Play it in the browser — a seat at the table against the simulator’s own bots. The page runs the Python package itself under Pyodide rather than a port of it, so the rules being played and the bots playing them are the ones in the repository. Twenty-four thousand simulated games have resolved without a stall and not one of them had a person in it, which is the whole of what is alpha about it.
👑 successionvprint-deck-2026-10-01-09884ab
2026.09.18 updated 2026.10.01
a card game about seizing power
readme
The King has died, leaving his infant son to inherit the throne. You are one of the powerful men of the empire, intriguing for the ear of the young monarch: place your agents in the offices close to the king, and see your faction's secret agenda through before anyone else sees theirs.
A card game for 2–8 players. Every player holds a hidden agenda — a faith to raise, a house to put in power, a balance to keep — and the court of seven seats is shared, so a courtier you seat may serve a rival's agenda as well as your own.
Play it
Play in your browser against bots, on a phone or a computer. Nothing to install; on a phone it can be added to your home screen and plays offline. Your first game deals you a gentle hand, and Rules in the game has the whole of how to play.
Print it for a real table:
- How to play — the rules for a table, two pages; as a PDF for Letter or A4.
- Print and play at home — the rules and every card, nine to a page, with a page of backs: Letter or A4. Print at actual size, cut on the lines, and sleeve the cards in front of ordinary playing cards if you can't print both sides. Bring a six-sided die.
- Order a real deck — the print-ready zip is sized and bled for MakePlayingCards, with an order file that fills itself in. docs/PRINTING.md walks through it. The board prints at home: A4 or Letter.
- The deck — every card, with its picture and rules text.
Tell us how it went
This is a playtest, and what we most need is to hear from people who played.
- Send a playtest report — a short form: who won, how long it took, what confused you, whether you'd play again. At the end of a browser game, Tell us how it went opens it with your game already filled in.
- Report a problem — something broke, or a card didn't do what it said. The link at the foot of the game's page fills in which build you're on. A game record (end screen → Save this game) lets us replay exactly what you saw.
Both need a GitHub account.
Where it stands
The rules are settled enough to put in front of players: every agenda is winnable, the eight of them win within seven points of each other, and 24,000 simulated games resolve without a stall. What is alpha about it is that the numbers come from bots; the open questions in docs/RULES.md are the ones a real table will answer faster than a batch run.
The game changes as the playtest goes. The build named at the foot of the page is the version you played, and a saved game replays only under the rules it was played by.
For developers
The rules engine is a dependency-free Python package (succession/), and the
browser game runs that same package in the page under Pyodide, so a bot, a
terminal player and a browser player all play the identical game.
python -m succession play # take a seat against the bots in a terminal
python -m succession run --games 1000 --summary
cd web && npm install && npm run dev # the browser game at http://localhost:5173- docs/DEVELOPING.md — the code, the simulator, the print tooling and the browser game.
- docs/RULES.md — the rules as implemented, every assumption and the flag that flips it. Read it before changing anything.
- docs/BALANCE.md — what the batch runs found.
- docs/EMBED.md — putting the game on another site.