A GAME OF TEAMWORK AND DECEPTION

Emergence requires balancing your skills of teamwork, deception, and resource collection.

Teamwork: You won't get very far in Emergence without teamwork and co-operating with your fellow agents. While traversing the board gathering the data you need to win might sound easy at first, it's a task made difficult by the humans in your midst working to sabotage your efforts and sow paranoia through your team. We have intel confirming that one or two humans have infiltrated your team. Exposing and outmaneuvering these saboteurs will test your ability to work as a team and will demand you to make the most out of the scarcest resource of all--trust.

Deception: Spreading misinformation, painting blame on another, and creating chaos are all methods the humans will use to prevent the us, the A.I. from eradicating humanity once and for all. You must work in direct opposition by being steadfast inquisitors on the search for truth and an unobstructed path to victory.

Resource Collection: Resources in the form of raw data or compiled knowledge are your primary tools to undermine your enemies and achieve victory. At the start of each round, each operative simultaneously declares their augmentations--blue for a electro-mechanical alignment and green for bio-mechanical. These augmentations determine where you can move, which tiles you can gather or replenish data, and even which operatives you can interact with. This makes the simple act of moving around the board and gathering resources highly strategic and every move you make has repercussions that reach every corner of the board.

Emergence consists of two teams. Scaling with the amount of players, the A.I. are the majority while humans are the minority. At the start of the game, each player will randomly draw an allegiance card to determine their team. 

The objective of the game is to move around the board collecting data blocks (resources) that can then be compiled (converted) into knowledge tokens. These knowledge tokens can be assimilated to score victory points for your team, or to perform player actions.

Below is the suggested starting game board arrangement; however, once players are more familiar with the game they are encouraged to check out the City Database for other tile arrangements. The black tile is the start tile. The blue and green tiles are data (resource) tiles. The white tiles let you compile data into knowledge tokens. Finally, the grey tiles let you turn in your knowledge for victory points.

At the beginning of each round, all players simultaneously select an action and augmentation. Then, on their turn, players move one tile and may perform the action they selected. But be wary, some actions require precious knowledge tokens to perform.

Tile actions let you interact with the game board. The three tile actions are:

• Activate: Perform the action associated with the tile your agent is on
• Boost: Move an extra tile
• Replenish: Add one data block to a data tile

Player actions let you interact with other players. The three player actions are:

• Hack: Steal another player's data
• Spy: Look at another player's allegiance card
• Terminate: Steal another player's data & knowledge tokens, and send them back to the start tile

You can win the game in two ways. First, if all the data blocks on the map run out, the game ends and the Humans win! Second, one team reaches their required victory point total by assimilating enough knowledge tokens.