.

Sympathy Card

Because you are forced to play the Sympathy Card as a board effect, it does not count as an Instigation, even if the results of the card are negative.

Players who receive the Sympathy Card treat it as though they drew it, which means that they may hold a Holdable card that they receive. Some cards affect all players, and in those cases it doesn’t really matter who draws it. That’s OK. Give it to someone anyway.

You may not give the Sympathy Card to opponents who are out of play.

Take Two Cards / Take Two Cards, Choose One

Note that you must land exactly on a Take Two Cards square in order to use it as an access route to the center. They are not Major Squares, and as such you may not declare a stop at them.

General Rules about FATE Cards

When a game effect instructs you to draw a card, draw the top card from the Fate Deck. Before showing it to anyone, look in the upper-right corner of the card. If the card has an icon of a hand holding some cards up near the name of the card, it’s a Holdable card.

You may keep it secret from the other players and “hold” it for play later in the game. Holdable cards generally specify when they can be played, and under what conditions. Generally they cannot be played when you are out of play. Holdable cards do not count as Possessions, and as such you cannot be Mugged for them, although you may sell or trade Holdable cards to your opponents.

If the card is not a Holdable card, play it immediately, including those that have the blue “Persistent” icon (see below).

If the card contains effects that do not resolve immediately (examples include “Cancer” or “Famine”), it is considered to be a Persistent card. These are marked with a special icon .

Leave these cards face up in the play area until they resolve or until another card forces them to be discarded.

Commands and statements on cards take effect sequentially. If a card effect puts you out of play, any remaining card effects are voided. If you have landed on a Take Two Cards square, obey the first card fully before drawing the second one; if the first one puts you out of play, do not draw the second one. By contrast, if you have landed on a Take Two Cards, Choose One square, you may examine both cards, then take the effect of the card you want.

Card effects that explicitly contradict game rules supersede them. For instance, if a Holdable card specifies that you may play it while in Jail, you may, although this directly contradicts the rules elsewhere, which specify that you may not play Holdable cards in Jail.

If you ever cannot afford to pay a fee incurred by a card effect, you have gone Bankrupt: you pay whatever money you have to the debtee, and you are immedi- ately Incarcerated. In most cases, the “debtee” will be the Bank, but the same is true for cards that direct you to give money to an opponent. This opponent may choose to offer alternatives to payment, but if an agreement satisfactory to both parties cannot be worked out, you are Incarcerated. See “Jail.”

Card effects that target other players (as in the case of “all players,” or “a player of your choice,” etc.) do not affect players who are out of play (unless the card specifically states otherwise). When resolving these effects, simply treat it as though the out of play players do not exist.

If the FATE Deck runs out of cards, reshuffle all cards in the discards pile and start the deck anew. If you’re playing with the Free Demo Version, remember that both the Standard PDF Version and the Deluxe Version of Inevitable have thirty-six additional cards (66 cards in all). Visit inevitablethegame.com/catalog/all-items to purchase.

HappyCOM-9 will thank you.

The Exalted Decider Trophy

At PAX East 2011, the Dystopian Holdings crew ran many games of Inevitable. The winner of each game earned a highly coveted Exalted Decider Trophy. Aside from being classy and tasteful, it also conveys special in-game powers upon its owner. For now, those powers are:

You may add 125 votes to your Total Votes when you run against HappyCOM-9 in an Election.
When selecting a group to play, you may elect to discard your selection a second time to opt for a third option.
Once per game, you may request that an opponent bring you a beverage. If that opponent refuses, they lose 250 points of Influence.

The esteemed posessors of Exalted Decider trophies are:

Katrina K.
Emma Y.
Rodney Sheldon
Fred Hicks
Charles Boucher
Eric "Wizzy" Wisniewski
Dave Evans
Matt Donle