Mechanics

Statement Types

Eleven statement types live behind the scenes. Eight are passive and appear automatically. Three are active investigations you trigger by selecting one or more targets. Each clean role uses exactly one type. Corrupt roles fall back to a generic lie producer when their disguised role would have spoken.

Truth vs Lies

Every official at the table has a fixed lie status decided at the start of the case: telling the truth, lying or silent. The status does not jitter between refreshes. A truthful clean stays truthful unless a Blackmailer is forcing them. A lying corrupt stays lying. A silenced official stays silent until the Silencer is arrested.

Alignment is not the same as lie status

A blackmailed clean official is producing false statements but is still clean for the purposes of arrest. The Legal Advocate's verify ability checks lie status: it will flag a blackmailed clean as "lying." The Finance Director's count and the Zoning Director's pair check alignment: they will both treat that same blackmailed clean as clean.

Conflating the two is the most common way to lose a case. An investigation result is a statement too: it is only reliable if the investigator is honest. From an honest Legal Advocate, "lying" means the target is corrupt or blackmailed and "telling the truth" means clean. If the Legal Advocate is lying, both verdicts flip. Neither verdict is a confession on its own.

Statements lock at start

Some statements need a chosen target or chosen lie value. To prevent you from rerolling by waiting for refreshes, the game decides these once and reuses them all game. That includes the Mayor's innocent target, the Vice Mayor's pair, the City Planner's lie value, the HR Director's lie count, the IT Director's lie chain length, the Silencer's victim and the Converter's victim.

Only Silencer ends on arrest

When the Silencer is arrested the muted target plays a "freed" animation and resumes producing statements. Blackmail and Manipulation are different: those effects persist for the rest of the case even after the corrupt card is arrested.

Annotations

The annotation system is local to you. The game does not read your stamps or ribbons. They exist as a place to externalise your deductions so the board carries the case for you instead of your memory.

Note Stamps

Right-click a card to cycle through five stamp states. While hovering a card you can also set a stamp directly with Q, W, E or R; pressing the same key again clears it. These are default bindings and can be changed in Settings > Controls.

• None: the default. Nothing on the card.
• Innocent (Q): green stamp. You believe this official is clean.
• Corrupt (W): red stamp. You are confident this seat should be arrested when the timing is right.
• 50/50 (E): brown stamp. Two candidates for one slot and you cannot yet tell which.
• Suspicious (R): yellow stamp. Something is off, but you do not yet have a clean read.

Color Ribbons

Middle-click a card to cycle through five ribbon states, or press 1, 2, 3 or 4 while hovering it to set pink, blue, orange or white directly. Like the stamp inputs, these are default bindings you can change in Settings > Controls. Ribbons are deliberately abstract, with no in-game meaning. Use them however you want: by Vice Mayor pair, by Finance Director group, by neighbourhood, by anything.

• None · the default.
• Pink
• Blue
• Orange
• White

Arresting

Press the arrest button (Space by default) to enter arrest mode, then click the official you want to arrest. Pressing it again before clicking cancels. The card flips to its true identity and the wrong-arrest counter ticks up if the arrested seat was clean. Other statements do not change: they describe the table as it was dealt, and an arrested official still counts for distances, neighbours and clean chains. The one exception is the Silencer: arresting it frees its target, who starts speaking.

Bulk arrest

When you are sure of several officials at once, press B (by default) or right-click the arrest button to enter bulk arrest mode. Click cards to mark them and click a marked card again to unmark it. Click the arrest button or press B again to arrest every marked official; with nothing marked, the same press closes the mode. The arrest key (Space by default) does not confirm: it cancels bulk arrest mode and clears every mark. Arrests run one by one in seat order and stop as soon as one of them ends the case, so marks after a losing arrest are never used. Bulk marks are separate from note stamps: stamping a card does not mark it.

Wrong arrests

A wrong arrest is any arrested official whose true alignment is clean. Blackmailed cleans, framed cleans (when the role exists in the build) and the Mayor all count as wrong. Three wrong arrests in a single case lose the level.

In a campaign run the wrong-arrest counter is per-level: each level starts with three lives. Losing the level ends the run. There is no global wrong-arrest pool that carries across levels.

Win and Lose

How you win

• Arrest every corrupt official at the table. The case closes the moment the last corrupt goes down.
• In Endless Mode every cleared level pushes you into the next one, so there is no terminal win.

How you lose

• Three wrong arrests in a level (see Arresting above).
• Arresting an innocent Mayor at any point. Instant loss.
• Losing a campaign level ends the run. No retry, no checkpoint, the save is deleted. Abandoning from the pause menu also ends the run; quitting to the main menu mid-level is safe and resumes from the same arrest state when you reload.

Seeds and Level Codes

Every table is generated from a seed, so the same seed always produces the same puzzles. That makes runs and single tables shareable.

• Run seed: the whole campaign. The pause menu shows it as "Run"; click it to copy. Your Run History also lists the seed of every past run. To play a seed, right-click New Run in the main menu and choose Add Seed.
• Level code: one table, with its player count, corrupt roles and difficulty. The pause menu shows it as "Level"; click it to copy. Paste it into the Seed field of Custom Game to play that exact table. The first campaign level has no level code.
• Limits: share codes between players on the same game version. A code that needs content your edition does not include, such as a difficulty or corrupt role the demo does not have, is refused with "This code is not available in this version". In a multiplayer match the pause menu hides both codes; the seed is revealed on Final Standings.

Difficulty Modes

Two modes are currently in play: Easy and Normal. Difficulty only changes how strict the table is. Which corrupt roles can appear is a separate setting: in the campaign it follows the act, in Custom Game you pick it yourself. The demo offers Easy only.

In Easy mode, abilities can target arrested officials, which lets you keep using the chamber as a workspace after a card has been resolved. In Normal an arrested card is removed from the targetable pool entirely.