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This post deals with the Inevitable Manual.

The Exalted Decider Trophy

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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:

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

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Newspaper's All Wet!

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Newspaper's All Wet

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

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The First Turn

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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.

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Complete the Outfitting Phase

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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.

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Transcribe Your Statistics

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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.

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Give Each Player A Group

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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.

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Select A Duration

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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.

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Setting Up: A Checklist

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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.

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Some Quick Strategy

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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!

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Starting Play (Quick Version)

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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.

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