I am not sure whether this should fit into "Reviews" or "General" but if it is the wrong place someone can move it :>

As ussual White Wolf display another surprising lack of any news or support for their game. This for me personally is a source of great frustration and remains a total mystery.

I have been playing Vampire and Exalted number of times, read all core books and some supplements, even tried to write some fiction. So I have a good look on their world.
Now for the game:

First to remind that this is just deduction from the pictures, I don’t own the game and I have not seen it in life.


The game should support 2-5 players. And it should start by each player randomly selecting a solar and a rival, placing one color and one black miniature on the wheel and the other color miniature in his starting city.

I assume that the initial position of the rivals is determined by the player sitting to the left.

The player possibly recieves some innitial money, essence equal to his essence rating.After that seven quests are drawn and positioned at the seven spaces on the left side of the board, for each quest a dominion card is drawn and the corresponding marker is placed at the territory shown by the dominion card. Now the quests are color coded and on each dominion card there are three territories shown, so my guess is that the corresponding marker is placed at the spot of the same color as the selected quest.

In case of a multicolored quest there are the following possibilities:
1. When placing the quest it is placed at a color chosen by the active player and when a player reaches the spot he can choose which part of the quest to handle.
2. Again the active player chooses the color of the territory but then only the part of the quest which corresponds to that territory can be performed.
3. The parts of the quest are performed sequentially; drawing new dominion card after each part of the quest is resolved.
4. The same as above but the dominion card is kept and the marker is moved to the corresponding territory.
The cataclysm text on one of the epic cards suggests that the player mark their quests using their cast symbols. That might be used as a marker for which part of a quest is fulfilled.

In order to complete a quest the character must travel to the indicated place, and possibly pass a test. I assume that they use the standard Exalted 1st edition dice system:
The corresponding attribute, plus activated charms (which must be paid with essence) plus items plus bonuses makes a dice pool. The player rolls all the dice and keeps those that show over a certain threshold (usually 7).The number of kept dice must be equal or exceeding the difficulty of the quest (which should be the number in the circle under “Challenge”, while the color indicates which skill should be tested) in case of two numbers divided by a slash the player might choose which of the tests they wish to pass. In case of multiple numbers that are not divided, the player must pass all of them in whatever order he wants.
If the player is successful then he collects the spoils of war. I am assuming as there are no listed penalties for the quests that if a character fails a quest, the quest is discarded. The spoils of war include Jade (green circle, used for money) Essence (yellow circle used for manna), Charms (white cards, used for enhancing the player actions by spending appropriate amount of essence), Rewards (powerful and not so powerful items), Renown (which is used to unlock the epic quests)
Rivals also seem to act like quests. They have listed spoils of war which seems much bigger than the quests. They also have defeat costs, which I assume the player must play if he loses a test against a rival.

Also as seen at the pictures the rivals have activation value. My assumption is the once you roll number of dice greater or equal than you rival’s activation in the same skill, your rival is activated and the player to your left moves him. This would go well with the fluff, according to which the easiest way to discover an exalted is to look at exceptional feats. They also have special equipment and characteristics that modify the dice pools of both them and the character.

Renown is used to unlock the epic quests, as each epic quest has a listed cost of renown. I assume that once a character has enough renown he might pick an epic quest, place it on a free space on the top edge of the board and place his cast symbol on the quest indicating that he has started it. There are 5 quest tokens corresponding to each of the epic quests and each of the epic quests corresponds to an elemental pole (the circles on the map, four of them on the edges, while the fifth is near the big wheel). The last stage of the epic quest requests the character to reach this pole and make some tests.

Now for the “unique” part: the wheel.
My assumption is that the wheel is close to the time system in Red November. The player who is further back in the wheel starts first and perform an action, the simplest of each is “Move: which allows the player to move number of territories that equals his movement trait. There might be other actions, like search or invent that requires number of different month to be performed but there is no indication on the cards for that.
According to the charm cards at the end of eahc month the characters regain some essence.
Once a player (or the last player) makes a full circle a year has passed, possibly some upkeep actions and the play resumes. At the end of the forth year the game ends and if no one has finished an epic quests either everyone loose or the player with the highest renown wins.

Now as overall this should be a "not so bad Runebound like game".
It has a built in timer which is great because Runebound without the doom track might go on for quite the time if the players are not aggressive enough.
Charms and equipment should make up for the lack of character evolution.
Rivals should bring and interesting way to prevent your opponents from wining.
The components look from good to great. (I don’t fancy the miniatures)
The map seems empty but I hope that the dominion cards will be clear enough.

Now there is a lot more that can be speculated about the game and I hope others will enjoy speculating till the rulebook is released or someone writes an actual review, but till then we can only speculate