Playing together

Worlds and characters

• Characters belong to one world. A player who joins a world for the first time makes a new hero there. When they rejoin, they get the same hero back where they left it.
• While a player is away, their hero leaves the board, out of harm's way.
• Your hero's own things: pack, gear, gold, bank, quest board and active quests, personal story quests, merchant standing, wreck marks, attuned waystones and respawn point.
• Shared by everyone in the world:
  • the land and its nodes, so a vein one player works out is worked out for everyone
  • creatures
  • vendors' books (demand and prices)
  • fish banks
  • world quests, and the bosses and legends that have fallen
  • the world chronicle
• Fixed when the world is made:
  • pace
  • game mode: Carefree (no penalty on death), Standard (drop some gold on death) or Hardcore (lose everything on death)
  • death rule: your corpse holds your things, or you keep your things

Hosting from a device

The hero panel offers two ways to host the world you have open:

• Invite Friends (Game Center): friends join through Game Center, up to Game Center's limit of four players, host included.
• Host with a Join Code: players on the same Wi-Fi find the world under Join a World on the title screen, and players anywhere type the code there. The code has 6 characters, shown like ABC-123. The world keeps the same code each time it's hosted. There's no set player limit when a device hosts.

Other rules while hosting:

• Only the host saves the world. It autosaves every 2 minutes, and a joined device keeps nothing.
• Players who do nothing for 10 minutes are sent home, with a warning 1 minute before.
• Both devices must run the same version of the game.

Hosting on a Mac

• Host on a Mac sends a copy of a saved world to a Mac running cardpg-host --receive. The Mac keeps the world running for everyone, and you get your hero back when you join it. The copy on your device stays as it is.
• The Mac host can be the CaRdPG Host app or the cardpg-host command-line tool. It can be found on the local network, or reached online with the world's code. It can optionally let players connect straight to the Mac.
• Mac host defaults: 8 players at most and a 10-minute idle limit. Both can be changed.

Free to try

• The game is free to play in Havenbrook Meadows and Whisperwood. Everything else needs a one-time purchase that unlocks the whole continent.
• The purchase has no ads and no subscription. It works on iPhone, iPad and Apple TV, and with Family Sharing.
• Free players are stopped at the border of a locked land, and the unlock screen opens. They can't target creatures standing in locked land, can't travel there by waystone or rune, and aren't offered quests there.
• Each player's own purchase counts, wherever they play. A free player can join a friend's world but stays in the free lands. A player who owns the game can go everywhere, even in a free player's world.
• A refund or revoked Family Sharing locks the game again.