Rulebook POC

The core loop

Five steps, repeated. Beat and catch wild games to grow your library and level up your team.

1. 1
   🎮

   Choose a starter

   Pick one of three games to begin your library.

2. 2
   🔎

   Hunt

   Head out to encounter a rarity-weighted wild game.

3. 3
   ⚔️

   Battle

   Trade turn-based blows using genre type advantages.

4. 4
   🎯

   Catch

   Defeat a wild game, then add it to your library.

5. 5
   ⭐

   Level up

   Earn XP, grow stronger, and hunt rarer games.

🔥 The Forge — create your own game

Describe a game that doesn't exist and the Forge turns it into a battle-ready original card — yours from birth. Your words shape the card: genre keywords set its type ("haunted" → Horror, "quest" → RPG…), and the description seeds its stats, rarity, and face. The same description always forges the same card.

• Originals only. Famous characters are filtered — the Forge refuses "Pikachu", "Mario" and friends. Describe your own idea.
• Fair by design. Forged stat budgets match hunted cards of the same rarity, and Legendary forges are rare — creating can't outclass collecting.
• Share a challenge link. Any fighter can be shared as a URL. A friend who opens it battles your creation instantly — no account, no cost.
• Remix. Beat a challenger's forged original and you may catch a remix of it — the same creation, now also in your library. Remix lineage is the seed of the creator economy.

🗓️ Daily Gauntlet & streaks

Every day seeds the same three opponents for every player — a shared run you can compare notes on — while their levels scale to your fighter. All three fights are free. Clear the run and you're paid gold that grows with your streak (consecutive completed days, bonus capped at 10 days). Miss a day and the streak resets. Your creator identity is a local did:key minted in your browser: creations are signed as yours from birth, and your game actions land in a locally signed event log — no account, no server, fully offline.

Starters

You begin by choosing one of three starter games — an FPS / RPG / Puzzle triad. Your starter joins your library at Level 3 and becomes your first active fighter.

You can switch your active fighter to any game in your library at any time between hunts — tap it in the Library panel.

Hunting & rarity

Each hunt spawns one wild game drawn at random, weighted by rarity — the rarer the game, the less often it appears. The wild's level tracks your active fighter's level (roughly ±1), so encounters scale as you grow.

Chance = a game's rarity weight ÷ the sum of all weights (100). A Legendary is roughly 7× rarer than a Common.

Age rating

Every card carries a PEGI/ESRB-style age rating. It is a real gameplay axis, not a label: it changes how often a card appears, whether it can enter tournaments, and how far it can evolve.

The battle system

Battles are turn-based, one-on-one: your active fighter versus the wild game. You pick a move, damage resolves, then the wild replies with a random move of its own. Repeat until someone's HP hits zero.

dmg = power × 0.5
      × √(ATK / DEF)
      × effectiveness   (2 / 1 / 0.5)
      × STAB            (1.5 if same type)
      × crit            (1.5 on a 10% roll)
      × variance        (0.85 – 1.15)

Genre type chart

Six genre types form a rock-paper-scissors web: each is strong against two types and weak to two. Read a row as the attacker's move type; each cell is the damage multiplier against the column's defender.

Moves

Every game shares a four-move pool determined by its genre type. Moves climb in power but drop in accuracy — a low, reliable poke versus a big, risky finisher. All of your moves match your type, so they always get the 1.5× STAB bonus.

Catching

Prefer to move on? You can skip the catch and keep hunting. Lose the battle and the wild game gets away.

Leveling & stats

Winning a battle grants your active fighter XP (25 + 18 × wild level). Fill the bar to level up — cascading through multiple levels if you bank a big win.

Training & collection rewards

Between hunts, invest in your library. Training permanently raises a game's stats, and simply collecting pays off through library milestones and per-genre type sets.

Bring Your Own Game open standard

The dex isn't ours to gatekeep. Anyone can contribute a new game card through the public SDK/manifest — the same contract our first-party and AI-generated games implement. The open question for any open submission is trust: does this game really exist, is it playable, is the metadata honest, does it violate no IP? gamr answers that with a two-track verification model.

Saving & progress

Everything — your library, levels, XP, active fighter, and win/hunt tallies — is saved automatically to your browser's localStorage after every action. There's no account and no server yet, so progress lives on the device you play on. The reset control in the Library panel wipes your save and starts you back at the starter screen.

Notes on extensibility

This is an early prototype (Epic #11), built so the rules are pure data and math — no DOM, no side effects — in apps/web/src/lib/poc.ts. That makes it easy to grow:

• More games

  The dex is a flat array — community PRs can append real games, or it can move to per-game JSON.

• Signature moves

  Today every game of a type shares one 4-move pool; per-game moves are a natural next step.

• Turn order

  SPD is tracked on every fighter, ready for a real initiative/speed check.

• Status moves

  Move power of 0 is reserved for future status effects (buffs, debuffs, DoT).

• A real backend

  The controller funnels platform signals through one emit() seam, ready to move behind the game-sdk contract and validate scores server-side.

• Richer catching

  Catch rates, items, and escape chances can slot into the currently-guaranteed catch step.

Tracking: Epic #11 · Battle system #14 · Rules page #17