Sanctum (game)

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Sanctum is a two-player computer collectible card game, played exclusively online against human opponents. It runs only on the Windows operating system.

The cards include common, uncommon, and rare just like other CCGs, but they are owned and traded in an online account, and their "casting" manifests their contents in a virtual environment, to strive for triumph in the "real" setting of a world map [1].

Sanctum was originally developed by Digital Addiction in 1997, and opened to public participation in 1998. In 2000, Digital Addiction closed its doors. Faced with the prospect that the game would vanish, several players created the non-profit (later for-profit company) now known as Nioga LLC to acquire and run the game. Nioga has maintained the game and made improvements, including bug fixes and issuance of a new expansion set, Revolutions, as well as the current development of another expansion, Allies and Traitors.

[edit] Overview

The game is played on a board of square tiles, roughly diamond shaped. Each player sees his or her own Sanctum at the bottom of the board and the opponent's Sanctum at the top. The rest of the board is semi-randomly generated. Each square on the board can be one of a variety of terrain types, or can contain a town. Each Sanctum and owned town produces recruits, which can be trained as Swordsmen or Archers to fight for their player, to attack monsters summoned by the enemy, to capture towns, or ultimately to capture the enemy Sanctum, thereby winning the game.

Every player has a collection of virtual cards (maintained online, not printed). Before play begins, each player chooses from this collection to make a deck of at least thirty cards. Players have a five card hand of spells, drawn randomly from the deck. Mana to cast these spells is generated by the Sanctum, by towns and by some of the spells. A card that is played from the hand or discarded is randomly replaced from the unused cards in the deck.

[edit] Structure

As with many fantasy games, spell-casting in Sanctum is constrained by a limited resource called Mana. In this game, mana comes in six types, in three pairs of opposites:

Strife / Order
Clarity / Mystery
Will / World

There are also twelve "houses", each holding claim to a specific pair of mana types, one major and one minor for that house, and a race of beings who serve it with a special power:

House Name	Major Mana	Minor Mana	Nation	Special Ability
Abomination	Will	Strife	Imps	+1 Hand Damage
Body	World	Mystery	Cyclopes	+2 Hit Points
Death	Mystery	Will	Keepers	+1 Hand Damage
Despair	Mystery	Strife	Shadows	Mountainwalk
Hope	Clarity	Order	Visions	Waterwalk
Justice	Order	Mystery	Gargoyles	+2 hit points
Life	Clarity	World	Elves	+1 Missile Damage
Making	Order	Will	Dwarves	Mountainwalk
Mind	Will	Clarity	Djinni	Waterwalking
Nature	World	Order	Satyrs	+1 Missile Damage
Unmaking	Strife	World	Misfits	+2 hit points
War	Strife	Clarity	Humans	+1 Hand Damage