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.
