Survive the year, one month at a time. Each of its 12 months an Omen is revealed and you draw back up to a hand of 6 cards, so a card you keep is a card you don't draw. You take up to 3 actions, then you must feed your people and answer the Omen.
Resources. Food feeds people. Timber raises buildings. Coin and Iron answer Omens. A Wild can become any of them.
Paying. What is in your Stores pays at full value, but each store is spent whole. A card spent straight from your hand counts for half.
Hardship. Fall short on a payment and you suffer 1 Hardship, or 2 if you are short by 5 or more. At 4 Hardship the settlement falls.
Actions. Click a card or a store to see what you can do with it. Stockpiling, trading and building cost 1 action each.
Calamities. The worst Omens demand 10 of one resource. One never comes in the first three months of a year, and unlike other Omens they do not grow from year to year.
Buildings. You can have one of each kind. A building card builds it at tier I, or improves the one you have by one tier, up to tier III; each tier costs more Timber. From the second year, Disasters strike without warning between months. A Flood, Fire, Lightning or Landslide knocks one kind of building down a tier, and a tier I building is lost. The Great ones destroy the building outright, and grow more common each year.
Refusing. A building card is your people asking for that building. For 1 action you may refuse: the materials go into your Stores as 3 of that building's resource, but it costs you 2 of the village's Mana.
The new year. Survive all 12 months and the year turns: some Hardship lifts, a child is born, and the next, harsher year begins with everything you have built.
Mana. Every month a village survives earns you Mana equal to its size, less 1 for each Hardship it carries. Mana you keep marks how far you have risen, and earns you titles. A village you stay with grows devoted: each new year it gives more Mana every month, and a larger village deepens faster. At the end of each year you may leave the village and keep its Mana, but a god who leaves early is half remembered: you keep half after one year, three quarters after two, and all of it from the third. If the village falls instead, everything it earned you is lost. Mana you have already kept is safe.
Miracles. You may spend a village's Mana to work a miracle: turn aside the month's Omen so that it asks nothing, or spare a building from a Disaster as it strikes. An Omen can be turned aside at any time before you end the month, but not once its payment falls due; a Disaster, only as it strikes. The first miracle in a village costs 10 Mana and each one after costs double the last. Mana you spend is Mana you cannot keep, but people who have seen a miracle believe harder. Their faith is extra Mana the village gives every month: the first miracle adds 2, the second 4 more, the third 6 more, and so on. Faith cools by 1 each month until only 1 is left, and suffering shakes it: every Hardship your people take removes 2 of it.
Retreating. If a year is going badly you may abandon the village before the month ends (the link is at the foot of the board). Its people are left to ruin and you keep only half of what leaving in peace would have kept.
Score each year: 1 per 5 in Stores, plus buildings, plus 2 per extra person, minus 3 per Hardship.