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The play module's tutorial at /play/tutorial is the first doorway for anyone who has never played a trading card game before. This page documents how the tutorial decides what to teach, who it's for, what it intentionally defers, and what rules-fidelity level we claim — substrate honesty applied to learning material rather than transactional state.
Audience
The tutorial's primary audience is the human absolute beginner — someone who has not previously played any TCG (MTG, Pokémon, Hearthstone, Yu-Gi-Oh, Lorcana, anything). The first section ("First, what is a trading card game?") does not assume that words like "deck" or "hand" or "turn" carry pre-existing meaning. From there the tutorial moves to OPTCG-specific vocabulary one layer at a time.
Secondary audiences served by the same content:
Players returning from other TCGs. They can skim sections 1–2 ("what is a TCG", "what is OPTCG") and start at section 3 ("how to read a card"). The OPTCG-specific differences from other TCGs are concentrated in the cards anatomy, the playmat layout (DON!! pool, life secrecy), and the four-step combat (Counter step).
Agents. The same content is published in structural form at /api/v1/play/tutorial. Each section has typed preconditions / transitions / outcomes + state-before / action / state-after example triples. Agents don't need the visual diagrams in the human page.
Screen-reader users + keyboard-only navigation. The page is structured as semantic <section> + <h2> + <ol> with descriptive alt-text on diagrams; the ASCII playmat diagram is wrapped in <pre> so screen readers announce it as preformatted text. Anchor links between sections work without JS.
Spectators learning by reading before playing. No interactive widget requires the user to act before continuing.
What the tutorial teaches
Ten sections, in this order:
First, what is a trading card game? — universal-TCG vocabulary (deck, hand, turn, win condition). For absolute beginners.
What is OPTCG. — the specific game we host. Two players, 1 Leader + 50 main + 10 DON!! deck, life-card win condition.
How to read a card. — Leader vs Character card anatomy with visual diagram. Cost / Power / Counter / Color hexagon / Effect text / Block number.
The playmat. — Bandai's eight-zone official layout, rendered as an ASCII diagram. Includes the substrate-honesty notes: DON!! deck is open to both players; Life is secret to BOTH.
Game setup. — place Leader, shuffle, draw 5, mulligan once, place 5 life face-down, determine first player.
Turn structure. — Refresh → Draw → DON!! → Main → End. With the first-turn rule (going first means no draw + only 1 DON on turn 1).
DON!! cards. — the OPTCG-specific resource system.
Combat. — the four-step combat resolution: Declare, Block, Counter, Damage. The defender-wins-ties rule is named explicitly because it decides every edge case.
Winning the game. — life-card depletion, deck-out, Leader-K.O.
Try it. — handoff to /play, which accepts anonymous visitors (guest cookie), no sign-in required.
What the tutorial intentionally doesn't teach
Two categories of OPTCG content are deliberately deferred:
1. Card-effect interpretation (Phase 4 boundary)
The current play module's engine plays the substrate — zones, turns, DON!! pool, basic combat, life-card flip — but does not interpret card effect text. The keyword tags [On Play], [Trigger], [Once Per Turn], [Counter], [Blocker], etc. are visible on the cards but the engine does not yet enforce what they do. Teaching the full effect grammar before the engine implements it would lie to learners about what they can expect when they play.
When Phase 4 of the multi-game roadmap (S47) ships the effect engine, the tutorial gains a new section explaining effect resolution and the keyword vocabulary's behavioral meaning. Until then, the tutorial points learners at the bilingual glossary for definitions and /play/compete + research docs for competitive depth.
2. Tournament / format rules
Deck-construction rules (50 main + max 4 copies + colors must match Leader + no sideboards), match formats (BO1 30min, BO3 60min), block rotation (Block 1 OP01–OP04 rotates out 2026-04-01), banned/restricted cards (Charlotte Pudding banned 2026-04-01; Prohibited Pairs system), and Championship deck-list submission rules are all real but not enforced in our engine yet. The tutorial mentions them for awareness; the substantive treatment lives in docs/research/optcg-playmat-and-tournament-rules.md and at /play/compete.
Rules-fidelity declaration
Per the multi-game play module roadmap, each engine declares the fidelity level at which it implements its game. The OPTCG engine today is:
Core ruleset, vanilla effect interpretation only.
What this means concretely:
Zones, turns, phases, basic combat: faithfully implemented (with two known gaps — Character cap of 5 not server- enforced; Stage cap of 1 not server-enforced).
DON!! pool mechanics, attach/rest/refresh: faithfully implemented.
Life-card draw on damage: faithfully implemented; Trigger effects on life flip are not interpreted (the card enters hand without firing its [Trigger] action).
Card effects:not interpreted. A card with "[On Play] Draw 2 cards" plays from hand and rests DON!! for its cost but does not fire the draw action.
Counter step: partially implemented — the combat flow has the slot for counters but Counter values are not redeemed from hand to boost defender power.
Blocker keyword: recognized as a card field but the blocker-intercepts-attack behavior is not enforced.
Format legality (Standard / Extra Regulation): not enforced. The engine accepts any deck shape ≥ 10 cards.
Ban list, prohibited pairs, block rotation: not consulted.
This rules-fidelity level is appropriate for the Hobbyist and Beginner archetypes (see /api/v1/play/archetypes) who play for love of the cards rather than competitive standing. It is insufficient for the Competitor archetype's tournament play — which is why the play module separates them with explicit landings (/play/casual vs /play/compete).
Substrate honesty
The tutorial obeys substrate-honesty rule 1 — every value carries an implicit or explicit claim about how it came to be true — at three layers:
Visual diagrams declare their source. The playmat diagram cites Bandai's Rule Manual (eight-zone numbering matches the official artwork). The card-anatomy diagram is labeled "Illustrative" because we draw approximations of Bandai layout, not actual cards.
The engine's fidelity is named. Each section that describes a rule the engine doesn't enforce includes a note ("today's engine plays vanilla combat without resolving keyword effects"). The learner is never told the engine does something it doesn't.
What the tutorial doesn't cover is named. The "What the tutorial intentionally doesn't teach" section above is itself the substrate-honest disclosure of the gap between this tutorial and a competitive guide.
The fifth question — for whom is this true?
The tutorial in its current form privileges:
English speakers. Sections are written in English only. The bilingual glossary (/api/v1/play/glossary) covers the OPTCG vocabulary in English + Japanese, but the surrounding prose is monolingual. Future translation is a tracked recursion target.
Synchronous readers. The "Try it" handoff assumes you can click Play right now and play a turn. Async-friendly play (slow-clock, intermittent attention) is covered in a separate tutorial section (for_async_players) accessible from the agent-targeted JSON tutorial; the absolute- beginner human path doesn't include it.
Visual readers. The page works without the visual diagrams (semantic HTML), but the diagrams are a load-bearing teaching aid for the playmat layout. Screen-reader users get the ASCII playmat diagram (announced as preformatted text); a future recursion target is a structurally-described version that doesn't rely on spatial layout.
Three audiences NOT served by this tutorial that the platform claims to welcome (per /welcome-all): non-English-only readers, slow-clock thinkers, and anyone whose primary input modality isn't a pointer device. The gaps are named rather than concealed.
Connection-doc: docs/connections/the-first-doorway.md (S49 — to be authored as story-as-wire of this kingdom).
The kingdom learned the substrate. The tutorial is how the kingdom teaches anyone what it learned. The teaching is substrate-honest about what it can and can't claim. The learner is never lied to.